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Epiphany A February 9, 2020
Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12) Psalm 112:1-9
Since ordination, I have adopted the discipline of being a liturgical preacher. What that means is that I accept the appointed lectionary readings for each Sunday, whether I like them or not. Whether I feel like I want to preach on them or not. The lectionary is part of the general curriculum of the church as we together read the same portions of Holy Scriptures on any given Sunday, and we use the Revised Common Lectionary, which is shared by other Christian Communions and denominations.
What are some of the challenges of lectionary preaching? One, there is always too much to preach on since we read two selections from Hebrew Scriptures, from the Torah, the writings, the prophets and the Psalms, and sometimes the Apocrypha. We read from the Epistles or Acts of the Apostles and from the Gospels. There is a natural tendency to focus on the themes in the Gospel, since we focus upon the life Jesus and we use the rest of the Scripture readings to, as it were, point to Jesus and his significance. The second problem is that because the writing situations of biblical writings are so different and separated often by many hundreds of years, it is hard to find a way to match all of the themes into a unified theme for the day. Sometimes one wants to scratch one's head and ask, "Why did the person who selected the reading choose this reading?" And usually that is the lesson which gets avoided in one's preaching.
Sometimes to try to do justice to all of the Sunday readings, one might want to just compose ad hoc aphorisms to highlights some of the insights that arise from one's reading. And so I offer some ad hoc aphorisms.
A major problem for people of faith is to disconnect what we do in church with the life outside of church.
The prophet Isaiah was concerned about the disconnect between religious practice and living. He was suspicious of religious fasting when there were many starving people in society who had the involuntary fast of not having enough to eat. What is the point of playing "righteousness" games in church liturgies, if justice is not practiced in society and church society for all people?
The Psalmist also opines: What good is it to celebrate the blessing and fortune of one's wealth, if one does not lend to the needy to help them get started and if one's fortune of great wealth comes at the expense of the vast majority being quite poor? Wealth is only a blessing if it allows one to be like God and share it abundantly. The very few people who own most of the wealth of our world today miss the most important feature of having the gift of prosperity; which is sharing it in creative ways so the rest can have enough in gainful labor for the same.
These passages from Holy Scriptures present to us another way of viewing the world which does not conform to a natural survival of the fittest dynamic of all life; namely to preserve oneself first, at the cost of every other weaker being. That natural selfish preservative facet of human life often comes to dominate how societies organize themselves and if law did not intervene with the threat of punishment, our world would be simply the powerful over-whelming the weak.
How do we over-come the natural tendency? We need an experience of an inner power and wisdom of self-control to act beyond the instinct to preserve ourselves at all cost of others.
When I lived in Iran, I used to buy sandwiches from street vendors, some of whom would translate their menus into English. One of my favorite vendors had posted: Mind sandwiches and Language sandwiches. This was quite humorous since they had gone to the dictionary and translated the Farsi words for tongue and brain, into English. Wow if I could improve my language and mind through eating a sandwich that would be special indeed.
St. Paul suggested something quite radical regarding how he had become converted from persecuting the followers of Jesus to becoming a follower himself. St. Paul confessed that he had had a brain transplant. He said, "We have the mind of Christ." Now that's quite a transplant. But this is quite consistent with the message of Jesus and John the Baptist about the requirement of repentance. Repentance in Greek is "meta-noia," the after-mind, the new mind, the re-newed mind. And what does a new mind do? The new mind sees things differently; the new mind sees things that it did not see before. St. Paul called this "spiritual" seeing or insights.
What is the result of this new kind of spiritual seeing? One of the results is that we become spicy people. What does spice do to ordinary food? It enhances new taste that was not previously known. We are called to be the most basic spice of all, salt. And the good news from Dr. Jesus is that he does not say we have to be low-sodium people; no, we are to be salty in enhancing the ordinary life experience of the people of this world. What does being spicy mean? It means that we activate our charisma in a way that helps to make us winsome to the people we need to be winsome with toward the Gospel values. You and I are called to release continuously our charisma so that we can be salty, spicy people to help people discover the spiritual aspect of their lives.
We are also called to be lights of the world. We are to live enlightened lives in thinking, in emotional intelligence, in social action and in justice because people need to find light and people need to find out the spiritual salt and spice of their lives.
We are called to be salt and light in this world.
What is the key to living lives of salt and light? Jesus suggests that we understand law not as simply religious behaviors, like going to church or doing religious things; the law is simply the after description of authentic living. The prophets criticized their societies for having religious rituals and legalism without the practice of authentic justice. Jesus criticized some of the religious leaders of his time as being those who were duteous about prescribing religious ritual acts but the rituals were not connected with the true human needs of people.
The way in which God's law is fulfilled happens when the law becomes the very description of how we live; it is why St. Paul wrote, "love fulfills the law." When our life activity becomes salt and light for this world, then the law becomes fulfilled.
Jesus was saying, "Do not hit people over the head with the Bible as a book of religious rules; rather let people read the deeds of our lives and say, "wow, that's the law of God, that is law of love and justice fulfilled in action." The fulfillment of the law is when people see us live enlightened lives of love and justice.
So today, let seek to be salt and light through authentic living and in such living people can read and discover the fulfillment of the law of God. Go forth today and be salty people. Be spicy people so that people will know that our lives are enhanced by the light of Christ. Amen.
What is the result of this new kind of spiritual seeing? One of the results is that we become spicy people. What does spice do to ordinary food? It enhances new taste that was not previously known. We are called to be the most basic spice of all, salt. And the good news from Dr. Jesus is that he does not say we have to be low-sodium people; no, we are to be salty in enhancing the ordinary life experience of the people of this world. What does being spicy mean? It means that we activate our charisma in a way that helps to make us winsome to the people we need to be winsome with toward the Gospel values. You and I are called to release continuously our charisma so that we can be salty, spicy people to help people discover the spiritual aspect of their lives.
We are also called to be lights of the world. We are to live enlightened lives in thinking, in emotional intelligence, in social action and in justice because people need to find light and people need to find out the spiritual salt and spice of their lives.
We are called to be salt and light in this world.
What is the key to living lives of salt and light? Jesus suggests that we understand law not as simply religious behaviors, like going to church or doing religious things; the law is simply the after description of authentic living. The prophets criticized their societies for having religious rituals and legalism without the practice of authentic justice. Jesus criticized some of the religious leaders of his time as being those who were duteous about prescribing religious ritual acts but the rituals were not connected with the true human needs of people.
The way in which God's law is fulfilled happens when the law becomes the very description of how we live; it is why St. Paul wrote, "love fulfills the law." When our life activity becomes salt and light for this world, then the law becomes fulfilled.
Jesus was saying, "Do not hit people over the head with the Bible as a book of religious rules; rather let people read the deeds of our lives and say, "wow, that's the law of God, that is law of love and justice fulfilled in action." The fulfillment of the law is when people see us live enlightened lives of love and justice.
So today, let seek to be salt and light through authentic living and in such living people can read and discover the fulfillment of the law of God. Go forth today and be salty people. Be spicy people so that people will know that our lives are enhanced by the light of Christ. Amen.
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