Mountain Music (Matthew 17:1 - 9)

     When I was a boy, we lived in Kansas . . . a flat, windswept land that brimmed with wheat and corn and blue-gills, that sprouted cattle on the hillsides, and in the summer it’d be hot and sultry, and my parents would head Northwest out of Wichita through Hutchinson – it was back before the freeway – and we’d make a bee-line for the Colorado border.  I remember the towns along the way, you actually went through them in those days, and when we got to Goodland – stark white silos etched against the sky – we knew we were almost there, and coming down off the highlands into Limon you can begin to make them out – first Pikes Peak’s black slab, then the rest materialize like smoke on the horizon, and at Limon we’d pick up U.S. 40 and head on into Denver and then up into the mountains, and stay in a little motel just East of Berthoud Pass.  The air would be cool and thin, and the trees would change shape, and up on Trail Ridge Road you could see forever . . . up in that thin air, with the fierce hot sun, you felt close to heaven, close to God . . .

And of course, it’s no accident that Moses got his marching orders up in the mountains, and Elijah met God there . . .  and Jesus went up onto a mountain to pray . . . and the symbolism wouldn’t have been missed on Matthew’s readers any more than it is on us . . . you are closer to God in the mountains, or so it is believed, and odd things happen there as well . . . weird things go on in those hollers, strange women with second sight, apparitions walking the moonlit desert . . . the transfiguration itself – not exactly something you see every day – happens up there in the rarified air.  It’s a perfect setting for a little piece of holy theater, and of course, that’s what it is, complete with special effects – the mountain-top location, the whiter-than-white raiment, and over in Mark, though not in this version, an impressive black cloud.  It’s vivid and real, you can almost smell it, taste it . . . think about all the times you’ve been in the mountains . . . the sharp pine-tang, the catching of your breath in the not-quite-thick-enough air . . . if you get high enough, it’s hard to get enough oxygen, and you have to work hard, and you’re huffing and puffing from the climb up to the top, and then Bam! all of a sudden, your beloved teacher is changed, he’s transmogrified, and you don’t quite know what hit him – or you – and the white of his raiment burns your eyes, it’s so bright, it’s whiter than anyone on earth could get them, whiter than the best five-star clothes-washer could do, and you can’t hardly see it’s so bright, but you can just make out – by shielding your eyes – a couple of other figures there with Jesus . . . yes!  Sure enough, it’s those old mountain men Moses and Elijah, and they’re talking to Jesus, just as sure as you and I are talking, just as sure as I’m standing here in front of you.

Now, it’s pretty obvious what you’re supposed to think, when you look back on it, but at the time you’re babbling, you just don’t know what to think or say, because here’s Jesus talking to the two greatest prophets of all, and not just a cat, but a whole animal act’s got your tongue, and instead of saying nothing like you should, instead of keeping your mouth shut—and I can certainly understand that—you blurt out some idiocy about making three little huts – you could just shoot yourself – three shelters, one for Moses and one for Elijah and one for Jesus – you actually name them one by one, and you’re mortified that it’s all you can think of.

And looking back on it, it’s easy to see what the tableau meant, it’s easy to see what you’re supposed to get out of the set piece . . . here Jesus is, hobnobbing with Moses and Elijah, three peas in a pod, it’s clear what the take-home lesson is – Jesus is one of a kind with those other two, he’s right up there with the two greatest prophets in Israelite history, in fact he is a prophet – here’s this guy you’ve been running around all over Judea with, doing miracles, healing the lame, riling up every religious authority you can find, so you know he’s special, and now you know just how much.  And you just had to open your mouth . . .

And . . . from somewhere comes a voice, and you know who it is without being told, and it’s funny . . . for years afterward, if somebody asked you to describe it – and you were asked, over and over – you had a hard time doing it.  Somebody’d say “Was it loud, and booming?” and you’d say “No . . . not really” . . . “Well, then, was it soft and musical” and you’d scratch your head and say “Not exactly,” and the truth is, you have no idea what it sounded like, you just know it was God . . . whether it was loud or soft or harsh or musical, whether it crashed through the heavens like thunder, or floated like a gossamer thread, you couldn’t say to save your life . . . like God, it just was.

