Salt and silence

Let me begin bluntly: your vocation (job) as a Christian, is not to deliver people from their sins with what you say or with what you do. Do you know why that’s the case? Because you are not God. Our gospel lesson this morning tells us that we are to be salt and light for other people not to see us - for we are not the food or the object that light illuminates; that would be Jesus - rather we are that the substance, salt and light, that entices others to seek Christ. 

This might seem really obvious to you. But we’re awfully good at deceiving ourselves. It is so easy for every one of us to look around us, to read and watch and listen to things going on, to do our evaluation, and then to come to the conclusion that if people were smart, or thinking rightly, or not deceived, or not brainwashed, they would agree with us because it’s quite obviously true. And since it’s so obvious - we think to ourselves - what we think and believe must be God’s will, right? 

If you think that’s true, I’ll let God respond to you: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord..." (Isaiah 55:8-9); ...no one comprehends what is truly God's except the Spirit of God" (1 Cor 2:11). Or when Job - who seemed to have everything figured out and a great life was suddenly stripped of everything to be tested by God through Satan, Job laments: search me God for I have done nothing wrong, I have kept your law, I know your statutes, I know what is right and I do it; why does everything seem to be falling apart; the world seems turned upside down. God responds: “who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? … where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Surely, Job, you know how all things work and how I work through all things. After four chapters of God asking Job whether he knows the intricacies of everything that exists, and how it all came to exist and be ordered, Job has this to say: “I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, but will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further … I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.

So Job becomes a prophet of Jesus’s own words: “‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” What does this mean in really practical terms for us? The early fathers of the church understood our passage today to be calling for an inward transformation of heart, which begins with the humility to confess that we do not know all things, that we are not God, that we are only God’s instruments. It follows with repentance, which involves turning our hearts and so too, essentially, since God made us as rational creatures, our intellects, our inquiry, our reading, our prayer, foremost, our full attention, to God’s Word revealed to us in all the Scriptures. 

For seeking him as he’s revealed himself to his Church through time, is what allows us to experience grace - the girding of hope that provides us the courage to engage with other people, often our so-called enemies. Hope in Christ as he reveals God to us in Scripture vs hoping someone’s given political rendering of Christ to suit their social, economic or political desires fuels the courage to ensure our exercise of faith doesn’t become about satisfying our own wills - wills that, as Jesus will experience in the desert that we’ll hear about on Ash Wednesday - are often tempted by our fears, our ignorance, and our unconsciously formed deepest desires.

Hope fuels the courage to let go of our presumptions, so we can be transformed as we seek him. Seeking him is that very submissive, self deferential process of laying down our lives and dying to ourselves. This doesn’t save us - we are saved by grace alone. Laying down our demands to God that our judgements and ways are found righteous allows him to reform us into the people God demands we become: the salt that flavours the food, the light that shines into people’s own darkness to entice and allow others to see as Job saw, to taste and try God out.

To summarize, Jesus calls us, in this passage, to hold our beliefs and understandings about the things of this world lightly, lest we make our beliefs or understandings into idols, imagining that they are absolutely true of God’s will. How on earth, we might ask, do we do this when we are asked to remain in relationship with people with whom we fundamentally disagree, whom we might see as absolutely wrong headed or dangerous, even. The place to begin is with humility. Humility, as Job recognizes, requires silence.

Why silence? So that you stop speaking to prove your righteousness to God - he knows who you are. You stop speaking to demonstrate your superiority to those people you think are blind and brainwashed. For we know from Scripture that it is so often those who presume others are in the wrong that are found to be in the wrong themselves; so Nathan shows David, and Jesus the Pharisees and Sadducees. 

You stop speaking so that you can listen to God. Attend, wait, and truly see Christ where he already is: in that other person whom God made. Then you ask God to make you the salt and light to help others to let go of their death grip on securing themselves in this world. You ask God how to transform your heart so that you can shift perspectives from your own and see what might be at the root of another’s responses to events that differ from yours (you might find both of you actually have the same root concern, or that one or both of you are missing some information that was driving your judgment; you may actually find that you don’t really understand something that you thought you did; or that you’re not sure how to get out of a belief and save face, so ask God for the courage to do so, since you are called not to justify yourself but to help others).

You ask God for the patience, gentleness and kindness, not to dismiss the other person or write them off, usually committing the cognitive distortion of generalizing about anyone who disagrees with you (all generation x, or all men or all women, all liberals, all conservatives, all woke people are …); for this is a sinful tactic of trying to reduce the world to what you can handle rather than being willing to seek God where he’s gone; after all his sheep, faithful and strays.

Humility, God says through his prophet, Isaiah, is not external conformance to rules that often demand legal precision; too often doing this serves your own interests and merely becomes a point of pride. Humility is a Christ-like posture of deference first to God and then to opening the space in time for the other to see God: so asking yourself, how do I come alongside this person so that the other person might be able to encounter Jesus - not you, but Jesus. For Jesus alone can “loose the bonds of injustice and undo the straps of the yoke to sin” that is common to every single one of us. AMEN