Sermon, Sunday, February 6, 2011 - Epiphany 5

“Salty Streetlights in the City of God”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, February 6, 2011 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

¹The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. ¹²Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in. (Isaiah 58:11-12)

⁶Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. ⁷But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. ⁸None of the rulers of this age understood this; (1 Cor. 2:6-8a)

¹³“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. ¹⁴“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid.” (Matt. 5:13-14)

We live in an anxious age. Economic uncertainty, job losses, political unrest around the world, such as the upheaval we’ve watched in Egypt all week, the violence of wars and threats of terrorism all invade our collective consciousness creating a pervasive sense of dis-ease and unrest, within and without. What does it mean to be a religious person in these unsettled times? Some of what we see of religious people is not particularly inspiring. Religious fanatics or extremists in every tradition often fuel the very conflicts and unrest that scare the rest of us to death. We live in a country that rigidly preserves the separation of church and state, but sometimes the institutionalized secularism that results poses real challenges for those of us who feel called to respond to the needs of the world out of our religious conviction and spiritual wisdom. St. Paul talks about this spiritual/secular tension in his letter to the Corinthians, and the prophet Isaiah records the words of YHWH to the Ancient Israelites with some very strong language about how religious life and social concerns are to be integrated in the lives of God’s people. And Jesus declares to his disciples that they are the salt and light in the world in which they live. Navigating the boundaries of the sacred and the profane has always been a challenge for we humans who are created in the image of God.

The people to whom Third Isaiah speaks in today’s reading are the remnant who have returned from exile in Babylon and resumed a form of the religious life that they had lost with the destruction of the temple. Worshippers are engaging with gusto in their religious observances, praying, fasting, bringing offerings to the priests and embracing their religious tradition and its practices with enthusiasm. “Day after day they seek me and they delight to know my ways” says YHWH. Having returned to Israel from years in exile in Babylon, they have renewed their religious life but in a changed world. Like mainline Protestants today, who’s numbers steadily decline, these Israelites have to try to figure out how to be a religious community in a world that is very different from the one they knew prior to the exile. As one commentator explains,

Isaiah’s people too are looking back to figure out what went wrong that led to their demise. They too have to rethink what it means to worship the God of Israel in a “post” world: posttemple, postexile, post-Davidic monarchy. Worship for them has become a proxy for all of the change that must occur if the covenant community is going to avoid the mistakes of the past and secure a new future. (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 1, p. 316, Andrew Foster Conners)

We contemporary Christians live in a “post” world too - post modern, post Constantinian, post-denominational. A world of “emerging church,” and changing worship styles and pervasive secularism that renders church attendance optional for most people. The Israelites to whom Isaiah preached had reached back into their tradition to find religious practices that they believed would be pleasing to God as part of their attempt to renew their religious life, hoping to garner God’s favor as they worked to rebuild their lost lives and lost culture.

Speaking through Isaiah, God is quite clear with the Israelites, that God does not delight in outward displays of religious piety, if that religious piety does not extend beyond the place of worship and into the everyday world of work and politics. Isaiah delivers a very clear message from God that what God wants from God’s people is a vibrant and faithful commitment to justice in the world. “Loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, let the oppressed go free, share bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your house, when you see the naked cover them.” Very concrete, very tangible acts in the world that God expects of God’s covenant people and which will delight the heart of God far more than elaborate religious worship rituals and spiritual practices that are undertaken only to make the practitioner look good in the eyes of their peers. Isaiah is clear that religious piety, worship and rituals that do not propel the practitioner to working for social justice is considered by God to be empty ritual and meaningless prayer.

Certainly in the modern world of declining church numbers, many denominations are pushing their churches to be about “mission” which is usually defined as going out into the world to do ministries of justice and reconciliation, to be prophetic and to speak truth to power on behalf of those who do not have a voice in our particular society. We are to care for the homeless, the hungry, the uninsured, the immigrant, to address issues of racism in our communities, workplaces, and churches, to engage in ministries that reach out to those underserved populations that Isaiah rattles off because our scripture tells us unequivocally that God expects us to worship God in the world in that way. And today’s conventional wisdom is that churches that engage in those kinds of missions and ministries will grow and thrive because they are doing the mission of God and others will see that and want to be part of it.

