Barbara Brown Taylor at Duke

0:36 In place of my usual holy greeting, let me just say, go devils, go. And for any of you watching from somewhere else, that was an athletic reference and not a metaphysical one. There are big sermons being preached in small places all over the world today, but you're about to hear a small sermon in a big place. so small that it only cares about two verses in the gospel you just heard and only two words out of those, salt and light. It's not like those tiny lockets of meaning have somehow suffered from too little attention over time. If anything, they've suffered from too much. They've lost their tang from overhandling. They've lost their shine from overbranding. So I'm here to shrink them down to size if I can. Here they are in Jesus' own syntax, at least in translation.

1:39 You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. It's the you that makes them interesting, especially the second one, since in another gospel, Jesus says, I am the light of the world, but not here. Here he says, you are. To whom is he speaking? He's speaking to you, whoever you are and whatever you're doing here. That part hasn't changed. He's speaking to you who identify as disciples and you further back in the crowd, those of you who are committed and those who are just curious. You who live big lives and you who live small ones on purpose or by circumstance. You, because you're the ones listening, and that's a perfect match for those who were there on the day he went up on the mountain, sat down, and began to teach. He never said the teaching was only for those in the front row or those who had signed up for the course. Auditors were fine with him. It was they, after all, who would decide whether his teaching had legs. If it didn't, they were free to go. This wasn't him trying to build his platform. This was him trying to change the world. Salt and light meant different things to his listeners than they do to us. They were harder to come by, for one thing. Surface salt was rare, and fire, light, required fire. One was expensive and the other was volatile. The human body couldn't produce either of them, though both were necessary for life. Both were used for more than one purpose, though the way Jesus talked about them made his meaning clear. Salt was for flavoring and light was for shining.

3:44 Whoever his listeners were and why ever they were there, Jesus was telling them who they were. He was telling them what they were for. There's enough right there to work with, but since Jesus was specific about his listeners being the salt of the earth and the light of the world, It's worth asking what kind of earth they were living on, in what kind of world. If anyone in the crowd that day was over a hundred, then they might have remembered a free Judea, but anyone younger than that had lived their whole lives under Roman occupation. Their earth had soldiers on it who managed tax revolts and power grabs during regime changes. While Jesus was still in diapers, the tumult following King Herod's death pitted Jews against Jews as well as Jews against Romans, and the reverb lasted for the rest of his life. If he had a big audience for the Sermon on the Mount, it was built on the live hope that someone, wasn't him, might turn that tide.

4:58 By the time Matthew wrote his version of the sermon down, things had not gotten better, but worse. The apostles Peter and Paul had both been killed. So had Jesus' brother James, head of the church in Jerusalem. Emperor Nero had taken a perverse interest in the early Christian movement. The first Jewish war against Rome had failed after years and years of fighting. The city of Jerusalem was in ruins, its people scattered, and the temple, gone for good along with the priesthood. Since we don't know for sure when Matthew finished his gospel, there's no telling if he lived through the eruption of Vesuvius in 79. But if he did, then that may have fueled his vision of the end times. The sun will be darkened, he wrote, and the moon will not give its light.

5:56 The stars will fall from heaven and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. However he came by those images, they tell you how bad things were. All creation was hanging in the balance. What was God up to? Being salt and light must have sounded like too small a job in the face of all that, too benign. If Jesus had said, you are the rare metals of the earth, that would have been better. Or if he'd said, you are the lightning of the storm. But that's not what he said. He told his listeners they were salt and light, so that's what Matthew wrote down. And just like that, what is God up to wasn't the only question anymore. There was another one which may have made some people way back in the crowd glad they were not on the front row.

6:53 It was implied, not spoken, but it went something like this. What are you up to, you seasoners of the earth, you shining lamps of the world? Never mind who I am for a minute. Who are you? And how's it going at your end of things? You're perfectly free to believe Jesus was only addressing the Christians in the crowd, even if they weren't calling themselves that yet, that he was counting on them to step up the salt and light production so the movement could grow. People have been reading the Sermon on the Mount that way for years, so if you hear it as a sermon for Christians, you will be well within the majority. Just hold open the possibility that Jesus wasn't seeing it that way. That he was seeing the whole earth spread out before him. The whole world.

7:48 And he was doing his best to describe an improbable way of life that could turn things around if people, if any people, would give it a chance. In Greek, the you here is not singular, as in you and you and you are the salt of the earth. It's plural, as in y'all. Y'all are the salt of the earth, all y'all. Ditto the light. It was then a big vision with small parts. And that's why I worry about it, because who wants to be salt and light in a world sold on hot sauce and neon. Even salt has become such a big business with more added flavors than Ben and Jerry's. With just a few keystrokes, you can order jalapeno salt, chipotle salt or habanero salt online, along with vanilla salt, soothing eucalyptus salt, and salted caramel chocolate salt for balance. A friend gave me a packet of sweet, smoky maple salt to use on salmon for my birthday, along with a packet of rosemary sage-infused salt for my roast potatoes.

9:03 They're good when I remember to use them, but they're so fancy I keep saving them for I don't know what. Same thing with light. Have you shopped for bulbs lately? When I couldn't figure out why the lights over my bathroom sink made half my face look like I was at the dentist's office and the other half looked like I was on the porch at sunset, it took a trip to Lowe's to figure out that my LEDs came in three different kinds. First, refresh with a cool and energizing tone that invigorates the spaces you need to be more active. Reveal provides whiter whites in rooms where clarity matters most. And relax. Its warm tone perfectly creates the cozy atmosphere you need.

