WORLDLINESS RECONSIDERED

February i1, 1990

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Acts 2:42-47
Matthew 5:13-16

“You are the salt of the earth...the light of the world.”
-Matthew 5:13,14 (RSV)

"You are the salt of the earth..."

Of one thing we are sure. Salt is not very good for us and we eat
too much of it. Nutritionists warn that it lies hidden~in near lethal
doses in the most innocent boxes and cans and packages and that it is
possible te do serious damage to your blood pressure at the breakfast
table. And so, we've learned new respect, or at least we've learned to try
to sit near the shaker so we can have some discreetly, or we wait until the
conversation rises to a new level of enthusiasm before whispering
clandestinely to the person next te us - “pass it, please...you know, the
salt."

I was thrilled to encounter an alternative word, even with tongue in
cheek, while reading a book, The Supper of the Lamb, A Culinary Reflection,
by Robert Capon. Capon is an Episcopal Priest, a good theologian, an
articulate and witty author and, it turns out, a fine cook.

“Food these days is often identified as the enemy," he writes.
"Butter, salt, sugar, eggs, are all aut to get you. And yet at our best,
we know better. Butter is... well, butter, it glorifies almost everything
it touches. Salt is the sovereign perfecter of all flavors. Eggs, are,
pure and simple, one of the wonders of the world. And if you put them all
together, you get not sudden death, but Hollandaise, which in its own way
is not one less a marvel than the Gothic arch, the computer chip or a Bach
fugue." [Preface to the Second Edition, xiii]

Capen, although he preaches balance in our culinary adventures, is
probably not for the habitual calorie counters. But his perspective does
help bring inte focus and immediacy, a very familiar saying of Jesus’...
"You are the salt of the earth.’

it certainly makes popcorn interesting. That was the conclusion, by
the way, of a carefully conducted scientific experiment in Biblical
research in our own Church School. It is called experiential learning. i

was walking through our office this week and noticed on Deborah Kapp's
door, a piece of paper which was obviously some kind of classroom
worksheet. Office doors, I netice, become the equivalent of the family
refrigerator. It's where you post announcements about how wonderful your
children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces are or how you feel about the
world in general. This worksheet on Deborah Kapp's door announced “I will
be the salt of the earth by... not being a bad boy." Karen Maurer
explained: The Church School curriculum follows the Jectionary and
therefore classes are often considering the same text as we are in worship.
Not always, but often. They studied “salt of the earth" last week. T
saved it for today. They talked first about how Jesus used Simple examples
to teach: objects people knew and understood, like salt, and like a candle.
So they conducted an experiment in order to understand what salt of the
earth means. They made popcorn. They ate some. Then they put salt on
some and ate it. They concluded that salt makes popcorn taste better. So
they further concluded that Jesus wants his people to make the world better
~ thus the promise to start in the process of salting the earth by staying
out of trouble.

Then they turned out the lights, pulled the shades and lighted a
candle. Someone put a waste basket over the candle. It got dark in the
room. “You shouldn't do that if we want to see what's going on," they
concluded. In fact, you can get hurt walking around in the dark.

Their final conclusions were that they could be salt and light by:
not littering and by being friends and not fighting. And it occurred
in a week in which my government backed away from its environmental
commitment (God forbid that we should blunder into preserving the worid!) -
and, then, as if on cue... another deadly oil spill on the West Coast. It
occurs to me that if those little ones help clean up the world and move the
human family one tiny step closer to the day when peace on earth is a
reality, they will have been salt of the earth and light of the world. I
also concluded after reading everything I could find about this little
saying of Jesus that the children got it right. You want to understand
what Jesus meant? Try your popcorn without salt the next time. Your
doctor will love you, but it won't be very interesting. Or turn out the
lights, sit in the dark and see what you can see.

The saying occurs at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. And
that happens at the very beginning of St. Matthew's presentation of the
story. Jesus takes the disciples up on to a mountain: the crowd of people
is gathered on the mountain side, he sits down in the middle of the
disciples and he says...

“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn.

“Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the
peacemakers."

