Be Christ’s Light

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on February 5, 2023. Based on Matthew 5:13-20.

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Today, we are continuing the Sermon on the Mount. This is arguably the most important part of the Gospel According to Matthew, and sometimes is treated as the “canon within the canon.” Some Christian sects, such as Anabaptists like Mennonites and the Amish, elevate the Sermon on the Mount above other teachings, basically viewing the Gospel through the lens of this sermon. It contains some of the most famous teachings of Jesus, like the Beatitudes that Susan spoke about a couple of weeks ago.

The passage I just read starts with two of the most popular images to describe the church: salt and light. From a modern perspective, it is sometimes hard to understand the cultural depth of these two images. Let me first speak briefly about salt.

How can salt lose its saltiness? What does it mean to be “salt of the earth”? I’ve read a bunch of different commentaries with different explanations, so I’m not sure which is right. One possibility is that Judean salt was impure and would be kept in a sack. The actual sodium chloride would leach out faster than some of the other constituents, leaving rocks that were of no use but to be trampled under foot. Another possibility that makes more sense to me is that salt was traditionally used as a fertilizer. Too much salt kills plants, but a modest amount helps poor soil, a little bit like adding lime. For me, that squares with being “salt of the earth.” So we are supposed to bring new growth to barren lands, or barren hearts.

What I mostly want to talk about today is light. I would bet that everyone here today is within arm’s reach of a light source. I personally keep one in my pocket. If you look around, you’ll see little lights on the microphones and big lights hanging from the ceiling. Lorie has a light over her head, and I’m looking right into some bright lights. Lights are everywhere.

Indeed, lighting needs have driven technology far more than we appreciate. In ancient times, the primary source of light was lamps filled with animal fat, whether from cows or goats or fish. These lamps would stink. Rich people would use vegetable oils instead, especially olive oil. Eventually, candles were developed, still using animal fat. This was all the state of the art until the nineteenth century. The need for oil to provide light drove people in the north Atlantic to hunt walruses to local extinction. Then it drove the global whale trade.

The first major change was the use of coal, petroleum, and natural gas. In the nineteenth century, coal gas lamps became common in cities. A lamplighter would go along the street each evening and light the gas lamps to brighten the way. Homes were plumbed with gas lines. With the advent of petroleum, many people switched to kerosene lanterns. Think about this: the oil industry was born in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, but the Ford Model T, which was the first mass-produced automobile, didn’t go on the market until 1908. What were people using the oil for? Primarily, for light.

And what drove Edison’s pursuit of electrical technology? Light. He patented and commercialized the incandescent bulb in 1880 and revolutionized our use of light. Since then, we have developed more sophisticated light sources like fluorescent and LED bulbs.

Light is foundational to society. It allows us to navigate at night and indoors. It enables us to search for what we have lost. It allows us to read and to learn.

In Matthew, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” Yet the Gospel According to John opens poetically, saying, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” John wrote that Christ was the light of all people. How do we square this with Jesus’s words saying that we are the light of the world? Well, Paul described the Church as Christ’s body. Christ is the light, but we are the vessels of that light. We are the lamps filled with the oil of the Holy Spirit, burning brightly with the love of Christ. We shine, not because of who we are ourselves, but because we carry the light of Christ’s love. Jesus came to teach us how to become vessels of his love, lamps burning brightly in a dark world.

Being the light is a prophetic task. I subscribe to a daily email from the Center for Action and Contemplation, a Franciscan center founded and led by Father Richard Rohr. Their theme in 2023 is The Prophetic Path. So far, the focus has been on Jesus as a prophet. Often, we think of prophets as those who tell the future, but in reality, a prophet is someone who speaks the Truth, with a capital T, about the present. The prophet sees what’s going on in the world and points it out. Father Rohr wrote, “What is a prophet? Let me try this as a definition: one who names the situation truthfully and in its largest context. When we can name the situation truthfully and in its largest context, it cannot get pulled into interest groups and political expediency. … We don’t want the big frame. No one wants the big picture. … The prophet or prophetess speaks truthfully and in the largest context.”