The voice says “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  And the words prick at your memory, at something floating around the edges of your mind, and then you have it . . . you’ve heard that one other time a voice from heaven identified Jesus that way, and that was at his baptism, and although you weren’t there to hear it, you know it by heart, it’s been passed down to you from the source . . . when John the Baptizer poured water over Jesus’ head, a dove fluttered down out of the heavens.  That time the voice had said – directly to Jesus! – “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  And you can’t help but catch the drift . . . this time, God’s talking directly to you, you and the other disciples . . .

But there’s one addition: God admonishes you to listen.  Here you are, hiking all over Galilee, observing miracles and wonderments, witnessing healings and exorcisms, seeing the lepers made clean and the paralyzed walk, and now you’re being asked to listen, to hear . . . in the aftermath of the most dazzling display of special effects you’ve ever seen – Spielberg would be proud—you’re told to listen.

Then the house-lights come up and Jesus is alone, alone on his mountain stage, and you have no doubt now that Jesus is the man, he’s the only man, entirely sufficient in his alone-ness, he diagnoses your discomfort, knows you said something stupid, but doesn’t call you on it—he just tells you to get up and not be afraid.  And as you pick your way down the mountain path, as you go from the mountain-top to the valley below, you do it, you listen, and the first words out of Jesus’ mouth tell you to . . . tell no one about any of this, not one solitary word, even though you’re bursting to run all over Palestine with the news; you’re told not to say anything until the Son of Man had risen from the dead, and here’s that rising from the dead stuff again, and you didn’t get it the first time, and you don’t get it now . . . but you don’t rebuke the master again like you did before . . . that just made him mad . . . and suddenly, the mountaintop is behind you and the heady time is past, and the land down here seems gray in comparison, flat and mundane, compared to the glory you just saw . . .

      After my family moved to Seattle, my dad and I hooked up with a group of musicians centered around a guy named Dick Dice, who was an autoharp player – and I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking of those instruments music teachers strum, or at least they used to strum – do they do that any more? – anyway, this was an Appalachian autoharp, big and golden, and it had a sweet sound forged in the Tennessee mountains, played by the likes of Mother Maybelle Carter and her husband A.P. . . . and we played and sang this mountain music for years until we lost touch with Dick – and each other, really – and so I was thrilled with the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” which is wry and funny and made a ton of money, but more important, it revitalized old-time mountain music, which sent us fans a-wallowing around in hog heaven . . . it’s beautiful music, at its best high and ethereal . . . it sounds like it comes from the mountains . . . and it’s strongly spiritual, too – mention of God is never far from the surface.

And the movie begat the CD and the CD begat the touring show of under-appreciated and under-paid musicians.  It was called the “Down From the Mountain” tour which is a good name . . . after all, the music comes from Appalachian ridges and hollers, it’s formed there, shaped there . . . it holds all the wistful yearning and hope of that place . . . and it’s been brought down to the flat-landers of New York and L.A., to the movie folk and the record-industry people, and then on to folks like you and me . . . for though it was forged in the high places, pounded into being through lives on the brink, it was brought down from the mountain to us, so we could relish it and treasure it and sing it ourselves.

And after the music of God on that mountain – this is my Son, the beloved . . . listen to him! – Jesus leads the disciples back down, because that’s where that music is needed, that’s where it was for.  Their mission is down in the valleys, down where the lost sheep live, not up in the lonely heights.  Peter wants to commemorate the occasion, he wants to put up shelters, maybe stay up there awhile to bask in the glory, but he doesn’t understand that the Christian life is not a mountaintop experience, it’s to be lived in the world, with the people we’ve come to serve.  Although the mountains may be right for visions, though they may be perfect to make haunting, beautiful music, it’s down in the valley where the people are, down from the mountain where the work is, where the mission of the church is.