The Beatitudes, one of the most remarkable and sublime and
revolutionary collections of ethical teaching in all the world. They are
so radical, so contrary toe the harsh reality of the world that the

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disciples surely must have wondered if he was really serious. “Blessed are
the poor in spirit... the meek?... Not in this world!" So they surely
must have conciuded that he was proposing that they, his chosen friends,
withdraw from this world where the meek and merciful are more often run
over rough shod rather than congratulated. “Nice guys finish last," Leo
Durecher once observed. So the disciples surely thought that what Jesus
was proposing is that they retreat from this world and establish a little
world within the world where the meek and poor and bereaved will be
blessed... Maybe even a place, an actual religious community, self-
contained, enclosed, far enough from the harsh realities of the world that
the peculiar new teachings of Jesus could actually be tried out. He could
be the leader of the community. He could continue to teach them in that
environment and they could continue to learn. They could even do the good
he wanted them to do by going out into the world on oceasion, to teach and
preach and heal, and then return to the community.

It is an idea with no small appeal. It is still an attractive option
for many people. In fact, it was a popular way of being religious in
Jesus’ day. There were communities of mystics who lived together in the
desert, practicing a kind of radically obedient, highly disciplined
Judaism. One of the famous ones around the Dead Sea was called the
Essenes, a kind of monastic, highly disciplined, and highly moral
community. It sounds like John the Baptist, for instance, might have been
a member of one of these communities. In any event they were there and the
people knew they were there and the expectation, throughout his life, was
that Jesus of Nazareth would move in this direction: would take his
followers out of the world and establish another worid, a world within the
world, a retreat, a haven, a shelter from the world's harshness and
brutality and cruelty. The religion of Jesus would be essentially an
“other woridly” phenomenon.

Se, he sets the record straight at the beginning. The world is the
focus. This world is the place they are to live in, to love and be
faithful in. They are going to have to figure out how to follow him
without withdrawing from the world. They are, in fact, "the salt of the
earth...the light of the world."

Meaning? change it... preserve it... cleanse it... celebrate... make
it tasty... All the standard studies point cut that salt was important,
valuable and necessary. It preserved food. It was a cleansing agent.

Salt was used ceremonially in the temple (and still is employed in a Roman
Catholic baptism). It was a valuable trading commodity. And it was a
lovely luxury, an embellishment...it made bland food taste good. Its very
nature is to quietly but dramatically alter that with which it comes in
contact. So, that's what his followers are.

But, the appeal of the other-worldly focus has been persistent,
consistent and some would say dominant across the centuries of Christian
history. It has been assumed widely that to be religious and to be worldly
are opposites, It has been assumed that to be a faithful follower of
Jesus, one needs to be suspicious of the world: to regard the world as an
evil place, full of temptation and sin. Being a Christian, it has been
assumed, and is still widely believed, means disengaging from the world.

It has been a persistent heresy.

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wo

There is a chapter on religion in Megatrends 2000, a new book by
John Naisbitl and Patricia Adurdene. The authors note the decline of the
traditional churches in our culture at the same time there is a dramatic
increase in some kinds of religion. “In turbulent times," they propose,
“Limes of great change, people head for two extremes: fundamentalism and
personal spiritual experience." New Age religion. Although they are very
different on the surface, they share a common focus. “In times of great
social change, fundamentalistic religion spells out the answers for peaple
- so they need not make decisions alone." New Age religion, on the other
hand, concentrates on inner feelings, personal spirituality." Both focus
somewhere other than the world. One emphasizes gaining life in another
world after death. The other promises contentment and fulfillment in the
interior world of personal feelings. Describing "baby boomers," the trend
setters for the future, Naisbitt and Adurdene say, “they are inner
directed: they don't care for existing religions, so they come out with a
new kind of religion, a New Age one, a kind of atunement." [p. 277, 279,
293]

Because most religion has chosen to be other-worldly, rather than
worldly, many social scientists, intellectuals, artists, long ago concluded
that religion is essentially irrelevant to this life -— this world,
answering questions no one is asking. In the introduction to his book on
Faith and Fragmentation, Philip Wogaman quotes a character in a Tom Robbins
novel who expresses the intellectual tenor of the times.

“Christianity is dying of its own accord.
Its most vital energies are already dead. We
are living in a period of vast philosophical
and psychological upheaval...and when we come
out of it..we will find that many of the old
mores and attitudes and doctrines will have
been unrecognizably altered or eliminated
altogether. One of the casualties of our
present upheaval will unquestionably be
Christianity." (Faith & Fragmentation, p. 3-4
from Another Roadside Attraction, Tom Robbins]

Robhins is not the first to come to that conclusion, of course. In
fact, the modern intellectual mind set was formed by people who simply
assumed that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, were on
the way out.

Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx,
essentially agreed on one thing and that is that religion in general, and
institutional religion in particular, was an impediment to human progress
and that the human race will be happier and freer without it.

