What if our religion was each other?
If our practice was our life and prayer was our words?
What if the Temple was the Earth? If forests were our church?
If holy water—the rivers, lakes, and oceans?
What if meditation was our relationships?
If the Teacher was reality? If wisdom was self-knowledge?
And if love was the center of our being?
I’d seen it before and was mildly taken by it then, but last week – for some reason beyond me – it spoke to my heart. Like the mystics tell us: When the student is READY, the BUDDHA will appear. Clearly, I was ready for this tenderhearted and stripped-down summary of what sounds to me like the heart of the Sermon on the Mount. It is, of course, a deconstructed summary – and while that may be a challenge for some traditionalists, using broadly ordinary words to describe our spiritual practices and impulses is one of the charisms of this age. As we learn how to reclaim awe in each day, renew our trust in the unforced rhythms of grace revealed to us in nature, and practice once again nurturing generous and sacramental eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to feel the holy right now: a new/old spirituality of compassion begins to be reborn within and among us. The artist and spiritual universalist, Iryna Dalton, restated an insight I first heard from Pope Francis:
During the three weeks leading up to Lent, those of us living into the sacramental wisdom of this season mark two of our oldest traditions: One is Candlemas – or St. Brigid’s Feast Day or even Celtic Imbolc – that marks the final festival in this cycle of light. Church historian, Diana Butler Bass, tells us that: “Two months ago, Advent began with lighting candles in anticipation of the birth of Jesus. The Nativity is accompanied by angelic beams shining upon the Holy family in a manger. Epiphany celebrates the star directing seekers to Christ’s birthplace. As Epiphany unfolds in January, God’s light expands, inviting the first disciples to “come and see” what the light has revealed. The final movement in the arc of light is Candlemas, one of our oldest festivals, that commemorates Mary’s purification 40 days after the birth of Jesus and the presentation of the Christ Child to the elders in the Temple.” Dr. Bass adds:
Christian feast days are, of course, theological. But they are laden with cultural meanings as well. In the Roman world, and throughout Europe where Christianity would flourish, early February was an important time in the cycle of seasons. The Presentation of Jesus falls half-way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox – the time when many of Europe’s ancient tribal people believed the earth woke up to new life. It marked the lengthening of each days — and was asso-ciated with fertility, the lambing season, and the returning of light. Linking Mary’s ritual cleans-ing and Jesus as the Light of the World with the primal seasonal celebrations of Mother Earth’s brighter days created the celebration of Candlemas. Where, on February 2, it became the practice to bring candles to the church to be blessed — and then walk home through towns or villages in candlelit processions. (The Cottage: Candlit Faith)
I don’t know what it’s like where you live but in my neck of the woods the shift towards the light is already becoming clear. It MAY be cold as a brass toilet seat in the Yukon, God knows it is here, but each day is becoming a little longer and lighter. That’s one part of our preparation for Lent.
Jesus told his disciples and the crowds: let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You’ve lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage. Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven. Now, please get this right: don’t suppose for a minute that I have come to demolish the Scriptures—either God’s Law or the Prophets. I’m not here to demolish but to com-plete. To fulfill. I am going to put it all together, pull it all together in a vast panorama. God’s Law is more real and lasting than the stars in the sky and the ground at your feet. Long after stars burn out and earth wears out, God’s Law will be alive and working. So trivialize even the smallest item in God’s Law and you will only have trivialized yourself. But take it seriously, show the way for others, and you will find honor in the kingdom. Unless you do far better than the Pharisees in the matters of right living, you won’t know the first thing about entering the kingdom.
You may recognize this reading as part of the late Eugene Peterson’s rendering of Scripture he called The Message: there are times when I think Peterson misses the mark a bit in this work but when it comes to the Gospels, the letters of St. Paul, and some of the Psalms? Man, it’s pure gold. My all-time, most beloved and cherished passages of Scripture comes from Peterson’s reworking of St. Matthew, chapter 11 that reads:
The assurance is that we shall live freely and lightly as we consciously become one with the un-forced rhythms of grace. What a promise, yes? You shall live freely and lightly… surrounded and saturated with pain. In a world just as broken as it is beautiful. During an era that will test your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And still, you shall live freely and lightly as seasoned light bearers! Today’s text tells us how Jesus believes this accomplished. You see, St. Matthew is painting Jesus to be the NEW Moses – God’s human/holy liberator who leads us AWAY from oppression and INTO blessings – in both our spiritual and material concerns.