There is no doubt in my mind that some part of that conventional church wisdom is completely on target. The prophetic books of the Bible and the teachings of Jesus are relentless in reminding us that to be true followers of God in Christ, we have a duty to strive for justice and peace and love our neighbor in tangible ways. But I also fear that too many churches, particularly struggling ones, grab onto some kind of social justice ministry in order to “grow” their church and not because they feel called by God to engage in that ministry. And when a church takes on a ministry solely for the purpose of increasing its own numbers and hopefully its revenue, it is being just as duplicitous and hypocritical as the Ancient Israelites who fasted so that others would see them and so that they might garner favor with God. For too many contemporary churches, so called “mission” is “the proxy for all the change that must occur to avoid the mistakes of the past and secure a new future.”

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes,

Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. ¹³And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. (1 Cor . 2:12-13)

Paul is clear in that letter that religious people are guided by spiritual wisdom, wisdom that is often quite different from the wisdom of the world. And he encourages the Corinthians to trust their spiritual insight and to be courageous enough to let it guide what they do in the world. In a secular culture, religious people must nourish their spirits and allow themselves the time and space to develop that spiritual maturity of which Paul speaks in order to be the prophetic voice that God demands through Isaiah and Jesus.

Karl Rahner, a 20^th century theologian said, “In the future Christians will be mystics, or they will not be anything.” By that he meant that Christians will only be able to survive and thrive so long as they nurture their ability to have personal experiences of God, experiences that transform them from the inside out. Paul Knitter, one of my favorite contemporary theologians, writes,

[A]ny kind of religious life or church membership must be based on one’s own personal experience. It is not enough to say “amen” to a creed, or obey carefully a law, or attend regularly a liturgy. The required personal experience may be mediated through a community or church, but it has to be one’s own. Without such a personal, mystical happening, one cannot authentically and honestly call oneself religious. (Knitter, Without the Buddha I Could not be a Christian, p. 16)

Whatever else a church might be about in our contemporary world, it must continue to be a place where personal, mystical experiences of the divine can be mediated for people searching for that divine connection. Prayers, rituals, hymns, sacred chants, liturgical seasons and holy stories all function to open people to the divine. Churches at their best are what our Celtic friends call “thin places”, places where the membrane between the sacred and the profane is translucent allowing us to see beyond the confines of our daily humdrum into the sacred mystery that is God. When we have those moments of connection with God, we become energized and empowered to be about the justice mission that is the heart of our baptismal covenant. Without the divine connection, we may lose heart and become exhausted and burned out when the ministry of justice becomes tedious, challenging or draining.

Jesus told his followers, “you are the salt of the earth.” “You are the light of the world.” Salt – those who add zest and flavor to the world, but also those who preserve for the future that which is nourishing and healthy from the past. Light – those who illumine the darkness so that all can see and feel safe in an unsafe world. These are the gifts that religious people bring to a secular world. When we engage in ancient prayers and rituals and sing hymns that have passed the test of time, we act as preservatives, keeping fresh for the next generation the holy wisdom and mysteries of our Christian heritage. When we move into the world empowered by the love of God that flows in our veins, we become God’s flashlight in our neighborhood, “the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.” God working through us creates that city on a hill that cannot be hidden. Our saltiness is manifest every time we celebrate the Eucharist, pray with or for a friend, or sing a hymn. Our light shines when we take a mission trip to Uganda to install clean water systems, set up a care closet to provide needed personal items for the poor in our city, or minister to those in jail and prison. At our best we are salty streetlights in the city of God, shoring up the foundations and repairing the streets. For, as Paul reminds us, “the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” Amen.