In the past, I’ve studied Benedictine spirituality, and one reason it appeals to me is that it’s very much a spirituality of the world, of the daily grind.  Even though it was developed for life in the cloister, life in a monastic community, it never forgets the larger picture, the poor of the world, the wanderers.  Likewise, it never forgets the other, the people we come into contact with in day-by-day existence.  It is the Christian vocation, Benedict says, to greet all with grace and humility, and never to begin conflict.  It is the Christian vocation, he says, to “relieve the lot of the poor, ‘clothe the naked, visit the sick’ and . . . help the troubled and console the sorrowing.” Hardly the picture most of us have of monks, squirreled away in some dark hole somewhere, fingering their rosaries.  But Benedict believed that the place of the Christian was to be apart from the world, yet involved in it . . . to be set aside for the work of God, which is in and for the world.

Once a week, we climb the mountain . . . once a week we come in through those doors back there and into the palpable presence of God.  And while we’re here – if we are lucky – we are pointed to the transcendent beauty of Christ, whiter and more dazzling than anything on Earth . . . we hear that lovely mountain music, that word from God, we hear it sung, we hear it prayed, and we hear it preached, and it’s the task of Christian worship – one of them, anyway – to point us to that white-hot reality, to direct our attention where it belongs, to the life and death and terrifying beauty of Christ.  “This is my son, my beloved!”  But we can’t stay on the mountain any more than those first disciples could . . . and whenever we’re tempted to camp out here, to circle the wagons and build those little huts Peter wanted, Jesus will remind us that our work is out there, it’s back out through those doors and in our community, in our nation and in our world.  Our work is among our neighbors, both those we know and those we don’t . . . here on the mountaintop, we’re given the word, and it’s up to us to use it properly and well when we come down.

But you know what?  Jesus doesn’t stay up on the mountain, either.  Just like with James and Peter and John, he comes down with us. When we go through those doors, he's right there beside us.  He comes into our homes and our streets and marketplaces, walking alongside us, guiding us in the right thing to do.  His voice is everywhere, in the trees and the wind and the rain . . . it’s in the dog, howling in the night and the cat rubbing against your leg.  It’s in the homeless guy who knocks on your door and the SUV that cuts you off on the way to work . . . Jesus speaks in all these things, and in all these ways . . . Jesus is God’s beloved Son . . . all we have to do is listen to him.   Amen.

Relationship Advice (Matthew 5:21 - 37)

     This is our third week of readings from the Sermon on the Mount, and one of the keys to understanding them is to remember that it is a sermon.  Our usual method of preaching it is to divide it up into manageable chunks, and the lectionary is no different . . . Thus, the first reading, two weeks ago, covered the beatitudes, the bless day and it described how things are and how they will be in the just rule of God, which in Matthew is called the kingdom of heaven.  Last week’s passage described how his followers were supposed to be in that kingdom, they were to be salt—preserving, flavoring, spicing—and light—illuminating, warming, and enabling color to be perceived.

And though we didn't talk about it, it ended with Jesus describing the relationship of his teaching to that of the law—I come not to abolish the law but fulfill it—and then a warning: “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  And though we always think of Jesus standing on a mountain proclaiming the Sermon—and the Monty Python comedy troop had fun imagining what folks at the back of the crowd might’ve heard—the entire thing is to his disciples.  Right at the beginning, he sees the crowds and heads up on to the mount, and his disciples gather ‘round and he teaches them.  The Sermon is aimed at believers, his disciples, not the crowd, not everyone.   It is instruction about how it is in the kingdom and how to behave in it.

So in this segment of the Sermon, Jesus is illustrating (a) what he means when he says he's come to fulfill the law and (b) how his followers are supposed to live that fulfillment so that they are more righteous even than the Pharisees, who after all live for that sort of thing.  And to make sure we get it, he uses a formula: you have heard that it was said X, but I tell you Y.  The law says X but I say Y.  In other words, the Y part is how he has fulfilled that portion of the law, and we should keep fulfillment in mind as we read them.

