21st September 2008. Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5: 13-20
Mina and I have had a terrible week. We were forced by the bishop to go to a conference. We had to go. It was a three line whip. In fact, all the clergy in the area had to go, except for one or two hospital chaplains. And not only did we have to go on this conference, we had to go to where we were forced to eat four course meals of French cooking. At lunch and dinner there were bottles of French wine on the table, which we had to drink. It's a tough life. We really suffered, didn't we, Mina?
You might be thinking, who pays for this, is this where my collection goes? Let me hastily tell you that we only have conferences every four years and the reason we go to is that it's cheaper, would you believe, then going to an English centre.
And of course we were there for a purpose and that was to listen, to learn, to be fed spiritually and to be refreshed and all these things happened. In fact, it was so good that in next Sunday's bulletin, I intend to put the website address so that any of you who have access to a computer, can listen to all the talks we heard. They were, in a word, brilliant.
Now that may seem a long introduction and seemed to have very little bearing on the readings and on the second sermon in the sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount. But it's not so. I can't speak for Mina, but I went on the conference because I had to, it was the next thing on the agenda. I went expecting little and I received a very great deal. Many of us in our Christian lives expect little. We have got so used to the experience of spiritual malnourishment, that we think this is normal, that this is how it is supposed to be.
One of the speakers was a man called Simon Ponsonby and he said this.
“Everywhere I go I find that God's people lack something. They are hungry for something. The Christian experience is not what they expected and they feel they have recurring defeat in their lives.”
We expected more. Many Christians feel dissatisfied, not with Christ, but in their relationship with him. Many Christians feel their faith offered much, but then it never happened. Christians today are hungry for spiritual fulfilment. The most desperate need of the Nation, is that the church gets filled with the Holy Spirit. We are salt that has lost its saltiness and if we have any light at all, we are so unconfident about it that we have hidden it under a bushel.
But is this a problem just of our own age? I think not. Human beings have always felt separated from God. However successful our life may be in a worldly way it never fulfils our deepest longings. We were created with the God shaped hole and we try to heal ourselves by feeling that hole up with all sorts of nonsense only to find it doesn't satisfy. In the words of
So let us back-track to where we started last week. At the end of Matthew, chapter 4 we find that the crowds were following Jesus, wherever he went. They were following him because they had needs. They were sick and they wanted to be better. They were full of fear and anxiety and they wanted to be at peace. Their lives were broken. They were downtrodden. They were disappointed. They were hungry for more, “Dear God, there must be more to life than this.” Jesus moved through the crowds touching first this one here with healing, listening to a story over here, treating each person with love and respect. And as he touched them and listened to them they were made well. But this wellness was so much more than they had ever expected. This was the Shalom, the healing, the wholeness, the absolute rightness of the kingdom of heaven. And it was all happening here and now through this man. Not because they, the crowd, were in any way special, but because he was special.
Having walked among them Jesus sat down to teach them starting with the Beatitudes, which we looked at last week.
So these ordinary people had the extraordinary experience of seeing signs of the kingdom; the healing of the sick, the driving out of devils, were known to be signs of the kingdom, and then they received this marvellous teaching, which was all about them, “Do you not see, the kingdom of God is among you, now!”
Jesus said to the crowd, “You are the salt of the earth.” Let's think about what that means for a moment. When I was a child you often heard people describes as the salt of the earth. A person who was so described was never an academic or an aristocrat. He or she was an ordinary Joe or Joan. But they had qualities of integrity, trustworthiness, dependability, generosity, warmth and carefulness for others. They were the sort of people who would genuinely do anything for anybody. And they would be well known within their circles as the sort of person you could turn to. They would bind communities together; ordinary people quietly and selflessly there for others.
And let's just look at this word, “salt.” The job of salt is to bring out the flavour of food. When you have really beautifully prepared food, you don't say, “Oh my, isn't this salty. Yum, Yum!” You say, “Oh, isn't this delicious!” Salt is not there to draw attention to itself, but to draw attention to all the lovely things around it.