Think about the first prophet, Moses. Yes, he told the Israelites about the Promised Land of Canaan, but more importantly, he denounced the evil of Pharaoh and the might of God to overcome that evil. All throughout the Old Testament, we hear about prophets speaking of the evil being done in Israel or Judah. Prophets like Amos denounce the way that the powerful mistreat the poor. He said:

For three transgressions of Israel,

    and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,

because they sell the righteous for silver

    and the needy for a pair of sandals—

they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth

    and push the afflicted out of the way;

Amos 2:6-7a

Amos goes on to proclaim that destruction is coming, but his primary message is that the present order of things is evil and not aligned with God’s will. That is the prophetic task, and that is what it means to be light. Like a spotlight, the prophet focuses the people’s attention on specific ways in which the world is broken, calling them to repent and fix the broken parts of their lives and their communities and their society.

Sometimes, the situation is so dire that a prophet is needed to proclaim Truth to the masses. Martin Luther King, Jr., was just such a prophet, speaking out against the systems and structures that perpetuated evil dating back centuries. But prophets like him are few and far between. Most often, we are dealing with the mundane, the casual, day-to-day shortcomings in our lives. Growing in God’s love is a process that takes time.

In that sense, we can be like the light of a dentist. Now, I only know one person who enjoys going to the dentist, and that’s Jesse. But most of us go to the dentist regularly to make sure we have good, healthy teeth and gums, or to correct problems that have emerged over the years. When we lived in Arkansas, our dentist was not very good. I think he just wasn’t very thorough. When we moved to Illinois, Rhonda and I went to a new dentist who found all of the things he had overlooked. Both of us needed root canals, in addition to several fillings. Our new dentist had better tools that allowed her to see the problems deep in our teeth and correct them before they got even worse. That was an unpleasant experience that played out over several months, but the alternative would have been even more suffering and eventually lost teeth.

In the same way, when the light of Christ’s love shines on the dark parts of our lives, it can be painful. If you really take Jesus’s teachings seriously, you will see all sorts of unpleasant aspects of your life: ways that you have mistreated your neighbor, ways that you have failed to love God with all your heart, ways that you have sinned by getting your priorities out of whack. Some people fear that experience, just as some people fear the dentist, but the reality is that hiding from God just delays the inevitable. If you do not root out problems when they are small, they fester and grow and ultimately can take over your life.

Now, I’m not advising you to be like a dentist, identifying all of the problems in other people. That’s a path that leads to being judged a hypocrite and alienating the people you care about. Christianity has earned a reputation for hypocrisy because churches so often criticize others while condoning sin among their members and leaders. As Jesus said elsewhere, “Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” What I’m saying is that each person needs to let Christ illuminate themselves to find those sinful parts of their lives and root them out, so that they can become Christ’s light to others.

Because that was Jesus’s commandment in this passage. Be the light! We have been given an amazing gift, the gift of membership in Christ’s family, blanketed with Christ’s love. Jesus says it’s as if we are a lamp. What is the purpose of a lamp? Let me ask it this way: Do you naturally desire to look at a lamp? Probably not. When I run at dusk or after dark, headlights are a real problem. When a light is shining right in my eyes, it becomes all that I can see. When the car passes, I am momentarily blinded until my eyes adjust. We are not drawn to light like moths. Rather, we use light to illuminate our path.

We are not called to be a dentist’s light, rooting out evil in other people no matter how painful. We are not called to be a flashlight shining in people’s eyes and blinding them to the world around them. We should not expect that our light will draw people to us like moths to the flame. Rather, we are called to be a streetlamp, illuminating the path to goodness. We don’t need to be a bright beacon like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Dorothy Day or William Barber or Desmond Tutu. We just need to be a part of the process of life and shine a little bit of light, a little bit of love, when we find someone in a dark place.

Jesus commands us to shine our light on the world to reveal the good and the bad, and to enable people to see a path to God. We are all people on a journey, one that ultimately leads to the eternal light of God’s presence. In the meantime, some people are walking in darkness, frightened of the world around them, unaware of God’s presence in their lives. We who know Christ know God’s love. We walk in the light of that love and can channel it to shine for others.

Let’s not put our light under a bushel. Instead, let’s shine for the world. That means exhibiting God’s love for the world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” God loves THE WORLD. Not just some people, but the WHOLE WORLD. Unfortunately, many people do not know the loving God that we know. They may have heard of a judgmental God, one who only loves people who act in a certain way or believe a certain thing, or one who condemns people who act in other ways. We know a God who loves everyone, who desires that each person should walk in the light of Her love.

Let us seek to be a church that preaches the true Gospel, the Good News that the kingdom of God is at hand for everyone. Let us be light in the darkness of people’s lives so that they may see the path that leads to God. Let us not be afraid of the dark, but know that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overtake it. Amen.

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