5th Sunday after the Epiphany--Year A

5th Sunday after the Epiphany
February 6, 2011
Two songs come to mind when hearing our gospel lesson for today. The first is one that many of us have been singing since our childhood. Our children sang it at the St. Nicholas feast a couple of months ago, and our choir presented us with a rousing version of it just a few weeks ago: This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” Many of us have been taught all of our lives the importance of letting our lights shine.
While I worked at the Stewpot soup kitchen in Jackson, I encountered another song about our shining lights. It quickly became one of my favorite songs that we would sing in the noon day chapel service, and the pianist would sing the verses, and the congregation would sing the chorus, in the kind of call and response that is common in African American spiritual singing. The chorus goes “Let your light shine, shine, shine. Let your light shine, shine, shine. May be somebody down in the valley tryin’ to get home.” This gave us a reason for why it’s important to let our little lights from childhood shine, so that we could serve as little lighthouses to inspire others and help them find their way when they are lost.
I love both of these songs, and they both share important theological truths, but I think that they skip ahead of an important truth that we see in today’s gospel story.
Our story for today is the second part of Matthew’s depiction of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. In last week’s gospel, Jesus had been ministering to the crowds, and when he seems them following after him, he goes up the mountain, where his disciples follow him. He then sits down, and he begins his Sermon on the Mount, with the beatitudes. What is especially important to remember about our story today, the continuation of that Sermon on the Mount, is that Jesus is not teaching the masses in the sermon; rather he is preaching to his small group of disciples, his closest, most dedicated followers. He is teaching what it means to be his disciple, and he preaches that to them and to us across the centuries.
Notice, that the first thing he tells us today is not what we are supposed to do. First, he tells us who we are. “You are the salt of the earth…” Salt in its very essence is a preservative. It enhances the flavor of what is already, innately there. That is who we are as disciples of Jesus. “You are the light of the world…” Light illumines and dispels the darkness. It reveals what is hidden, and its very essence is to shine.
First, before he tells us what we are to do, he tells us who we are. We are the light of the world because we are baptized into Christ Jesus who is the true light of the world. We are salt because Jesus is the truest, purest salt, and we are a part of him. Martin Luther once said that we are not called to be Christians. In our baptism we are baptized into Christ, and thus we are called to be little Christs to all the world. That’s how Paul can say to the Corinthians that “we have the mind of Christ.” And it’s how Jesus can say—you are salt; you are light; because I am salt and I am light and you are a part of me.
It’s only after he tells us who we are that he tells us what to do. You are salt, so you must keep your saltiness; do not let it be bleached out by your cares and concerns and burdens nor by the priorities of the world. You are light, he says, so you must “let you light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”
There is a certain amount of effort and work required in being salty, in letting our lights shine, but primarily the work of salt and light is in the remembering: I am salt; I am light; I am baptized into Christ Jesus, and I continue to be transformed into his image and likeness when I remember who I am and when I try to live more fully into that.
We have to be in touch with our identity in Christ, and we have to remember it over and over again to live into the work of who Christ calls us to be, before we can be those who help enhance the gifts of what is already there or those who shine the light to reveal the hope and the good news for a hurting and broken world. It is a continued process of remembering, of falling away and coming back; of reshaping our own wills, desires, priorities according to the “mind of Christ” that dwells within us.
You are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. Remember it weekly when you are fed in the Eucharist, in daily prayer and in reconnecting with our Lord who calls you. And only then can you live into the call of your saltiness, your call of being the light and “Let your light shine, shine, shine. Let your light shine, shine, shine. May be somebody down in the valley tryin’ to get home.”