Salt, light, and the Law

Sermon for Epiphany V, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY.
Text: Matthew 5:13-20

I have been thinking about salt a lot recently, mostly as a question “Do you have any salt for sale?” at various hardware stores or places like Walmart or Meijer. Salt is a valuable thing to have at specific times, like when you need to sharpen flavors in a meal or melt snow and ice. So, when Jesus says “You are the salt of the earth,” I want to say, “Yeah, but I need to get out of my driveway. Is shoveling snow not enough to make a difference in the world?” Jesus also says that I am the light of the world, which is nice, but sunlight is better at melting snow than I am using salt. And then Jesus says he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and I start to think that maybe he’s going to do something about the people who run the stop sign at the end of my street. But the Gospels are not about seasoning food, or dealing with snow and ice, or enforcing someone’s laws. So, Jesus, I have some questions about this.

My first question is about these laws that Jesus is coming to fulfill. Whose laws? Which laws?  If I read today’s gospel in the context that it was written in 2000 years ago by a Jewish author for a Jewish audience, Jesus is referring to laws in the Torah. The Gospel of Matthew has within it an assumption that The Way, as Jesus’ movement was initially referred to, would remain within Judaism as a sect. Jesus’ disciples and followers would remain Jewish and observe the laws in the Torah, but for different reasons. So, Jesus is saying here that the laws in the Torah would be kept until the end of time, and that Jewish faith in Jesus would continue essentially forever. However, there is a problem with that. We are not Jewish. We don’t keep kosher in our kitchens. Men don’t wear kippahs on their heads or put on phylacteries in our worship space. We don’t need a minyan, or a minimum of 10 people to hold a worship service. That is due to Paul who saw the universal relevance of Jesus’ teachings to the entire world, Jewish and pagan. It is also due to a natural separation between The Way and Judaism over time, as each began to define themselves on their own terms. We adopted what was originally an epithet for Jesus followers and now we use it to refer to ourselves without shame as Christians. So, it is not the Jewish laws in the Torah that we follow today, and we have to negotiate with this gospel reading to understand what are the relevant laws to us as 21st Century Christians.

This leads to another question, and that is, which laws do we follow? Does Jesus’ reference to laws in his time render this part of the gospel irrelevant? I do not think we get off that easily, because we still need laws for guidance and guardrails in our time, especially as we have seen in the past year. The truth is that we spend a lot of time chasing after divine laws based on our favorite interpretation of scripture, and we attempt to turn them into secular laws with some success and at other times with dismal failure. Human laws should strive for justice, and they do reflect justice in the eyes of those who push for them and pass them. But there are also laws that reflect and validate a purely personal righteousness, or a pursuit of power. We are then confronted with the question of what to do with laws that are fundamentally unjust or with just laws that are unjustly applied. We can ignore them, giving into the temptation to say “laws are meant to be broken.” But by saying that, we are admitting that we are above such laws and exercising an equally flawed justice by excusing our accountability and exercising our power over others as we see fit. Jesus’ words about the persistence of laws are still relevant because we cannot make and enforce laws without his guidance.

Since Jesus did not bring his own set of laws and we do not follow the Torah, we have to determine what to expect to last forever. As I have thought about this, I am reminded of what I learned in a class on Islam that I took in college. I learned of a cycle that started with Abraham who balanced spirit and law, but when Judaism brought in new laws it became unbalanced. Jesus brought the spirit back to balance the law, but then the spirit replaced the law, and we lost balance again. Mohammad brought the law back to the spirit to achieve balance again. I mention Islam and Mohammed because we need both Spirit and law in our lives. Spirituality without discipline or law without spirituality gets us into trouble. The source of spirituality is the Holy Spirit and listening closely to it discerns whether we are following God or our own desires. The source of law itself is harder to discern, but it is present in scripture as Jesus’ teachings and life: love your neighbor as yourself; feed the hungry and heal the sick; show mercy and strive for justice; put the needs of others ahead of your wants; remain humble and lift up the outcast. These could be laws for us, and together with the Holy Spirit we enter into a dance with the power of the spirit and the concrete action of God through us, balanced and productive. Now the task becomes formalizing Jesus’ commands into a discipline that we can follow as law.

This delicate dance between spirituality and discipline leads me to one last question: What does this dance look like? Traditions in the early Church have provided an answer with monastic rules of life that put into action Jesus’ teachings. They have provided limits and guardrails protecting against the power of the ego and acting out of fear. Many of those rules have been adapted to daily life for everyone to build a life of prayer to determine what things we say and do that are truly in Jesus’ name, and what things are really about ourselves. Following a rule of life removes the temptation to make our life, and the life of our communities all about us individually. It shifts the focus to both the health of the community and the individual, rather than sacrificing what holds us together to self-centeredness. This is how we can understand living under the law that Jesus mentions, a law that can last to the end of time because it is a life of balance in our world  based on Jesus’ life. With that balance we can heal the wounds created by selfishness, abuse of power, and selective piety. Lent is coming soon, and it will be a good time to develop a rule of life, a balance of discipline and spirituality.