“Salt and Light,” by Rev. Dr. Jay Marshall Groat, September 29, 2024, based on Matthew 5:13-16

More than once, usually in the setting of a classroom but now in the setting of this message, more than once I’ve said this to people to just try to make my point and I’m going to do it now, and here it is. If today you are walking down the street – I can visualize, I’m seeing you now walking down the street in downtown Mount Vernon – and you see someone approaching you, and you are absolutely convinced that it’s Jesus of Nazareth. You’re just sure of it, and he’s walking up to you. It’s obvious that he wants to talk to you. What I’ve counseled people over the years is if that ever happens to you, you may want to consider turning around and running for your life. And I mean that, because this is our calling – it’s only this. You are the salt of the earth, and you are the light of the world. That’s all. Go do that. Go be that. This is a herculean calling. They’re clearly related and they’re slightly different. These two concepts have kind of a yin-yang relationship. If you decide not to turn and run, this is what you’ve signed up for.

Salt. Salt of the earth. You know, I’m old enough that I played high school football in the late ‘70s, and during summer conditioning practice our coach would give us salt tablets to take. Anybody remember salt tablets? You shouldn’t do that. There were big piles of salt tablets on the training table and we would partake of them. Salt is basic. And I can hear my excellent writing teacher at Mount Union College saying to us if something is basic don’t write that it’s very basic. It’s basic or not. Salt is basic. And I looked it up because I didn’t know – in a healthy human body there’s typically around 250 grams of sodium in us at all times. That’s about four saltshakers, according to the person who I read, about four shakers of salt inside of us. If we don’t have enough salt in our bodies, because salt is basic – I’m going to try to pronounce this correctly – we might come down with hyponatremia. That’s what we get if we don’t have enough basic salt, and in the worst-case scenarios we can come down with shock, coma and even death. Salt is basic. Salt of the earth.

There is something called blessed salt in the history of Christianity. Let me read this: “Blessed salt has been used in various forms throughout the history of Christianity. Among early Christians the savoring of blessed salt often took place along with baptism. In the fourth century Augustine named these practices invisible forms of invisible grace.” Now I read up a little bit more on this, and beginning probably as early as the fourth century when you were baptized then the person who was baptizing you would make the sign of the cross on your forehead after dipping them into blessed salt. Salt is basic.

My Bible commentator writes this: “Salt had many connotations in Matthew’s tradition of context, including sacrifice, loyalty, covenant, fidelity.” And this I love, listen to this. “Eating together was called sharing salt, and expressed a binding relationship, purification, seasoning and preservative.” You know, Jesus got in trouble for a number of reasons with the religious authorities. Please remember that one of the things that drove them the craziest was that he would sit down and eat not only with anyone, but with those rejected and those on the margins. He ate with them; he shared salt with them. In Jesus’ time, if you were a Jew, sitting down to eat with someone meant that you were welcoming them into your religious culture. And Jesus did it, he shared salt with them.

Over the years as a pastor, I would often – I still do – if I want to have lunch with you, I don’t have an agenda, I just want to have lunch with you or a cup of coffee, I will say, “Hey, let’s get together and break bread.” I think I’m going to start calling it, “Let’s share salt.” Will people look funny at me? Sharing salt. Salt of the earth. What does that mean? If we are the salt of the earth, what does that mean? So, I thought about it. I know people who are the salt of the earth. You know people who are the salt of the earth in your life. And it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Here’s what I think – the first thing that came to my mind is they’re real, and another word for real is authentic.

Very early in my ministry when I was an associate pastor, I got a lot of good advice from the late, great Roger Kunkel, who was the senior pastor and my boss. One of the first things he said to me was, “Jay, please hear me when I tell you this. As a pastor, you’re not going to fool anyone. People are going to know whether you’re doing your work, and even more importantly than that, people are going to know if you care. You’re not going to fool anyone.” And he was absolutely right. Salt of the earth people for me are real, they’re authentic. I came up with four characteristics of the salt of the earth. The second one I came up with is compassionate. And you know, linguistically that means simply “with passion.” When you’re with a person who is salt of the earth you can tell you’re in the presence of someone who wants to connect with you. Compassion. The third of the four I came up with was forgiving. Salt of the earth people know how to forgive. And the fourth — a salt of the earth person is present. In the business world they call this availability. They’re present. Salt of the earth. Hard to define, you know it when you see it.