Remember that initially St. Matthew’s community was a part of first century Judaism who exper-ienced Jesus as the Anointed fulfillment of Torah. Tradition was vital for these Jewish-Christians who began their journey of faith grounded in the rituals of the Temple, but by the time our text was written in about 90 CE, were living in exile in Antioch, Syria. The closing words of this lesson are intended to evoke continuity between the OLD Moses and the NEW: “Please get this right: don’t suppose for a minute that I have come to demolish the Scriptures – neither Torah nor the Prophets.”
I’m not here to demolish but to complete. To fulfill. I am going to put it all together, pull it all together in a vast panorama. God’s Law is more real and lasting than the stars in the sky and the ground at your feet. Long after stars burn out and earth wears out, God’s Law will be alive and working. So, trivialize even the smallest item in God’s Law and you will only have trivialized your-self. But take it seriously, show the way for others, and you will find honor in the kingdom. Unless you do far better than the Pharisees in the matters of right living, you won’t know the first thing about entering the kingdom.
Even the message we now call the Sermon on the Mount has Jesus obliquely referencing Moses al-beit in a subversion of scriptural literalism. On the mountain, Moses first received and then shared the commandments while Jesus begins with blessings. Moses articulates Torah, the law, while Jesus emphasizes charis, God’s grace. Both have their place – both are simultaneously true and distinct – and both incarnate unique spiritualities that can lead us into the heart of God’s love although in qualitatively different ways. For the first century community of St. Matthew – and perhaps for you and me as well – Jesus teaches that we can live into the fulfillment of Torah by consciously being salty and enlightening. So, let’s be clear about that word fulfillment lest we get off track. Bible scholars insist that in the ancient world of the Gospels, fulfillment was a key spiritual concern:
Do you recall the first miracle story in the chapter two of St. John’s gospel? At a
wedding in Cana of Galilee, Mary asks Jesus to turn water into wine so that the feast might continue. That story is ALL about fulfillment! When the wine runs out halfway through the weeklong festivities, Jesus asks the household servants to take the six stone containers that usually held water for the Jewish rit-uals of purification and fill them full of water. When they are filled full – or ful-filled – Jesus asks the wine steward to taste the contents: “People usually serve the good wine first” proclaims the stew-ard, “then, when the party really gets rolling and the guests have started to feel no pain do we bring out the cheaper stuff – but you have kept the good wine until last!”
See where this is going? Not only can the feast now move to its completion, so too the gospel as it takes what has become empty and fills it full of possibilities and joy. St. John uses this story to say the NEW way of Jesus is just as life-giving as the old way of Moses who cracked a stone open in the desert so that HIS people might continue their journey of faith, too. What we DON’T want to say in the 21st century, however, is that the NEW way of Jesus supplants the OLD – our ancestors did that in spades – and set in motion an anti-Semitism that is STILL vicious, deadly, and destructive. This text, you see, was taking shape and form during a time when one group of Jews was arguing with another. The Jewish Christians of the Johanine community, along with their Samaritan and Gentile friends, were disagreeing with their sisters and brothers in a Temple-based Judaism.
+ Despite their differences, these believers wanted to remain a part of the wider Jewish com-munity even when the more conservative rabbis disagreed. Once the Temple was destroyed, however, the wounded Jewish community became increasingly hostile towards those who questioned their authority.
+ While the Jewish Christians were relatively powerless and beleaguered, these doctrinal argu-ments – while sometimes ugly – were essentially what happens within all large and diverse families disagree. They shout. They challenge. They sometimes play dirty and say things they wish they could take back, too. And for a few generations that’s what happened.
