When I sat down to write my sermon this week, I actually had to check the forecast before I could really begin, because I needed to know the chances of being tarred and feathered for talking about spring if today’s forecast called for -40.
Since it only called for -20, I’ll take my chances. So let me talk to you about spring.
I said back in October that my favourite day of the year is the first day in fall when you step out of your house and your breath mists the air, and you hear the crunch of leaves under your boots and everything smells so crisp. I love that day.
But my second favourite day of the year is the first day that I can step outside and smell ‘spring’. And this past Friday, when I stepped out of our little house to come to the office, that’s what I smelled. What does ‘spring’ smell like, you ask?
It smells like salt. Salt, and light.
What does light smell like? Well, I don’t know. But it’s funny how humans can remember places as smells. Every time I come into the church alone, I walk into the sanctuary here, and I watch the silent pews, and I smell what to me will always be the house of God – the smell of wood, of wax, and of prayer. What does prayer smell like? Well, I can’t bottle it, but maybe it smells like the distilled essence of hope.
And on that first ‘salt and light’ day, I smell the salt in the air as the water on the road dissolves the salt spread to stop ice from forming, and the light I smell just comes from the world being warmed as the sun shines it light on all that was dormant, and dead.
Salt, and light. New life from old, precious things from things we thought long dead.
Jesus sits near the top of a mountain and looks at the crowd gathered around him. He’s blessed them all; the meek, the mourning, the hungry; his words have been for them. But then he does something…different.
“You are the salt of the world,” Jesus says. “But if salt has lost its saltiness, how can it be restored? It is thrown out and trampled underfoot.”
There’s a lot to be said about those words, and certainly a lot of moral commentary has been made about them in the past – I received a book in the mail a couple of years ago that urged me to be part of a ‘revival of salt’ – a call to a Christian life; whatever that was, before the country lost its salt and was trampled underfoot.
But that got me thinking. Which is always a dangerous proposition, I know. How does salt ‘lose’ its saltiness? Salt is made of two essential elements – sodium, and chloride. It can’t lose its saltiness.
My mom has had a fancy salt and pepper set that’s sat in the china cabinet since before I can remember. A couple of years ago, while setting up for a family dinner I snuck a deviled egg from the tray, put a little pepper on it, and popped it in my mouth. But you know what? No pepper taste. So I sprinkled some on my hand and gave it a taste. It didn’t taste like anything. Turns out that pepper will lose its flavour. But salt…salt always tastes like salt.
It’s like light. A bushel basket is like a wicker basket – not very tightly woven. So, even if you put a candle under a basket (and I think Jesus is just as mystified as to why you’d do that), in a dark room it would still give off light. Jesus doesn’t say “blows it out,” he talks about hiding it.
There’s a good story there, I think. Jesus tells us that he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill. Indeed, Jesus reminds us that not one letter of all those laws in the Torah – all 613 of them – will pass away until all this around us has, too.
The law will not pass away until heaven and earth – light and salt – have passed away. The gospel of Jesus Christ – the good news of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ – fills heaven and earth. It is salt and light, something essential, something pure.
But Jesus tells us that if we have more faith in the law, the belief that we have to do something for that salvation, can weigh the gospel down. It’s like the bushel basket put over the candle, or salt that’s cut with chalk. It can make the words of hope seem a little dim.
Salt and light never lose their essential characteristics. They are both always exactly what they are meant to be – but we can interfere with them. We can put a basket over a light. We can ‘cut’ salt with anything. In the same way, our faith, the great gift from God that defines our Christian life, can become stale. It can be lost under a burden of anger, or fatigue, it can take a back seat to our own interests and wants. In our own human tendency to seek out what makes ourselves righteous, we run into the danger of putting our faith in the law – in our works – to make us right with God.
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But I read a story this week that gave me a great deal of hope; an assurance that no matter what happens there is still hope. In the midst of all the violence and protests, groups of Christians are forming human shields to protect – not to protest – groups of Muslims at prayer.
Let your light shine…
We may be far more aware of how we have grown stale and hidden whatever light we once thought we had. We may feel dull from anxiety and stress, in danger of being snuffed out or trampled underfoot. In naming us salt and light, Jesus is not making a simple statement of the obvious, but is bestowing an affirmation from a loving and creative God. Jesus is expressing God's faith in our acceptance of God's gift of grace—grace that empowers us to love one other. God's grace alone frees us to serve; it alone brings real joy.
"Let your light so shine," we say, and we hand the newly baptized or parent a candle, a miniature pillar of fire. It is the light of Christ—shining before we receive it—that will never be snuffed out.
Let the people of God say amen.
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