"Salty Like Jesus" / Rev. Dr. Richard Coble / 8.16.26

We continue reading the Gospel of Matthew from the Sermon on the Mount.

Hear now the word of God.

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 underfoot.

You are the light of the world.

A city built on a hill cannot be held be hid.

People do not light a lamp and put it under a bushel basket.

Rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to the whole 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.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Okay.

Okay.

Before I get into all of this, I want you to remember I'm not from around here.

Okay?

So forgive my ignorance when I ask, is the whole like praying out in public at events that don't have anything to do with church, is that like an East Tennessee thing?

Yeah?

Okay.

Um take Lakeshore Park Little League, for example.

Um, it's not a church-affiliated league, right?

Um, but after every single game last year, my son's coach led the kids in a prayer in Jesus' name after every game.

Um, which is, you know, it's fine, right?

I mean, my kids are Christian.

Uh I'll claim the name Christian, you know, most of the time.

Uh but it would have been nice if he had, you know, asked first.

Because I think non-Christian kids like baseball too, right?

It's not just baseball either.

Uh my neighbor on the first day of school on Monday this past week started leading all the neighborhood kids in prayer, again in Jesus' name, um, right in the parking lot of the elementary school after we had walked all the kids together to school.

And that that makes a bit more sense, I think.

Accept this.

He knows I'm a Presbyterian minister.

And um, and no, frankly, I don't want to lead a prayer at 7:30 in the morning on a Monday morning.

Um I'm not on the clock then.

But I guess what I'm saying is it would have been nice to have been asked.

But here's the thing uh my neighbor is Presbyterian, but he's not this type of Presbyterian.

Um and I'm pretty sure he doesn't like this type of Presbyterian.

Um, you know, heathens over at Westminster, you know what people say about you.

Um and and frankly, I could care less what type of Presbyterian church you go to at 7:30 on the first day of school.

I'm just trying to get there on time.

But then my neighbor starts this extemporaneous prayer in the par in the parking lot of this public school, and the thing is, like we all walk there together.

We're standing right beside him, but he doesn't ask our family to join in.

And and that didn't feel great, right?

So I guess what I'm saying is, what does Jesus mean when he says, Let your light shine before others?

Because some folks would interpret those things like praying after a baseball game, praying out in the school parking lot, as doing precisely that, letting your light shine before others, and others of us wouldn't.

And the Sermon on the Mount is supposed to clarify these things.

Um, our section today is all about like how you let people see your good works, how your good works demonstrate that you are a sincere follower of Jesus.

We are followers of Jesus.

We are meant to be anticipating Jesus' coming kingdom.

We are meant to reflect his light, right?

Just as light, Mary Sophia said this very well, just as light lights up a dark room, so the followers of Jesus are meant to bring light and life into places of darkness.

Just as salt brings flavor into your food, so we, the salt of the earth, are meant to bring spice into places that would otherwise be dull and insipid.

The thing is, and you just heard it, Jesus doesn't actually say what it means to be the light of the world.

So people kind of they take that verse and they run with it and they come up with really different interpretations of what it means to be light of the world, salt of the earth.

So what are we supposed to do with that, right?

Public prayer, sure, fine.

Um, I actually think it's a good thing for my kid to remember there's something bigger than his ego when he's up on a pitcher's mound.

Um, I too, if I'm being really frank with you, could use that reminder as well when I am tempted to yell at an umpire during a 10-year-old's little league game.

I've done that.

I do wish we could find a more inclusive way to do this whole praying in public thing, though, right?

Because that's that's always the issue with prayer in public.

It tends to leave folks out.

Like you all probably saw this this past week.

There's a county commissioner here in Knox County who's trying to make it like illegal for Muslims to call for public prayer, right?

There's he's trying to propose an ordinance that would fine Muslim communities a thousand bucks every time they did it, right?

Um same week, it turns out, very same week, uh, in Blunt County, did y'all hear about this as well?

The Blunt County Board of Education mandated that the Ten Commandments be put up in every Blunt County public school, which is fine, of course.

You know, we're we read the Ten Commandments here too.

