Sermon Title: "Salty & Shiny"
Date: February 6, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Susan Bjork

Lesson:  Matthew 5:13-20

Most gracious God, you are the source of love abundant, the bearer of light everlasting, and the bringer of hope eternal.  In this moment, I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight.  Amen.

Today’s scripture lesson from Matthew picks up right where we left off last week as the sermon on the mount continues and Jesus issues a challenge or a call of sorts to those whom he has just named as “blessed” (the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, those hungry for righteousness, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted).

In his paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, Eugene Peterson retells the first portion of today’s lesson in this way:

Let me tell you why you are here.  You're here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth.  If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness?  You've lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage.

Here's another way to put it:  You're here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world.  God is not a secret to be kept.  We're going public with this, as public as a city on a hill.  If I make you light-bearers, you don't think I'm going to hide you under a bucket, do you?  I'm putting you on a light stand.  Now that I've put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine!  Keep open house; be generous with your lives.  By opening up to others, you'll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.

This call Jesus puts forth to his original audience and to all of us who feel called to be his disciples is like most challenges he puts forth: on one hand, it is fairly simple; on the other hand, it can be difficult to do sometimes.

The call Jesus puts forth is this:  Be who you really are, who you were created by God to be. 

In other words, be salty and shiny!

“You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus says, so be salty.  Season the lives of others with goodness and love.  It doesn’t take too much salt to flavor the whole, but you’ve got to be brave and do it. 

Salt is a preservative.  So, be the salt that preserves that which feeds and nourishes the community.  Share that nourishment with others.  Be salty; don’t be bland.

“You are the light of the world,” Jesus says, so be shiny.  Let the light of God shine through you.  Be a lamp to the community by sharing God’s love with others. 

Illuminate the path of God for your community and pay attention to the other lights around you.  For with more light, we may all see the path before us more clearly.  Be a community of hope that shines as if up on a hilltop.  Be shiny; don’t be dim.

Why do all this? ...because the world needs salt…the world needs light.

Don’t do this to relish in your own saltiness and illumination, for discipleship is not only a private matter.  Discipleship is the practice of the whole community.

Be salty and shiny, so your whole community can be a faithful light which shines forth God’s love from a hilltop.

Be salty and shiny in order to reflect the love of God which you have received into a world in need of love, and nourishment, and hope.

You have been given a gift which is yours to share; you have been given a call which is yours to live out…not all by yourself, but in this community and out in this world. 

Salt can’t season from inside a shaker.  Light can’t illuminate from underneath a basket.  In other words, salt and light don’t exist only for themselves.  They have jobs to do.  And so do you!

This challenge, this call, which Jesus put forth is as true for us today, the church in the 21st century, as it was for those who first heard him that day.  It has been the call of the church in every age.  It is a call to remember who we truly are: God’s beloved.  And it is a call to share that love with others who may have forgotten that they too are loved.

It may push us out of our comfort zones at times to be salty and shiny.  We may have to take a risk now and then on behalf of God’s Reign which we so long to glimpse.

The path of discipleship may take us through rocky terrain at times.  We know this.  Some of our forebears in faith knew this even perhaps even more clearly than we do.

On August 31, 1962 the civil rights organization known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized a group of southern African Americans to board a bus heading to Indianola, Mississippi.  The purpose of their trip was to register to vote.  The first person to volunteer for the trip was a plantation sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer. 

It was not an easy choice for some to board that bus that day.  The threat of job loss or physical violence as a result of this action was a very real possibility.  Fannie Lou Hamer later remarked, "I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember."

Sensing that others on that bus were nervous, however, Hamer decided to do what she could to boost their morale and strengthen their resolve.  And so she began to sing the spirituals of her Christian faith and among the songs she sang that day on that bus was This Little Light of Mine.

Impressed by what he heard about Hamer’s leadership on that August day, one of the head organizers asked around until he tracked down the “lady who sang the hymns.”  From that point on Fannie Lou Hamer became a leading activist in the civil rights movement, organizing voter registration drives and freedom rides. 

Hamer was known to be bold and brave and she never lost her resolve, even when she and fellow activists were arrested on a false charge and severely beaten in 1963.

Hamer’s singing was well-known throughout the civil rights movement and This Little Light of Mine became one of her signature songs.

I suspect that for Fannie Lou Hamer, as a woman of faith, those songs were a source of strength in the face of oppression, hope in the midst of the world’s persecution, and a reminder of her true identity as a child of God.  She owned her salty status and she truly was a light shining forth into a world in deep need of illumination.

We too have the opportunity in this life to be salty and shiny, my friends. 

We too have the opportunity to witness to the love of God by loving others.

We too have the opportunity to bring hope to those in need by proclaiming the source of our hope.

We too have the opportunity to teach compassion and acceptance by welcoming the stranger as a neighbor.

We too have the opportunity to put people before production and creation before consumption.

We too have the opportunity to stand in solidarity with those who seek a just peace in the middle of tenuous social, economic, and political situations.

We too can be salt and light.

Let us not forget the witness of our brave sisters and brothers in faith like Fannie Lou Hamer who stepped out in courage and let it shine…let it shine…let it shine!  Amen.