Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20
What shall we do with these lessons? How shall we understand them? I’m going to take the Isaiah lesson first, and then the Gospel lesson, and then say just a few words about First Corinthians.
We start with the prophet Isaiah, and we hear him rebuke his people. He says that if they want their worship to be true to God they have to match it with a communal ethic of justice and generosity; they have to express their devotion with an outward energy of sharing their blessings. Otherwise don’t bother God. Your fasting is useless unless you address injustice in the world. Look after the poor, and your light will rise like the dawn. Do that, and God will be present when you call on God.
And then in the Gospel we hear the Lord Jesus saying something similar. He calls on his people to the salt of the earth and the light of the world. This was not some general ideal but a challenge in the spirit of Isaiah. He was telling his people that they had a mission that had an outward purpose beyond themselves. Salt is for using, not for keeping packed up by itself. Your light is for the world, not for you to keep under a basket to protect its flame from blowing out. You are a people chosen by God for the mission of demonstrating God’s mercy and justice to the other nations of the world. You are a city on a hill, unable to be hidden, where the nations will stream to learn God’s law.
But God’s people were refusing this vocation in both Isaiah’s time and Jesus’ time. Of course there were many individual Jews who were devout and generous, but the nation as a whole was taking an inward course of self-preservation. Their take was not to bring God’s light to the world but that God should swiftly judge the Gentiles with righteous retribution and revenge. You can understand their stance, considering the casual brutality of the Roman Empire upon them. But even if it was understandable, it was still unfaithful to their special calling and their mission.
The Lord Jesus was appealing to his people to reclaim their special mission while there was still time. Here he was, the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, right there with him, and the time had come that the law and the prophets were pointing to, the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is now!
The scribes and Pharisees don’t believe it. For them the Kingdom of Heaven was not at hand. It was far off, and God would not send it unless the nation first proved its worthiness by a rigorous, legalistic righteousness. Their strategy was the opposite of Jesus’. Circle the wagons, build the walls, close the gates, preserve, protect. Preserve our salt and keep it in a jar. Protect our flame within a basket. Forget about justice in the world, our only mission is to keep ourselves pure so that someday God will save us and reward us by punishing our enemies.
The Lord Jesus is contesting this. So he’s got his positive teaching and his negative teaching. The positive is for the mission rightly understood, and the negative is against the mission as taught and practiced by the scribes and Pharisees. He has to say, No, that’s not the purpose of God’s law, to build a wall around yourselves. The purpose of God’s law is for the life of the world. He has to say, No, I’m not against the law, I’m against the paranoid application of the law. We have to apply the law in mission for the world, we have to apply it in ways of generosity for the nations and justice for the poor. That’s how God will bless us, just by our doing that, and I’m calling us to do that, now.
In one sense, Jesus’ call was unsuccessful. His summons did not sway the leadership. The people in the leading towns of Galilee resisted his challenge. But for himself the Lord Jesus followed his own program. He was the salt in the culture around him. He was the light. He became the city on a hill that could not be hid, he embodied what Jerusalem was meant to be as he drew all nations to himself. His teaching was his own agenda, and he lived out what he preached.
And yet he was not successful, when the people that he preached to eventually rejected him. The powers put him out. Would they have done that if they were wise to what they were doing, that in condemning him they condemned themselves, and in defeating him they spelled their own defeat?
The powers were not wise to it, but after his death and resurrection his disciples saw it, and St. Paul wrote of it in our second lesson, that there was a greater power than the powers of the world and a deeper wisdom than the wisdom of the world. He saw that true power comes into the world in the weakness of the gospel of Christ and the deepest wisdom is the foolishness of him crucified. He also saw that the Holy Spirit was using this gospel to bring the law and the prophets out into the world to fulfill their mission of justice, healing, and peace.
We have this mission too. And shall we express it as salt or as light? Blending in or standing out? Mercy or justice? Sheltering the poor or contesting against poverty? Feeding the hungry or fighting for a just economy? Cooking or marching? Serving or protesting? Embracing or advocating? Priestly or prophetic? Salt or light? Both, of course. Our mission means both blending in and standing out.
Sometimes one thing can be both, depending on who is judging it. Nineteen years ago the Consistory decided to declare ourselves as fully open and affirming on sexual orientation. Soon I heard criticism of this by some of my colleagues who said that we were just trying to blend in with the liberal social ethics of Park Slope. Well, if that were the case we would just stop naming Jesus Christ as Lord, and him crucified, which is the really weird thing to be doing in Park Slope, so I did not bother to defend what we had done. And at the same time we were taking a stand within our denomination that has been a costly one for us. So I would say we were both salt and light.
Yesterday Steve Lappert led his group of volunteers in cooking for CHiPS, as he’s been doing for years. That is both salt and light. It’s salt for the people who are being fed, and it’s light for the rest of us in this congregation. It’s salt for the hungry and light for the church. Our summer respite shelter is salt for our guests and light for us who serve. Letting James sleep on our front stoop is salt for him and light for our community, as some of our neighbors tell me they don’t like it that he’s there, and others tell me that it’s a real credit to our church and what we stand for.
It’s not like we have some grand strategy. It’s not that we have this great wisdom of how to deal with homeless men or solve the problems of hunger, it’s more like all we know is Jesus Christ and him crucified, and that’s enough to tell us how to treat the man on our stoop. And if the prophecy of Isaiah is right, that yields a kind of righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.
It’s a responsive kind of righteousness, even a kind of giving-in. It’s not that we are trying build the Kingdom of God, it’s rather that the Kingdom of God is already here, on our stoop, and in our kitchen, and in the whole new world of sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s a receptive righteousness and therefore a risky righteousness, which is why it takes faith and hope and love to do it.
The mission is a challenge and it’s also fulfilling. It’s an obligation that’s a blessing. It’s always a challenge for any congregation, and we’re always tempted to retreat from it towards preservation and protection. But this congregation is blessed with leaders who get the mission, you are blessed with people who welcome its challenge and sign up for its obligations.
You have elected elders and deacons who get the mission, and you will install them onto consistory to keep this congregation on mission for the next three years. They will do that. You are blessed, Old First, you are blessed. You are blessed because God loves you, so you love them as a way of loving God back.
(Disclosure: this sermon restates and quotes the interpretation of N. T. Wright, particularly in his Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year A, SPCK, p. 28.)
Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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