Wouldn't they be surprised to see the newspaper this morning? The
hottest news is from South Africa, announcing one of the truly major
revolutions, social and political, of our time... and in the middle of it -
squarely in the center ~ between Facists on the one hand, brandishing
swastikas and brown shirts, and Leninist revolutionaries, whose social
orders often turn out to be more repressive than the ones they replace, in

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the middle... an Anglican Bishop, Desmund Tatu; a brave, devout Anglican
layman, Neison Mandella; a Calvinist preacher, Alan Boesak... and hundreds

and hundreds of Christian churches... Wouldn't they be surprised at the
headline, "The God that, Failed" - a summary of the sudden “imploding” of
Communism... and again, al the center, the church, Solidarity, the Pope,

the other Protestant churches of East Berlin.

To his modest little band of non-descript friends, Jesus said, "You
are the salt of the earth - light of the world," and they were. And
incredibly, in spite of the dire and confident predictions of the smartest
among us - the followers of Jesus are still salt of the earth.

The event that touched off the Romanian revolution never made it on
many front pages probably because it was only about a church and a
congregation of Christians and their minister. In the western city of
Timisoara, the pastor of the Reformed Church, the Romanian equivalent of
Presbyterian, Laslo Toekes had spoken and acted on behalf of religious and
ethnic rights before. “He had been suspended from his parishes and moved
in the past when the state decided his influence was becoming too strong.
Masked men broke into his church in November and threatened to kill him and
his family, so he moved into the church itself with his wife, and sent
their son to stay with grandparents. He was abducted, beaten by security
guards, interrogated and then after his return, asked to sign a document to
say that he had not been mistreated. When he refused and the police came
for him again, members of his congregation formed a human chain around him
to prevent his arrest. That gesture grew into the massive protests and
subsequent blood bath that toppled the Ceausescu dictatorship. There was
shooting; people were killed. A chant often heard in the nationwide
protests was - "Timisoara! Timisoara!" [Fort Worth Star Telegram, in PC
USA News, 1/5/90]

“Salt of the earth...light of the worid." The world is where the
action is. We make a very big mistake - a theological mistake - when we
despise, withdraw from or fail to love this world, in favor of some other-
worldly haven from reality and harshness and brutality. God so loved this
world that a Son was given for its salvation, its reconciliation, its
healing, its hope.

Robert Capon, in his delightful theological cookbook, says it
deliciously:

"There is a habit that plagues many so-
called spiritual minds: they imagine that
matter and spirit are somehow at odds with
each other and that the right course for human
life is to escape from the world...into some
finer and purer (and undoubtedly duller)
realm... that is a crashing mistake. It was
God who invented dirt, onions and turnip
greens... God who at the end of each day of
creation pronounced a resounding ‘Good!' And
it is God's unrelenting love of all the stuff
of this world that keeps it in being at every
moment." fop. cit., xii]

an

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That is why the criteria by which we measure ourselves and on the
basis of which we plan programs at this church is not numbers alone, but
faithful expression of the Gospel in the world. That is why we pay less
attention to the heavenly scorecard than we do ta children tutored and
houses built and apartments painted and homeless sheltered.

Now - it is just at this point that the preacher is supposed to move
in for the sale and urge the people te get on board and start becoming more
salty. And the temptation to do that is real. However, it is not what
Jesus said or did. It is not imperative, but indicative. He doesn't
order, invite or command them to become the Salt of the earth... he tells
them that is what they already are. They are, this modest little band of
non-descripts, sitting on a hillside, in a remote outpost of the Roman
Empire, they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. So it's
a description... a compliment. They did not aspire to change the history
of the world... they simply tried to follow Jesus... and the world got
changed. That's how it goes apparently.

When you follow Jesus, when you faithfully follow, accepting his
Lordship, living for him, you become something you didn't intend. You
become, wherever you are, salt of the earth. You become, wherever you live
and work and have being, Fight of the world.

it is true about churches striving to live out the faith with
integrity... and it is true of individuals, trying to live faithfully in the
world, at work, in government, business, education, in personal and in
public responsibilities.

It can be an adventure. You can find yourself in new places, doing
new things. You will find yourself living more thoroughly in this world
than ever before and maybe even loving it more, understanding more, how
absolutely God loves this world and all its children.

God knows, the world needs that, needs a faithful church and
faithful, worldly disciples.

Jesus said: “You are salt of the earth...light of the world."

Amen.

0 God, lover of this world, creator of its beauty and energy, author of its
hope: give us courage ta love it, to live faithfully in it. Give us heart
and soul and strength to be its flavoring and seasoning.... in Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.

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