The Conspiracy of Salt and Light - Matthew 5:13-20

Last week, with the snow and ice, I found my exercise confined to a bike trainer and treadmill. Both are effective for the body, but deadly for the mind. So it was that I watched all three hours of Netflix’s new miniseries, “Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials.”

Those who have been around Christ Church long enough know that I have a weakness for a good mystery. Lowbrow or high, my favorite shows follow a rule-breaking protagonist unraveling a hidden plot.

In the case of Seven Dials, though I don’t want to give away too much, there is a unique kind of mystery—one that reveals a secret society that works throughout the world to hold evil at bay and preserve what is good. In other words, at the heart of the story is a group a lot like the church.

There is a conspiracy afoot, and we are a part of it. On the Mountain, after Jesus has taken his core group of disciples away from the crowd, we hear the plot unveiled: You are to be salt and light. Like the leader of an underground resistance, Jesus is spelling out for his cell group their basic call. They are to be like salt, agents of flavor that bring out the delicious taste of God’s good creation in a world whose palate has been deadened by processed substitutes. They are to be like light, revealing the colors that spill out in the world for a people who have dulled their vision to monochrome. This is the mission given to this ragtag group of disciples, not to overthrow the world but to subvert it with the power of life.

As Jesus will explain in the rest of the sermon that follows, this mission to live as salt and light, is not an attempt to replace the standing world order with a better politics, or a more just economy, or a more comprehensive system of charity. Jesus is after something far more radical than all that—the transformation of the heart. With the heart renewed, goodness will be the natural result. But misunderstanding this point has been the tragedy of so much Christian mission in the world. Like the scribes and the pharisees we have tried to impose a distorted image of goodness from the outside. Still, until our hearts are made new, the salt we offer will be diluted by our ambitions, our light will be hidden behind our grievances and our egos. Without our hearts transformed by God’s love, we will be tempted to take power, and in the process, confuse our country for the Kingdom of God.

This abuse of the Gospel and undermining of Jesus’s message is nowhere more evident than in the use of the “city on a hill” metaphor found in today’s gospel. Taken up by John Winthrop, the early Puritan governor of Massachusetts, to describe the mission of that early colony, it has since been a favored image of American politicians for the role that America is to play in the world. Instead of a church, marked by turning the other cheek and loving enemies, we are given America, the superpower, as a shining light in the world. Such an abuse of scripture has been a bipartisan problem, as has been the resulting Christian nationalism, which can take a variety of shapes, but is always identifiable when the church seeks to sanctify the state rather than be an alternative to it.

To help disabuse us of such temptations, we are gifted this Sunday with Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Corinth was a city at the crossroads of commerce, a place known for its wealth and power. One would think that a message about the power of the resurrection would have resonated well among such people. God’s defeat of death? That would have been great advertising. Instead, Paul tells us that when he was in Corinth, he preached only about Christ crucified. Crucifixion was a shameful death, a powerless one. There’s no heroism involved in being nailed to a cross. That’s the point of it—to strip away any dignity from the victim. And yet, it was with this reality that Paul led.

What’s more, Paul admits that he came to Corinth in weakness, with fear and trembling. He wasn’t a bold prophet, but a stumbling preacher telling his audience a truth that was outright foolishness. We have heard so much of the cross that we fail to get how wildly absurd it would have been to its first hearers.  A crucified God is a weak God, and yet, in this weakness, Paul found a different kind of power— a power that comes from below, as essential as the soil. It is through the cross, as the theologian James Cone put it, that we find “God’s critique of power…with powerless love.”

Those of us who have joined in the conspiracy of that love must learn to set aside all other attempts to gain power. The world is not ours to save by controlling it with our vision and values, but to serve as gentle agents of joy and goodness. Imagine the transformation that would happen if people from every walk of life, in every place, moved through their ordinary days filled with the love of Christ? Just a few such people, scattered throughout the world, would make life more delicious and filled with light.

Thinking about the network of people who live in such love, I thought about Ronald, a man I knew from the Washington D.C. church where I served in seminary. Ronald always arrived on Sunday morning with a bright smile. His love poured over on everyone he met. Though his intellect was impaired, he was able to hold down a job cleaning the bowling alley at a nearby military base. He mopped the floors all night, and yet never failed to make it to church when his shift ended.

I think of him and the kind presence of love he carried with him. He lived with that love in his work, and on the bus, and when he came to church. Through his very presence, he was an agent of grace. Ronald would have seemed, from the perspective of the world, to be powerless, and yet he had opened himself up to be a vessel of the power of love. He had accepted the call to be salt and light, an agent of God’s conspiracy of love in the midst of life. I am certain Ronald was doing far more to sustain the world than anything that happened down the street in the White House.

As our church moves into its next season with our renovations to our parish house, our success will not be measured by how many impressive people walk through our doors or how many large pledges we can attract. Instead, if we want to actually live from the power of God, then we will become a community of prayer and presence, service and solidarity. We need a lot more people like Ronald in our circle. It is from them that we will learn to find our own path toward the weakness where God’s power can be made perfect. With our hearts so transformed, we too can be agents of God’s conspiracy. In our work, our travel, our visits to the grocery store or the gym, we can carry with us salt and light. Through the transformation of our hearts, God’s powerful powerlessness will flow from us, and it will be a blessing to our neighbors and our world. Amen.