OK, light of the world. Jesus did a lot of things right, and he clearly would not have passed an anatomy test because he says elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount, he says this, he clearly doesn’t understand how eyes work because Jesus said this: “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy your whole body will be full of light, but if your eyes are unhealthy your body will be full of darkness. If in the light within you is darkness how great is the darkness.” Didn’t Jesus understand that eyes exist to take in light? Right? He’s obviously talking about something else. He’s talking about that eternal light inside of us that projects light. Light of the world.

I want to share with you a few lines from an ancient Celtic blessing. It’s a Scottish blessing, hundreds and hundreds of years old, and it begins like this: “May the blessing of light be on you, light without and light within. May the blessed sunlight shine on you like a great peat fire, so that stranger to friend may come and warm themselves at it. May the light shine out of the two eyes of you like a candle set in the window of a house, bidding the wanderer to come out of the storm, and may a blessing be your light.” Alright, I want to finish with this – not the flashlight, but my dad.

In 1976 — I remember the year because it was the year I graduated high school. We were the bicentennial class. Every senior class in the United States in 1976 had the same theme for their prom, Stairway to Heaven. That’s another story. So, my dad, a pastor of a church in Marysville in 1976, he came down with an illness, a disease. It’s called histoplasmosis. Histoplasmosis is a rare thing; coal miners get it. You get it in your lung, you get it from coal dust. Most of the time it’s in your lungs and most of the time you don’t know that you have it, because it runs its course and leaves behind a little, tiny, microscopic scar, scar tissue. One to 2 percent of the population get it in their eyes. Another way you can get histoplasmosis is through pigeon droppings, and at the time the church had a pigeon problem up in the belfry. We don’t know, we’ll never know. My dad came down with histoplasmosis in his eyes, and within two years he was legally blind. He was still a young man, really, in his late 40s. He was legally blind, and it got worse the older he got. It didn’t take long for him to lose his driver’s license, he couldn’t drive. My mom or somebody else from the church had to drive him to church. And I’m here to tell you, he got that in 1976, and he lived to be 89 years old, his eyes got progressively worse, and he never let his light stop shining. The more blind his eyes became, the more light he projected. It was amazing.

He and I had a minor argument once. It wasn’t really an argument. I didn’t really understand it, and I still kind of struggle with it. My dad wasn’t perfect, but he was the light of the world, and he said to me, “Jay, you know what, I’m not going to pray for myself.” I said, “Dad, why not? Why wouldn’t you pray for yourself?” He said, “There are so many people who have it so much worse than me.” The man refused to pray for himself. The more blind his eyes became, the more light he projected. One of my favorite moments, for two or three, maybe five years, he used to watch television with binoculars, and it helped him. Does anybody remember the TV show “Charlie’s Angels?” I’ll never forget the time I walked in the room; I came home from college and surprised him. I caught him watching “Charlie’s Angels” with binoculars. Now if you don’t remember “Charlie’s Angels,” see me after the service.

That’s the light of the world. That’s our calling. You all started doing this long before I got here, because if Jesus walks up to you today in Mount Vernon, I think he’s going to say to you, look, you’re called to be this all year, you’re called to be the light of the world. And he’s going to ask you where you go to church, and you’re going to say, I go to the First Congregational Church here in Mount Vernon. And I think Jesus is going to say something like, Oh, that church knew from the beginning that you’re called to be the light of the world.

Main Street’s out that way, right? I’ve been here long enough to know. I grew up in a small town that’s not a small town anymore. One of the reasons that it’s not a small town is because the state took Route 33 and turned it from a two-lane road into a four-lane road and put a bypass around Marysville so the Honda plant could be created, right? There’s no bypass around Mount Vernon. Did you notice this? Everybody has to go through Mount Vernon, and some day I’m going to take the entire day and sit out there and count the number of cars that have to sit at that light and look over and see our signage. Anybody remember what it says? Except for the person who put it up. Anybody remember what our sign out there says today? Because we changed it. Be a blessing. Be the salt of the earth. Be the light of the world. Be a blessing. Amen?