Let’s look at his first example: “You have heard that it was said: ‘You shall not murder;’ and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.'  But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire.”  If we put aside the hyperbolic “hell of fire” thing—suffice it to note that Jesus is probably not referring to what we think of as Hell—putting that aside, you can see that he’s made it seemingly more stringent.  Not just murderers are subject to judgment, but those who are angry with a fellow Christian are as well, or those who insult another . . .

Again we need to put aside that “judgment” thing, except to say that he doesn’t specify (a) what the judgment will be, (b) when the judgment will occur or (c) who the judgment will be by.  And if we do, maybe we can notice that Jesus doesn’t make it tougher so much as he broadens it, or makes it more full.  It may be that he “completes” it, which is one of the constellations of meaning of the Greek word pleroow, translated in the Sermon as “fulfill.”

And how does he broaden it?  He includes more than just killing someone . . . he extends the Ten-commandment proscription against murder to unresolved anger and enmity.  He gives an entire mini-discourse on relationships between members of the body of Christ.  If you are angry with a brother or sister, and insult a brother or sister, and say “you fool,” you will be subject to judgment.  This is about relationships, and everything he quotes damages them.  They damage personal relationships, making it harder for folks to get along.   But of equal importance is that they make it harder for a community to function.  Animosity and bad blood impede the mission of the Body of Christ.

Here’s the upshot: if you’re offering your gift at the altar, which is an ancient way of saying “if you’re at worship,” and you know that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar—in other words, stop your worship—and first be reconciled to that person, and then come to worship. Enmity between members of a congregation spoils worship, it poisons it, and worship is the food-source, the nourishment of the body of Christ.  If you think about your own experience, you can see it’s true: if there is bad blood between you and another member, it can be hard to even show up on a Sunday morning, much less worship with any integrity.  But if we make it up with him or her, our souls are cleansed, and we can enjoy our time with God once again.

And notice that Jesus doesn’t say if your sister or brother has something against us and it’s our fault, in fact he lays no blame at all . . . he just says to do it.  It doesn’t matter whose fault it is, we’re just supposed to do it.  There is a strain of humility needed here, as there is in all of these examples.  We are to reconcile with one another not only for our own good—everybody knows how good that can feel—but also for the greater good of the worshipping community.  We’ve all been in worship where you can feel the enmity, feel the division in the air . . . well, Jesus is implying, you might as well not even bother if that is the case, you might as well not do it, because it is not doing you or the body of Christ any good.

Then Jesus makes an interesting move, as we preachers say: he expands it to outside the community, telling his followers to settle with an accuser—is it the same brother or sister from the previous verse, or an outsider?  At any rate, Jesus tells us to settle on the way to the courthouse, presumably in front of the entire community.  Not only does this make sense from a personal viewpoint, keeping one out of jail, but from a witness viewpoint as well.  Remember that “don’t hide your light under a bushel basket” line a little earlier in the Sermon?  If we settle our disputes, whether in the community or outside of it, without being drug into court, it is a witness to others outside our circle of faith.

Well.  This first example, about relationships and their healing, provides an interpretive lens for the rest of the passage . . . “You have heard it said  'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”  Jesus knew, even before modern-day sexual harassment laws, that leering at women does not good relationships make.  Or a good workplace, or a good community of faith.  We are not to treat others as objects, to objectify one another, whether the opposite sex or not.

Note that he treats it as one-sided . . . then just as now, the power balance was tipped decidedly in the male direction, in the direction of the patriarchy.  It’s not an accident that he targets men . . . men are the ones with the power.  And in a relationship based on an imbalance of power—one which I believe Jesus came to rectify—staring openly at the less-powerful is a sign of that power, a sign that one does it because one can get away with it.

I find that peoples’ views of this passage are clouded by hazy notions of what Jesus meant when he said “adultery.”  Adultery in the biblical world was defined as extramarital sexual intercourse between a man and another man’s wife. It arose out of the property laws in ancient Israel, where the wife “belonged” to her husband, and the extramarital relationship violated the rights of her husband. A man could have such a relationship with an unmarried woman and not be guilty of adultery, but if the woman was married, both he and she were guilty.  Note that this was not because of some abstract notion of what was “moral” and what was not . . . it was based upon the very concrete notion of women as property, or chattel.  One which we do not hold today.

As such, the whole basis for the divorce passage is invalidated, but it still is instructive that Jesus seemed to consider normative a loving relationship between marital partners.  And it is not an accident that Jesus addresses the divorce problem from the male perspective only.  Note that in his saying, it is the man who causes the woman to sin.  Is this not a significant turn-around from Genesis, where Eve corrupts Adam, not the other way around?

Finally, we come to the proscription on swearing . . . in a community of faith, or in any community, for that matter, a person’s word should be her or his bond.  Simple honesty is what Jesus calls for, both within and without the community.  Relations within are strengthened thereby, and we are a light to the rest of the world if we model these things outside.  And as Jesus said earlier in the Sermon, we shouldn't hide that light under a bush.

In his spiritual masterpiece, Jesuit scientist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes what it means to live in the kingdom, which he calls The Divine Milieu.  He speaks of our lives as being made up of passivities and activities.  Passivities are things that are done to us, things that  we must endure, for better or worse.  Activities, then, are what we ourselves do, and they can be activities of growth or diminishment, but Teilhard isn't talking just growth or diminishment of the individual, but of the Kingdom of heaven, the Divine Milieu, itself.  There are things we do that enhance the all-encompassing, all-immersive kingdom of God and things we do that diminish it.

And I think this is a good way to look at passages like this one.  When we refuse to reconcile, when we take each other to court, or treat each other like objects—sexual or otherwise—it diminishes the Divine Milieu, it marginalizes the Kingdom of heaven.  When we do that, we are a light under a bushel, we are salt that has lost its taste.  On the other hand, when we reconcile and settle our differences without dragging one another into court, when we treat one another with respect, as the children of God that we all are, we are light and salt, our very presence and actions enhance and advance the Kingdom of God.  Amen

Salt and Light (Matthew 5:13 - 20)

     This is the second of four readings from the Sermon on the Mount . . . last week’s, of course, is the most well known.  Far from being prescriptive, far from being dogmatic, far from saying you must be poor in spirit to go to heaven, or you must be pure in heart to inherit the kingdom, the blesseds are in fact deeply pastoral, and eloquently speak to a central Gospel: we, as children of God, are blessed, for we live in the Kingdom of God.  We are kingdom people, where peacemakers are honored, not just barely tolerated, where mourners are comforted, not forgotten, where mercy comes first, and retribution is but a distant memory.  The blesseds are profoundly moving, profoundly soothing, profoundly comforting.

One thing that isn’t often mentioned is that that the blesseds are proof that this Jesus guy sure could preach.  They are a preacher’s dream: beginning  with simple, two clause declarative sentences: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”  He’s doing what preachers from William Sloane Coffin to Chuck Swindoll to Billy Graham do: building up a head of steam by repetition.  We fall into the rhythm, we rock along with it, and are in a sense lulled by it: “Blessed are the meek . . . Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness . . . Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”  All of a sudden, the pattern is broken by a sentence with only a single, long clause:  “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.”  And it wakes us up, and makes us pay double attention:  revile you, persecute you, utter evil against you.  It’s clear that this is the payoff, what it’s all about: Jesus is speaks a word to Matthew’s congregation, 35 years in the future . . . they are being reviled, they are being persecuted, they are being falsely accused.