Another thing about salt is that you don't need much to flavour food. You only need a tiny amount and it makes all the difference.
In Jesus's day salt was also used in two ways that we don't use it today. It was used to purify: you would scrub dirty surfaces down with salt; and it was also used to preserve food so that the food would not go bad: think of salted fish.
So Jesus says to all these ordinary people who think their lives are so unimportant, “You are the salt of the earth.” Few though you are, you will make all the difference. No one will notice you, any more than anyone notices salt in food. No one will thank you for the service you will do in binding society together, in having a care for your community. No one will see that by who you are and how you conduct yourselves you will cleanse and preserve, enrich and strengthen community, which is essential to human well-being.
Do you realise what Jesus is saying to these people? He is saying, “You are part of God's plan for the world.” You, who felt your lives were so dull and unimportant, are the foundation of everything. You are the salt of the earth, the whole world. God is not going to change the world into the kind of world he wants through kings and princes, armies and wars, celebrities and superstars, but through ordinary people being the flavour of God in the world. God in Jesus has come into their lives and using ordinary people he is going to light up the world.
About seven years ago, I stayed in the conference centre, besides Canterbury Cathedral. My window looked out at the Cathedral which was beautifully floodlit at night so I went to bed with my curtains open. When I woke in the middle of the night all the floodlighting had been switched off, but high up in one tower one single light shone out into the night. I later learned that this was the pilgrim light and that in the past every Cathedral had a tower in which a light shone all night to guide the pilgrims through the dark countryside to their destination and to safety.
So, Jesus said, “You are to be like lights for God, you are to be like the light that was lit in a Jewish household and was hung on a stand to light the whole house. You are to be like the lights of the village on a hill that you can see in the distance, or like the pilgrim light of Canterbury Cathedral. However dark the night is, however hopeless things may seem to be, you will be alight with the glory of the God who has just come close in the healing touch of Jesus, not for your own sake but for the sake of the world. Always remember the darker it is the brighter the light shines.
But you may say, this is all very well, Alison, but I don't feel salty; my faith feels pretty tasteless. I don't feel that God's light shines through me. I just feel tired and disgruntled, anxious about the constant bad news, and demoralised. I have been a Christian and a churchgoer for years, and I don't know what I mean by God.
I want to remind you again of how ordinary these people were who had followed Jesus to this Galilean hillside. They were you and me. But they have got one thing right. They had followed Jesus to a place where they could bring their pain and sorrow to him and where they could listen to him. They wanted something, something more than “this”, and they followed the one person who they thought could give them something new. And Jesus did it and it was so new. They, the nobodies; they, the spiritual zeros; they the “sat upon, spat upon, ratted on”, the flotsam and jetsam of life were God's secret weapon. , It was so radical that Jesus had to warn them. He wasn't turning over everything they'd ever been taught. He wasn't (in v. 17) abolishing the Law and the Prophets. He was trying to fulfil the teaching, to show God's people what God had always intended his law to be for. The Law of Moses was intended to give life, not suffocate it; to set people free, not burdened them; to create a society in which men, women and children could thrive; but those who had power had misused and misinterpreted the Law. Jesus had come to show what God had intended, in his (Jesus’) life and death and resurrection.
So how do you feel Jesus' touch in your life? Please look for a moment at the fourth beatitude (v. 6), “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Righteousness is right relationship with God and with others. Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness? Do you want God in your life? If the answer is, “yes,” then keep asking him, ask him and ask him and ask him and don't give up, and like the crowds that followed Jesus to the hillside, follow Jesus to those places where you might meet him. Sign up for a home group this year, if you've never done so before. They are starting at the end of this month and they are really good. If you feel that you are apathetic, that you have lost your appetite for God, then simply ask God to help you to want to want him. I promise you he will respond. After all, he responded to all those ordinary Joe's on a Galilean hillside all those years ago.
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