The reason I keep sharing this contextual background is because overruling, supplanting, and de-stroying the way of Moses was NEVER a part of the ministry, word, or heart of Jesus. What he tells us now is what he said then: if you want to fulfill the heart of Torah then be salty as you bring illu-mination to those all around you. Please notice that the words of Jesus are NOT theological or creedal words – they simply describe a way of living in the world that incarnates Torah. That makes grace tangible. That points to the presence and love of God in our flesh. These words are the anti-thesis of the anti-Semitism that has killed our Jewish cousins for millennia and tarnished the soul of Christ’s body forever.
So, what IS sacred saltiness and insight all about? Jesus asks us to trust that being created by God means that we are always the Lord’s beloved – women and men who not only experience inward blessings and assurances, but the ability to share those blessings outwardly, too in the simplest and most humble manner: as salt and light. It’s been said that even in small quantities salt and light make a difference. “A pinch of salt brings flavors alive for salt is one of the only spices that en-hance the other flavors in our food. And light — maybe a single candle — can illuminate a room, light up a landscape, and be seen from more than a mile away.” (SALT Project)
What’s more, both salt and light have very simple and earthy purposes: salt is meant to be salty and light is meant to dispel the darkness. When the saltiness is diminished, we get rid of it. Same, too, with candles or flashlights or batteries that no longer shine – which is a clue for us about OUR identity as God’s beloved. Salt and light show us:
And here’s the kicker: these blessings are proof of grace because nobody has to WORK to become salt or light. As the Lord’s beloved, as Lady Gaga likes to say, we were BORN this way. Salt and light are part of our essence – all we must do is claim them as gifts. One poet said, “All we have to do is actually BE salty and luminous.” Or to put it another way: we must simply BE ourselves. Jesus tells us we’re ALREADY salt and light – living souls made to bless the world. “We may FEEL small and in-significant, but like a pinch of salt or a spark of light, we can make a tremendous difference. So, get out there and be who you are!”
+ Notice that he never tells us that if we DO these good things we will be blessed. Instead, he says you are already blessed – you were made to be a blessing – so go out and live your dest-iny – with vigor! For THIS is how Torah is fulfilled: by being fully your truest and most loving self and sharing that blessing.
+ At first this may sound different from the ways the rabbis put it. But don’t be worried, what I am telling you, Jesus says, is at the core of what Moses taught: it’s a way of being the fills Torah full. I’m not about abolishing or changing the law! I’m about getting to the heart of it and fully living it out!
What Jesus is preaching, you see, is precisely what the prophet Isaiah proclaimed 500 years earlier: the ancient poet is telling those about to leave their exile in Babylon that practicing the feasts and fasts of our tradition in order to manipulate or buy God’s love is a dangerous dead-end. Chapter 58 of Isaiah is clear: Day after day my people seek me, they want to know my ways as if they were a
nation that practiced justice and compassion…they want God on their side when they cry out:
Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why do we humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” So, listen: you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers. You fast only to quarrel and to fight so understand that THIS fast falls on deaf ears. Is such the fast that I choose a day to humble oneself? Is it just to bow down the head like a bulrush and lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? NO! Is not this the fast that I choose: to lose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? To share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them and not to hide yourself from your own kin? THIS is how your light shall break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up quickly.
+ To fulfill Torah – to live into God’s presence with gratitude and integrity – is to claim our gifts as salt and light for the world. It’s to trust that small IS holy – that our simple gifts of love, humor, tenderness, clarity, kindness, truth-telling, and peace-making enhance the lives of others and bring a bit of light in the darkness, too.
+ And our unique charism is being our own special salt and light for the world in our sacred and salty way. We are to BE who we truly are – not fake being another – or jumping through someone else’s hoops – or trying to pass in any way, shape ,or form. Conformity, St. Paul tells us in Romans 12, is deadening to our imaginations, flesh, and souls.
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Do not be conformed nor squeezed into the mold of this brokenness. Instead, fix your attention on the blessings God’s has created within you and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Recognize what God asks of you and respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity and the lowest common denominator, God brings the best out of you, de-velops well-formed maturity in you as salt and light. So, take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering – for this is the heart of it all.