Um, but you do have to ask yourself like, how does like a Muslim kid or um a Buddhist kid or a kid that comes from a family that's not religious, how are they gonna feel when they walk into their public school, a place where they're supposed to feel welcome and they see the Ten Commandments?

Because they're probably already getting the message already that they don't belong.

And then they walk into their school and they feel see another sign that they don't belong.

But here's the thing: how do we, as followers of Christ, how do we discern whether that is letting your light shine or not?

Because I I would bet you the folks behind those laws, they would point to these verses and they would say, that's what we're doing.

We are letting our light shine.

And this is more than just like a pedicultural issue, right?

Like when you get right down to it, when you really think about the Sermon on the Mount, it really is a question about how do we live our lives?

Like, if we really believe the things that we say, if we are really sincere about following Jesus Christ in our faith and in our life, how do we do that?

How do we let our light shine?

What type of lives are we called to live?

Like these are important questions for us.

So I'm gonna try to answer them a little with two things.

Two things come to mind when we try to put kind of some meat on the bones about what is letting your light shine.

The first is this, um, this is lost in our English translations, but in the Greek, when Jesus says, let your light shine before others, that you is plural.

So it's not just so much like, how does Richard make choices that let his light shine?

It's really more like, how does the community of faith, how does a community that claims to follow Jesus, how does it reflect God's light, God's salt?

That's the first thing.

It's a communal command, not just an individual command.

The second is this.

I don't think it's an accident that all this talk by Jesus about being salt and being light, I don't think it's an accident that that comes right after the Beatitudes, which Ron just read to us.

You all remember the Beatitudes.

We just heard it.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the merciful.

So being salt and being light, when you put these two things together, you realize it's not just about being showy and ostentatious with your faith.

It's more about reflecting the qualities of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus describes in the Beatitudes.

It's more about a community of faith living into the qualities of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus describes in the Beatitudes.

And in the kingdom of heaven, if we're listening to the Beatitudes, you realize it's all about bringing people in, not pushing them away, right?

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

So, in all the many ways that we as a community of faith seek to demonstrate our faith, and it says right here, we are to demonstrate our faith before others, we always have to be asking, in doing so, are we being true to the type of community that reflects the radical inclusivity of the kingdom of heaven as Jesus describes it in the Beatudes?

Are we reflecting the radical inclusivity of the kingdom of heaven described in the Beatitudes?

I'm gonna give you one more example.

I'm gonna leave you with one example.

And yet, I'm sorry.

This is another example of Christians fighting amongst themselves.

It's something Christians do a lot.

Maybe you've noticed.

Let me take you back to Easter Sunday of this year, Easter Sunday 2026.

There was something going on behind the scenes that a lot of you probably didn't realize was going on.

Um, we had just changed our company that does all the setups and all the cleaning for the building.

We had had one company that did it uh forever.

Um, but it was it was time to make a change.

It was it was a good time to make a change from one company to another.

And um we had this new crew, and they weren't completely new to us, like we actually did have some ongoing history and relationships with this new crew, but anyways, they were new, and they started on Easter Sunday of all Sundays, and that's not ideal, let me tell you.

Um, because on Easter Sunday, about 400 to 500 people walk through this building in about three hours.

Like, Easter Bowl Sunday is as close as I ever get to like the World Series, right?

Like, like you've gotta be on point.

Things have gotta go right on Easter Sunday.

And then to top it all off, we had this crew who had never been here before doing all of our setups and our cleanups that day.

So, meanwhile, um I had written my Easter sermon, because of course that's what I do, um, not thinking about the cleanup crew or the setup crew.

I was more thinking about, you know, the resurrection, what it has to do with our lives.

And let me just say this from the beginning.

For those of y'all who remember the Easter sermon last Easter, it was fine.

Okay.

Like, like it wasn't like my favorite Easter sermon.

It wasn't my least favorite either.

It was somewhere in the middle.

Solid B.

Okay.

There was one line from the Easter sermon that I really liked.

Maybe some of you all remember this.

Um, I was talking about how the resurrection leads us into new ways of being and thinking and faithfulness that we couldn't imagine on our own.

