Several
years ago my sister, father, and I started giving my mother a hard time because
she suddenly became very particular about how dark it had to be for her to go
to sleep. It had to be completely, 100% pitch black, and if somewhere there was
the littlest light shining—maybe the dull glow from a streetlight outside the
window, maybe from an alarm clock beside the bed—she would not be able to fall
asleep. She would lie there awake, irritated by the light. She even got so
dependent on having utter darkness whenever it was bedtime that she started to
travel with a roll of electrical tape in her toiletry bag. When they’d turn off
the main lights of some hotel room, inevitably there would be other smaller
lights around the room still shining. Little light on the thermostat? She’d
slice off a piece of electrical tape and cover it up. Little light emanating
from some device in the bathroom? Slice off another piece of electrical tape
and slap it on there. It was like a little bed time ritual, one in which she
discovered how difficult it actually is to control the amount of light when it
is supposed to be dark.
You
can imagine how awful we felt when we realized that she had developed quite a
serious eye condition that left her extremely sensitive to light. (Moral of the story: don't ever, ever tease your mother). And you can
imagine how silly I feel now that I have somehow developed a similar nightly
ritual. I don’t have an eye condition, but for some reason I, too, need as
little light as possible. In fact, there are some nights I don’t get good sleep
and I’m convinced it is because there is this little teeny weeny green light on
our printer and it is keeping me awake. Mind you, the little light is about the
size of the head of a pin, and it sits on our desk about 5 feet away from our
bed, but when I wake up in the middle of the night it IS THIS BRIGHT. I’ve made
a special cover for it, not out of electrical tape, but out of black
construction paper, and when someone prints something it often knocks that
paper out of the way. You think I’m crazy, but that teeny tiny green light
ruins the darkness.
“You are the teeny tiny green light
that will ruin the darkness,” Jesus tells his disciples. It’s a good thing to
say, and the right time to say it. Jesus has just begun what many consider his
most thorough, most important teaching about the kingdom of God and it’s
totally imaginable that they’re starting to get a bit overwhelmed by the sound
of it all. He has come on strong, even mentioning right up front the fact that
they may face some persecution, some blowback, for their beliefs and their
works of mercy. And so now he gives them an idea about how special and
important and influential their witness will be. Like a city situated up on a
hill that stands visible for all those in the valleys and hillsides, like a
candle set on a table in a room at night that enables people finish their work,
like the small bit of salt that flavors the dish it is in, they will have an
effect on the world around them. And even if someone walks around with
electrical tape, they will prove by their very presence that it is actually
very easy to banish the darkness.
Light
is difficult to control. Just a little teeny tiny bit can make a huge
difference. In a time long before people knew the physics of light—that it had
characteristics of both a particle and a wave—Jesus is telling them that their
very actions in Christ’s name will be mysteriously explosive, impossible to
shut away. As little photons of good in an evil world, disciples could beam and
bounce off of others and transmit holy energy to them, and like a wave their
actions could reach distances far beyond the distance their legs could ever
take them, like when a prayer shawl stitched here warms a person in a hospital
on the other side of town. And long before anyone knew the chemistry of salt—that
it is a stable compound with positive and negative ions (polar opposites!) which
allow it to dissolve and spread into a larger surrounding substance—Jesus is
telling them that although they might be small and pretty ordinary-looking and
totally different from each other they would be able to season and enrich an
entire community, like when a church’s Jesus stained glass window brings joy to
thousands of people driving up Monument Avenue. Incidentally, this scripture is
what one architect used as he presented his initial ideas to the building Team
back in December as the congregation contemplates a new addition.
But
Jesus is not just lecturing on the power of positive change, or spreading
random acts of kindness. Those things are nice, but Jesus is talking about
something more serious here. By calling them salt and light, Jesus gearing up
his followers to understand they will represent to the world the true life of
the kingdom of God. Jesus says that he is the fulfillment of the law, the
culmination of all that God desired to teach and convey through the giving of
the law and the words of the prophets in the days of ancient Israel. When
Christ lives in them through faith, they will display that fulfillment of God’s
desires for the world through their own words and actions. That is perhaps why for
so long the first thing said to a new daughter or son of Christ after they pass
through the waters of baptism is, “Let your light so shine before others that
they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”
However,
as important as your one teeny tiny green light is …or yours…or yours…Jesus is
actually not speaking about individual lights here. He is speaking to his
disciples as a group, as a community. Each time he uses the word “you” in this
passage, he is actually using the plural form of that word, which we don’t have
in English…unless, of course, you live in the South. He is saying, “Y’all are
the salt of the earth. Y’all are the light of the world. Let y’all’s light so
shine before others.” In other words, it
is not each person’s ability to shine that Jesus is focusing on, but their
power as a collective.