Every day I see places where salt and light could make a huge difference. In his most recent New York Times column, David Brooks writes that with the growing presence of AI – artificial intelligence – we MUST commit to sharing our uniquely human insights and experiences with verve and grace:
A.I. churns out the kind of impersonal bureaucratic prose that is found in corporate communica-tions or academic journals. You’ll want to develop a voice as distinct as those of George Orwell, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and James Baldwin, so take classes in which you are reading distinctive and flamboyant voices so you can craft your own… Machine thinking is great for understanding the behavioral patterns across populations. It is not great for understanding the unique individ-ual right in front of you. If you want to be able to do this, good humanities classes are really use-ful. By studying literature, drama, biography and history, you learn about what goes on in the minds of other people. If you can understand another person’s perspective, you have a more valuable skill than the skill possessed by some machine vacuuming up vast masses of data about no one in particular. (NYTimes)
This morning, Tish Harrison Warren wrote in the Times about the staggering witness for racial just-ice and revolutionary nonviolence embodied by the late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. A fierce and fiery ally of Dr. King’s, Shuttlesworth was MLK’s perfect foil: Blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory. When a white mob met him with baseball bats, chains, and brass knuckles and beat him senseless while he tried to enroll his black children into Birmingham’s regional high school, the good Reverend recalls hearing something that said: “You can’t die here. Get up. I have a job for you to do.” In the hosp-ital later that day, a reporter asked Shuttlesworth what he was working for in Birmingham. He responded: “For the day when the man who beat me and my family with chains at Phillips High School can sit down with us as a friend.” (NYTimes) He was a living testimony to being salt and light as he lived freely and lightly beyond the oppression of American apartheid.
My friends in Montreal called my attention to the work of Deanna Smith, Black slam poet and spoken-word artist, who brings poetry to everyday working adults and children as a way to build bridges. She recalls “performing a poem about her grandmother called Generations. It touched on themes of Black history and identity. After the sharing, a “self-described "old Irish white guy" came forward saying: "We haven't had the same kind of experiences, but what you said really touched me and I'm so glad that I came. That, she says, is the power of poetry. I was like, wow: that's what it’s all about. It's about storytelling and reminding each other that we have all these different lives and all these different experiences, but we're not so different. It's such a powerful exchange when people who don’t know each other find common ground.” (CBC Montreal) Talk about sharing our salt and light! I hear the contemporary poet, mystic, and Christian theologian, Maren Tirabassi, celebrating the gift of salt and light – and the dangers of cynicism, too – in her re-statement of today’s Scripture.
How often we are the salt in the wounds of the earth, flaunting our prosperity, hoarding it, and destroying the tastes of the wind, the ground, the sea, by the trampling of those great boots we call our needs. Or, with halogen beams on our out-of-control trucks, we careen up the highest hills searching the biggest city, and singing, "this big light of mine I'm going to make it shine so no one sees anything else for miles and miles around." We have missed the lamp-lighting in the valley places where kindness dwells, not so everyone looks at our light, but that by our little light a child reads a book, an elder feels safe from rustling outside the window, or sirens in the streets, and partners in love cook potatoes, slice apples, bake bread with a dash of salt, so all those who are hungry may come in and eat. (Tirabassi, Facebook)
Following the law and filling it full in the mind and life of Jesus means staying true to our inner essence – staying open-minded about how this is realized – and trusting grace to trump karma every time. As we ready out hearts for Eucharist, let me close as I started:
+ At first this may sound different from the ways the rabbis put it. But don’t be worried, what I am telling you, Jesus says, is at the core of what Moses taught: it’s a way of being the fills Torah full. I’m not about abolishing or changing the law! I’m about getting to the heart of it and fully living it out!
What Jesus is preaching, you see, is precisely what the prophet Isaiah proclaimed 500 years earlier: the ancient poet is telling those about to leave their exile in Babylon that practicing the feasts and fasts of our tradition in order to manipulate or buy God’s love is a dangerous dead-end. Chapter 58 of Isaiah is clear: Day after day my people seek me, they want to know my ways as if they were a
nation that practiced justice and compassion…they want God on their side when they cry out:
+ To fulfill Torah – to live into God’s presence with gratitude and integrity – is to claim our gifts as salt and light for the world. It’s to trust that small IS holy – that our simple gifts of love, humor, tenderness, clarity, kindness, truth-telling, and peace-making enhance the lives of others and bring a bit of light in the darkness, too.
