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.
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