I
think this can be especially challenging for Americans to remember, for we are
really fascinated by the power of the individual. We tend to like stories where
one person makes a difference. In fact, not just here but elsewhere in the
gospels Jesus seems far more concerned about the impact his followers have when
they function as a group.
 |
| "Pentecost" (Salomon de Bray, 16th cent.) |
Early
church historian Robert Louis Wilken drives this home in his book about the
first thousand years of Christianity, the years from Jesus’ death and
resurrection to about A.D. 1000. The communal aspect of Christian faith cannot
be overstated, especially because they were formed in a time of great
persecution, when it was often a death sentence to be identified as a follower of
the risen Lord. “The early Church,” he says, “was a community with a distinct
anatomy; it was not simply an aggregate of individuals who believed the same
things.”[1]
It came into existence, he says at another point, as a community, not as a
bunch of individuals. That is to say, the first Christians would have a very
difficult time with the modern understanding some seem to have that someone can
be a follower of Christ apart from the church. In fact, Jesus doesn’t even seem
to make much room for that understanding, either.
In
any case, baptism and faith make a person part of a body, and that body, and
the way it moved and functioned together, was what had the quality of light. By
the power of the Holy Spirit the disciples of Christ learned to work together to
display the love of Christ, to share their bread with the hungry, to bring the
homeless poor into their houses, to cover the naked, to offer their lives for
the sake of others…and when they did so their light broke forth like the dawn.
It
seems to have been this “y’all” characteristic of discipleship that led
Christians to create the first hospitals the world had ever known of. In
ancient Greece and Rome, when people worshipped many different gods and
goddesses, people who were sick used to go and sleep in the temples of certain
gods with the hopes they would be healed. Within the first few hundred years of
its existence, the church transformed that trend. They designed and built
structures where the sick could come and be tended to. They trained people that
we would call doctors and nurses to take care of the sick because that is what
they had known Jesus to do. The earliest hospitals were, of course, very rudimentary,
but they were no doubt a new kind of salt for the earth.
It
is this y’all characteristic that still attracts attention today. One of my
colleagues who went to high school with me ended up getting ordained as an
Episcopal priest and served right down the road from me when I was in
Pittsburgh, is now the rector of a parish down in Waco, Texas. We’re only
really in touch through Facebook these days, but I found out that he was invited
to participate in a very rare experience a couple of weeks ago. Mark
Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, who was until recently a
self-described atheist, scheduled a meeting with the pastors in Waco. Apparently
Zuckerberg just wanted to listen to what pastors had to say, and he was
especially keen on hearing what the pastors said about the communities they
served—what was important to them, how they functioned. In an article about the meeting, my colleague said you could have knocked him over with a feather. They
had no idea they were going to be interviewed by such an influential person. Zuckerberg,
who practically invented the concept of social media and who has made it the force
it is today for connecting with people and spreading information, suddenly seems
to want to learn from pastors of small congregations what is really important
to communities and how they work together?[2] It
almost wonders if someone might be seeing our light.
In
these tense times when it seems there is so much that wants to pull people
apart, when there are clear, competing visions and desires for what our human
communities and even our country wants to be, the light of Christ evident
through the Church is especially important. We can even disagree about
political and social issues of our time here—like positive and negative ions
that mysteriously still work together—because ultimately it is the truth of the
cross that illuminates our lives. It draws us together, pulls us in to its
forgiving and cleansing center, telling us that we aren’t just a bunch of “yous,”
but one great big y’all. It draws us in and reminds us that there is something
in our witness that can shine, that we exist as that one community in the world
which by its very presence reminds the world that God loves it, cares for it, has
died for it so that it may truly live. That is flavor, my friends. That is some
kind of seasoning.
And,
lest we forget, even when the world seems really, really dark, sometimes all it
takes to ruin it is a teeny tiny green light.
Thanks
be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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