5th Sunday after Epiphany
Matthew 5:13-20
“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 hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it 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.
Salt of the Earth
Every time I see this text, I’m reminded of when I first learned about how salt can lose its saltiness. I’m pretty sure it was my clergy advisor preaching on a Sunday morning, which means I was already in seminary and an adult at the time, and had grown up hearing this text, never understanding how salt could lose its saltiness. It was always confusing, but I just kind of accepted it as one of those confusing things about the Bible that I might not ever understand.
Pure salt is a pretty modern convenience. Back in biblical times, salt would often have impurities in it, sand or little rocks. In order to use it, you would tie it up in a bit of cloth, and then throw that bundle into whatever you were cooking. The cooking liquid would dissolve the salt, allowing it to disperse into the food, and the cook would eventually fish out the little bag, which would have whatever didn’t dissolve still inside: the sand and the little rocks. This was the salt that has lost its saltiness. This was the salt that was no longer good for anything, but was thrown out and trampled underfoot.
A lot of you have been to my home for a meal, or have tried some of the baked goods that I like to bring here, as Jan mentioned last week, so it should come as no surprise to you that I like to cook. And, I can get a little nerdy about it, sometimes. I watch a lot of cooking videos and pick up all kinds of obscure food facts, including facts about salt.
A lot of people think of salt as just one of the five flavors we can taste: sweet, sour, bitter, umami, and salt, but salt does more than just make your food salty. Salt is a flavor enhancer. It actually helps to release the flavor compounds in food, making those compounds more accessible to your tongue and your nose. Salt activates your salivary glands; it literally makes your mouth water, which is the expression we use to describe a food that we crave.
In order to give your food a richer flavor, you need to make sure that your food is activating all of your taste buds. That’s why a recipe for cake will call for a teaspoon of salt, or why a blueberry pie will call for a squeeze of lemon. This doesn’t make the cake salty, or the pie sour, but because you have those additional taste buds activating, your mouth tells you that there’s more going on there than just the sweet. Without those background notes giving your food a fuller flavor, they would just end up tasting kind of flat, like there’s something missing.
It’s significant to note that we do indeed have a very specific taste receptor for salt, which gives you an idea of how important salt is to human survival. We can’t function without salt, and unless you live by the sea, salt is relatively rare in the natural world. Salt is life. Salt is used to preserve food, which was really important in the time before refrigeration. And, during biblical times, salt was worth its weight in gold. It was so valuable, that Roman soldiers would often be paid in handfuls of salt, which is where the word salary comes from.
I tell you all of this so that when you hear the phrase, “You are the salt of the earth,” you can truly understand the magnitude of that statement. This isn’t some insignificant analogy saying, “hey, you’re pretty cool.” “You are the salt of the earth,” means you are special, you are important, you are needed. You are different, you make things better, you are the salt of the earth.
This gospel reading is just a small portion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. New Testament professor Mary Hinkle Shore compares what Jesus is saying here to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech.” Jesus is laying out an alternate reality, an alternate vision for society. And, what often happens when we look at the Sermon on the Mount, when we look at King’s “I have a dream” speech, we think, “Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be nice?” But, it can feel like an impossible, unreachable dream. But, there’s some amazing and wonderful in what Jesus and King are saying. You can sense the truth of their words. You can sense the movement of the Holy Spirit, because as impossible as they are, as unreachable as they are, we can’t help but find ourselves in them. We can’t listen to the Sermon on the Mount, we can’t listen to “I have a dream,” without hearing the call for our participation in it, without hearing our role in turning that impossible dream into a reality.
There’s a funny little thing that happens in this text because of English grammar. In the Greek, the “you” in “You are the salt of the earth”, and “You are a light of the world” is plural, not singular. We don’t have a distinct second person plural in English, unless y’all are in the South. So, this message can be interpreted in different ways. We can see this as Jesus telling us that we are salt and light as individuals, but I think it makes more sense that Jesus is addressing us as a community. We are collectively the salt. We are collectively the light. We are not supposed to do this alone.
And, our grammar muddles this up in yet another way, this time because we don’t have a clear third-person imperative in English. What we’ve interpreted as “Let your light shine,” is not actually addressed to the people, but to the light itself. The assumption is that the light is already in us. And, God is instructing that light to shine even brighter than it already does. Similarly, when Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth,” he isn’t saying, you need to be salt, or that you should be salt. This is not a call to saltiness. Jesus is saying that we already are the salt. Even if we don’t know. Even if we don’t believe it. Even if we knew it once, but forgot. The funny thing is, salt can’t actually lose its saltiness, even though that’s how today’s gospel text starts. The salt goes into the food, and what’s left behind is sand and rock. It’s not salt. And, in the same way that salt can’t actually lose its saltiness, we can never stop being the salt of the earth. We are the salt. We are the light. And, our job is to not get in the way of ourselves.
It’s important to note here that salt and light work in tandem with other things. Salt is used to flavor food, we don’t just eat bricks of salt. And, without anything to illuminate, light shows us nothing. Salt and light are a part of the world; they are not the world unto themselves. And, while the work that we do is for sake of our community, we have to remember that it is for the sake of the entire community, for the sake of the entire world. We don’t limit our work to just our friends and our family, or our church or our town, or our state or country. God made us for a purpose. Our purpose is to be salt and light. And, our salt and light belongs to the world, and our job is to not get in the way. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