This sets us up for the conclusion “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in this way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”  Jesus tells them to rejoice!  Be glad!  They are squarely in the line of the prophets!  And it’s both an ending and a beginning, and it’s important for us to see this.   It’s a continuation, and it should be read as such: Rejoice and be glad . . . you are the salt of the earth . . . rejoice and be glad, you are the light of the world.  Our reward—dare I say it?  Oh why not—our reward is that we are salt and light, not pie in the sky by and by.  Or maybe we’ll get the pie, but the reward I think Jesus is talking about here is we are salt and light. Heaven, you will recall, is Matthew’s way of saying the Kingdom of God, which again Jesus says, is here and yet still barreling down upon us.  And so our reward in this new reality, this heaven Jesus speaks of, is that we get to be salt and light.

And of course we all know what that means, don’t we?  We all know what the metaphors signify . . . salt is a preservative, it’s used to cure meat, to make it last without rotting.  We’ve all had some form of salt pork, or salt-cured ham . . . bacon is salty precisely because it’s been preserved in salt.  Rejoice, Jesus says to the folks listening, you are salt!

And at the same time, rejoice!  You are light, you illuminate the dark places, drive darkness out of the corners, giving no place for evil to lurk and fester and erupt.  You illuminate the events of the day, the political landscape is made clear in the light of your witness to the Gospel.  You become the lamp by which we all read, by which we all interpret current events . . .

And reading this, we have to ask ourselves: who else illuminates?  Who else preserves?  Who else throws light into the dimmest crevices and who else nurtures and protects the world, even in all its distress and pain?  And it becomes clear, now, that the reward of the children of God in the kingdom of heaven is to do the work of Christ, to be salt and light, to be the hands and feet, to illuminate and preserve, to be good stewards of God’s good creation.   Rejoice!  Christ says, for you shall be my body, to borrow Paul’s metaphor, you shall do my work of lighting the way and preserving Creation.

But we never get any credit, do we?  In fact, we’re getting more and more discredit—if you’ll allow me to misuse and abuse a perfectly innocent word—Christianity, and religion overall, is taking more and more of the heat as we hurtle into the third millennium after Christ.  And really, Christians deserve some of it, don’t they?  Their intolerance of other faiths, their tendency to demonize those who don’t believe the way they do, their triumphalistic belief that God will reward them because they are Christians and punish the rest in everlasting fire—crackle, crackle, crackle—have caused an awful lot of grief, from the Crusades right up to the present.

But these days, the attacks seem sharper: Christianity—and religious faith in general—is being ridiculed by the likes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.  Every week on HBO, Bill Maher, who I find to be very funny, makes fun of us, saying we believe in a magic man in the sky who we ask to give us whatever we want.  He is so fixated on this that he’s had to visibly tone it down, and when he has intelligent guests whom he respects, like Princeton professor and philosopher Cornel West, who nevertheless profess a belief in God, he just doesn’t know what to make of it.  One of the funniest things I’ve seen on his show was a few years ago, when liberal comedian D.L. Hughley, intelligence radiating out of every pore, nevertheless said he did not believe in evolution.  The genuine look of befuddlement on Maher’s face—he did not expect that—was priceless.

Folks like Maher and Robards and Dawkins avatars of a modernist world-view . . . it is a materialist worldview—that’s materialist from a philosophical point of view—wherein if you can’t see it, touch it, measure it, or prove it with a scientific experiment it isn’t real, it doesn’t exist, and those who believe differently are living in a fantasy world.  That’s the thing about a world view: it circumscribes what people believe, what people can believe, without an herculean thinking outside the box . . .  and with world-views, that’s almost impossible.

Of course, a thing that goes hand in hand with the modernist view in the West—in Europe and North America—is the profit motive.  If it doesn’t affect the bottom line, if one doesn’t get a solid return, then it needs to be culled.  Churches, of course, fall into this—it’s difficult not too, being bathed in the materialist Kool-Aid—and they get to thinking that the only measure of vitality is an increase of warm bodies in the pews, or at least a healthy endowment.  In our country, this bean-counting mentality is on the rise, and there are movements to do away with the clergy housing exemptions, and to make churches pay taxes like everyone else.  Only, of course, not “everyone else” pays taxes, do they?  Oh, most of us do individually, but corporations pay very little, and the amount is shrinking daily.  Soon we will be faced with the spectacle of churches—non-profit organizations who sponsor much of the charitable work in this country, who run the food banks and the after-school programs—paying taxes while corporations are paying none.