10:00 So problem solved. All I had to do was decide whether I wanted to be revealed or relaxed at the bathroom sink. I know these are just metaphors, but they're really good ones, or Jesus wouldn't have picked them. Plus, they raise important questions for those of us who live in a time with more choices than his first listeners ever dreamed of. Does salt have less flavor if the only ingredient in it is salt? When someone's calling for your help in the dark, does it matter whether your light is cozy or not? To believe that fancy is better than plain is to cut down on how many of y'all trust you have salt and light to share.

10:47 Believing that more is always better is another thing to watch out for even when it's well-intentioned. Jesus wants salt. We'll produce a mountain of it. Does he want more light 10,000 lumens coming right up? I was a youth group leader long enough to appreciate the enthusiasm, but the truth is that our salt and light squad wore out our welcome on a couple of mission trips with our blinding white rescue lamps and our embarrassingly expensive supplies. We meant well, but a lot of the time we just ended up making the people we'd come to help feel poor and patronized. When we left, some of them turned to go while we were still waving, goodbye, goodbye. The thing about salt is that a little makes all the difference. Too much ruins the whole thing.

11:42 If you're a cook, you know how much salt and sugar look alike, especially if you keep them in glass jars. Get them confused one time so the whole bread pudding goes into the trash and you'll never use either one again without tasting it first. Are you one of those people who salts your food before you taste it, why do you do that? Too much light can ruin things too. Light's such a popular metaphor, especially among Christians, for all things good that it's hard to remember light can burn and light can blind. 300 lumens is enough to read by at night, but if you look straight at that bulb, your reading's over for the next little bit. Did any of you hold a magnifying glass over ants when you were little? Bad Aunt Karma coming up.

12:38 Or maybe you spent too much time in the sun yourself and you have to see the dermatologist every year now. They're just metaphors, but they work. The planet is suffering from the too-muchness of our bigger-is-better inventiveness. Our empires rest on the rickety uprights of fuel reserves and global clout. what are just the right amounts of salt and light compared to that, especially in human-sized containers. Flavoring is such a subtle thing. So is shining. A little goes a long way, and too much spoils the plan.

13:27 Another thing to love about the metaphors is there's no talking in them. Salt doesn't explain. It flavors. Light doesn't preach, it shines. Both keep quiet in a very loud world. Did you know there are presently more than 2 million podcasts available online, with 48 million episodes? 3,000 TEDx events take place every year, with 20 spot-lit talkers in each one, dreaming of becoming the next Liz Gilbert, Brene Brown, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Depending on whom you ask, 700 hours worth of videos are posted to YouTube every day. The number of self-published books has increased 264% in the last five years. A whole lot of people have a whole lot to say.

14:27 A couple of those figures come from a recent article in Time magazine about over-talkers. Maybe you know one or two. The author Dan Lyons says he was one, but it wasn't all his fault. He wrote, we live in a world that doesn't just encourage over-talking, but practically demands it, where success is measured by how much attention we can attract. He's in recovery now, but it took writing a book called STFU to get there. Just let it sink in.

15:05 Subtitle, The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World. He also taped a piece of paper over his computer above it that said, Quiet! Listen! Short answers! Wrap it up! Now he says instead of having a talk with his children, he has a listen. He doesn't give answers to questions no one has asked. He's learned how to season a conversation instead of dumping the whole shaker in.

15:37 I think it's normal for humans to want to do something when we receive a teaching like that about who we are and what we're for. Some people instinctively push back at it or exercise their freedom to walk away. Others dive in and do their best to make an A+. But it's important to note that there's nothing to do about today's teaching because it's not an instruction. It's not a warning. It's not a threat. It's what's called a speech act. A saying that creates a reality with words that enacts what it says. Other examples.

16:21 I take the Edward to be my husband. The jury finds you not guilty. The meeting is adjourned. You are the apple of my eye. When these things are said, they're done. Even if another speech act changes things later, they don't describe reality, they create it. When Jesus tells his listeners they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, it's as if a monarch has laid a sword on all their shoulders. When they stand up, they won't be the same people they were when they sat down. They can do whatever they want with Jesus' speech act. They can be salt that's lost its flavor. They can be light that never leaves the house.

17:15 Or they can do small things with great love. They can do great things with a few words. All they cannot do is to unsay what Jesus said to them. They cannot cancel the speech act that made them who they are. We are how God shows up in the world. Not the only way, and not only for the benefit of our kind, but as species go, we're the ones with God-like power on this earth. We may not be as smart as dolphins, or as altruistic as ants, but there's a lot riding on what we do with our salt and light. That's not an instruction. That's a fact. Since this is a small sermon, I hope you won't make too much of it, or at least don't turn your salt and lightness into such huge burdens that you're exhausted by even thinking about them.

18:16 Flavoring is a subtle thing. So is shining. A little goes a long way, and Jesus said a lot more about mustard seeds than he did about the cedars of Lebanon. So all y'all take care here. You're in front and you're way there in the back because whoever you are and why ever you're here there's just light flying out of you.