And I quoted a line from a beloved author, Rachel Held Evans.

Do y'all remember Rachel Held Evans?

I quoted, I quoted her because I had just read this essay that she wrote about how the resurrection had led her to unexpected places in her faith journey.

So, for example, Rachel Held Evans, she had grown up this really conservative evangelical.

And then she had kind of a conversion experience, and you know, it led her to be in community with folks that she never expected to be in community with.

And she she has this fantastic line that I quoted on that Easter sermon.

It's almost like an aside in the essay, but she says, At one point in my life, I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight.

And instead, as I went along this journey of faith, God used gay people to show me how to be Christian.

Fantastic line, right?

God used gay people to show me how to be Christian.

So I quoted that line, one, because it's beautiful, but two, because it seemed really true to my own life of faith as well.

Um, like Rachel Held Evans, a lot of you all know this already, um, I was raised in a church where the leaders were not open and affirming.

Um grew up in the 90s, southern, Bible belt, small town, where basically everywhere you turned, you got the message that being gay was something to be ashamed of.

And then I remembered, it's funny how like memories just kind of come to you sometimes.

I was remember, I read that line from Rachel Held Evans, and I remembered seeing this news program back when I was a teenager.

Um it was about um the murder of Matthew Shepard.

Do y'all remember Matthew Shepard, um, a gay teenager who was murdered in Wyoming for being gay?

And the news program, it was about the aftermath of that.

And during the aftermath, there had been um a protest, and there had been this gay teenager who was like out on the courtroom steps of Matthew Shepard's town, and he was like, he was holding up this sign, and the sign on one side in huge letters wrote gay, and then he would turn it, and the other side said God, and he kept turning it over and over and over.

So they interviewed this teenager saying, like, hey, what does this sign mean?

And um, I'll never forget what he said.

He said, I made this sign because I know that this is how God made me.

God made me gay.

He said that he made the sign because he believed that a God of love had made him gay, and he didn't think that was anything to be ashamed of.

I didn't mention that memory in my sermon, um, but that's what came to mind when I read Rachel Held Evans saying it was gay folks who taught her how to be Christian.

It was gay folks who taught her how to let her light shine.

Anyways, let's go back to Easter Sunday.

I say that sermon, or I give that sermon.

Um, the owner of that new company, the cleaning and setup company, heard that sermon, um, heard me quote that line on Easter Sunday, and two days later he put in his notice.

Um, they weren't gonna work with this church.

Uh, apparently, he didn't realize that we were open and affirming.

And frankly, I was shocked.

Because, like, this is how naive I am.

When I wrote that sermon, I honestly didn't think I was saying anything all that controversial.

And frankly, for this community of faith, um, it wasn't all that controversial.

Again, 400 to 500 people came through these doors, heard that sermon.

The only complaint I got was that the sermon was too long because we're Presbyterian.

But this type, but this is the type of community that God has formed us to be.

The type of community that leans into love.

The type of community that can hear a line like that and recognize that it's gospel truth.

And that's not about being showy or pushy or ostentatious about our faith.

It's not throwing it into somebody's face because they disagree with us.

It's simply about being the people, being the community of God that God calls us to be.

So that when somebody asks, well, what does the light of God look like?

They can look at our community and they can hear just an echo of it.

They can see just a small little reflection of the radical love of God.

I bring this up on rally day, not so that we can pat ourselves on the back.

It's certainly not to blame and shame this company.

I bring it up instead as a reminder that the default of this world is still exclusion.

That when people hear the name Christian, more often what comes to mind is about who is not included, who is left out rather than who is.

And so, friends, on this rally day, as we are called to delve into the Beatitudes and Christ's call to be salt, to be light, let us remember that we are called to live into the name of Christian in a different sort of way.

In a way that invites rather than draws lines in the sand.

In a way that builds bigger tents, longer tables, instead of putting up stronger walls.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ looked down a hill and he said, You are the light of the world, you are the salt of the earth.

Let me tell you, that light, that salt, it is still needed just as much today as it was back then.

Let us be salt, let us be light to a world still hungry for the love of God.

Amen.