The late Dr. Peter Marshall told a story he called “The Keeper of the Spring.”  Here’s how it goes, in Marshall’s own elegant, poetic words: “Once upon a time, an Austrian town grew up along the Eastern slope of the Alps. It was sheltered in the lee of the protecting heights, so that the wind that shuddered at the doors and flung handfuls of sleet against the window panes was a wind whose fury was spent.  High up in the hills, a strange and quiet forest dweller had been hired years ago by the town council to clear away the debris from the pools that fed the lovely stream flowing through their village. He patrolled the hills and wherever he found a spring, he cleaned its brown pool of silt and fallen leaves, of mud and mold and took away from the spring all foreign matter, so that the water which bubbled up through the sand ran down clean and cold and pure.

“It leaped sparkling over rocks and dropped joyously in crystal cascades until, swollen by other streams, it became a river of life to the busy town. Millwheels were whirled by its rush. Gardens were refreshed by its waters. Fountains threw it like diamonds into the air.  Swans sailed on its limpid surface and children laughed as they played on its banks in the sunshine.

“But the City Council was a group of hard-headed, hard-boiled business men. They scanned the civic budget and found in it the salary of a Keeper of the Springs. Said the Keeper of the Purse: ‘Why should we pay this romance ranger? We never see him; he is not necessary to our town’s work life. If we build a reservoir just above the town, we can dispense with his services and save his salary.’  Therefore, the City Council voted to dispense with the unnecessary cost of a Keeper of the Springs, and to build a cement reservoir.

“So the Keeper of the Springs no longer visited the brown pools but watched from the heights while they built the reservoir. When it was finished, it soon filled with water, to be sure, but the water did not seem the same. It did not seem to be as clean, and a green scum soon befouled its stagnant surface. There were constant troubles with the delicate machinery at the mills, for it was often clogged with slime, and the swans found another home above the town. At last, an epidemic raged, and the clammy, yellow fingers of sickness reached into every home in every street and lane.

“The City Council met again. Sorrowfully, it faced the city’s plight, and frankly it acknowledged the mistake of the dismissal of the Keeper of the Springs. They sought him out in his hermit hut high in the hills, and begged him to return to his former joyous labor.  Gladly he agreed, and began once more to make his rounds. It was not long before pure water came lilting down under tunnels of ferns and mosses and to sparkle in the cleansed reservoir. Millwheels turned again as of old. Stenches disappeared. Sickness waned and convalescent children playing in the sun laughed again because the swans had come back.”

Like any good parable, this story admits of many applications—and Marshall, in his lifetime, used it in more than one way.  But I think of it whenever I think of these verses, whenever I think of Christians as “salt and light.”  Just like the City Council, our materialist culture, our modernist world-viewed country-men-and-women do not understand what it is we are called to be.  And just like the City Council, they ridicule us and, we are “romance rangers,” as Marshall politely put it, and they seek to cut our supports, because after all: are we not useless?  If they can’t see what we do, if they can’t touch it or feel it or measure it, it must not exist, and it should be cut from the budget, eliminated from our national discourse.

But brothers and sisters, in the face of this, we have Christ’s promises: we are salt and light, whether the world likes it or not, whether it believes it or not, whether it even knows it or not.  As Christians, our presence and our actions preserve and enlighten the world.  So you who mourn, rejoice!  Take heart, you who are meek and the makers of peace.  You are salt and light, co-workers with God, preservers and illuminators of Creation. And that is what it means to be the body of Christ on earth.  Hallelujah!  Amen.