+ And our unique charism is being our own special salt and light for the world in our sacred and salty way. We are to BE who we truly are – not fake being another – or jumping through someone else’s hoops – or trying to pass in any way, shape ,or form. Conformity, St. Paul tells us in Romans 12, is deadening to our imaginations, flesh, and souls.
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Do not be conformed nor squeezed into the mold of this brokenness. Instead, fix your attention on the blessings God’s has created within you and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Recognize what God asks of you and respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity and the lowest common denominator, God brings the best out of you, de-velops well-formed maturity in you as salt and light. So, take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering – for this is the heart of it all.
Every day I see places where salt and light could make a huge difference. In his most recent New York Times column, David Brooks writes that with the growing presence of AI – artificial intelligence – we MUST commit to sharing our uniquely human insights and experiences with verve and grace:
A.I. churns out the kind of impersonal bureaucratic prose that is found in corporate communica-tions or academic journals. You’ll want to develop a voice as distinct as those of George Orwell, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and James Baldwin, so take classes in which you are reading distinctive and flamboyant voices so you can craft your own… Machine thinking is great for understanding the behavioral patterns across populations. It is not great for understanding the unique individ-ual right in front of you. If you want to be able to do this, good humanities classes are really use-ful. By studying literature, drama, biography and history, you learn about what goes on in the minds of other people. If you can understand another person’s perspective, you have a more valuable skill than the skill possessed by some machine vacuuming up vast masses of data about no one in particular. (NYTimes)
This morning, Tish Harrison Warren wrote in the Times about the staggering witness for racial just-ice and revolutionary nonviolence embodied by the late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. A fierce and fiery ally of Dr. King’s, Shuttlesworth was MLK’s perfect foil: Blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory. When a white mob met him with baseball bats, chains, and brass knuckles and beat him senseless while he tried to enroll his black children into Birmingham’s regional high school, the good Reverend recalls hearing something that said: “You can’t die here. Get up. I have a job for you to do.” In the hosp-ital later that day, a reporter asked Shuttlesworth what he was working for in Birmingham. He responded: “For the day when the man who beat me and my family with chains at Phillips High School can sit down with us as a friend.” (NYTimes) He was a living testimony to being salt and light as he lived freely and lightly beyond the oppression of American apartheid.
My friends in Montreal called my attention to the work of Deanna Smith, Black slam poet and spoken-word artist, who brings poetry to everyday working adults and children as a way to build bridges. She recalls “performing a poem about her grandmother called Generations. It touched on themes of Black history and identity. After the sharing, a “self-described "old Irish white guy" came forward saying: "We haven't had the same kind of experiences, but what you said really touched me and I'm so glad that I came. That, she says, is the power of poetry. I was like, wow: that's what it’s all about. It's about storytelling and reminding each other that we have all these different lives and all these different experiences, but we're not so different. It's such a powerful exchange when people who don’t know each other find common ground.” (CBC Montreal) Talk about sharing our salt and light! I hear the contemporary poet, mystic, and Christian theologian, Maren Tirabassi, celebrating the gift of salt and light – and the dangers of cynicism, too – in her re-statement of today’s Scripture.
How often we are the salt in the wounds of the earth, flaunting our prosperity, hoarding it, and destroying the tastes of the wind, the ground, the sea, by the trampling of those great boots we call our needs. Or, with halogen beams on our out-of-control trucks, we careen up the highest hills searching the biggest city, and singing, "this big light of mine I'm going to make it shine so no one sees anything else for miles and miles around." We have missed the lamp-lighting in the valley places where kindness dwells, not so everyone looks at our light, but that by our little light a child reads a book, an elder feels safe from rustling outside the window, or sirens in the streets, and partners in love cook potatoes, slice apples, bake bread with a dash of salt, so all those who are hungry may come in and eat. (Tirabassi, Facebook)
Following the law and filling it full in the mind and life of Jesus means staying true to our inner essence – staying open-minded about how this is realized – and trusting grace to trump karma every time. As we ready out hearts for Eucharist, let me close as I started:
