Sunday Morning Worship Service - 2/8/26 - Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

27:00 is definitely high on the list. Two Sundays ago, an ice storm blew through my corner of northeast Georgia, taking down thousands of trees, snapping more than 100 utility poles, and dropping over 10 miles of live wire on the ground. The power at my house was off for two and a half days, giving me plenty of time to meditate on what Jesus said about light. in this morning's excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount, except I didn't want to be the light two weekends ago. I just wanted it to come back on. And last Sunday, we got six inches of snow. There was no power outage this time, but the county manager said everyone should stay off the roads because we were almost out of salt, and there were already a lot of cars in ditches. He explained the shortage wasn't due to poor planning.

27:55 It was just that the county had used most of its salt the week before and was sharing what was left with neighboring counties in worse shape than we were. A new shipment would take two weeks, so the problem wasn't that the salt had lost its flavor. On the contrary, it had done its job so well that we had used it up. So when the weather forecast looked good for this weekend in Durham, I could not wait to fly away from the land of broken trees and lingering ice packs to a place where there was plenty of salt and light. Isn't there? Please tell me there is. In the cold and dark of these past two weeks, it became clearer than ever that salt and light are as essential to human life now as they ever were. Jesus could have said, You are the meat and potatoes of human life on earth.

28:50 He could have said, you are the red anemones that make the desert bloom. He could have likened his followers to all kinds of vital life-giving things, but what he said is, you are the salt of the earth. You're the light of the world. However much our experience of those things has changed over the years, the metaphors have kept their power, I think, because Jesus didn't say too much about them. Were his followers road salt, table salt, salt to season, salt to preserve? Were they searchlights or nightlights? Were they light to see by or light by which to be seen? The way he put it, his followers weren't supposed to be any of these things. They already were. He could see the crowns over their heads even if they couldn't. and he wanted them to know who they were.

29:47 Though he did go on to point out some things that could go wrong, losing their saltiness or hiding their light from view, there were no imperatives in what he told them about themselves. There were no conditions under which they might cease to be what he said they were. Salt that has lost its flavor, it can still be tossed on the steps to de-ice them. It's still salt. Light that's kept behind blackout curtains may not help anyone outside, but it's still light. So this part of his sermon isn't a do-better talk. It's a you-are talk, leaving everybody who hears it to bring it in for a landing where they are. What's your salt up to today? Where's your light aimed?

30:38 The metaphors in the teaching are rich, but the scope is daunting. To be the salt at your dinner table is one thing, but of the whole earth? That's a lot of ground to cover. To be the light for a neighbor in need is doable, but to be the light of the entire world? Only the sun can do that, and only half the world at a time. What was Jesus thinking? He was thinking in the plural, for one thing. You can't hear it in English. but in Greek, his you is all of you. Everyone within the sound of his voice, which Matthew amplified, you heard it today, far, far beyond those who were sitting there that day. And still it's a lot, even for a multitude, to be salt and light in such tumultuous times.

31:32 During my recent no-salt-no-light retreat with today's gospel reading, three problems became apparent even in the dark. The first is how our media-saturated culture offers us divine omniscience with no divine omnipotence to go with it. We know so much more than we can do anything about. The whole world pours through screens we can hold in one hand telling us terrible things that are happening in places far beyond our reach. They show us videos of other human beings at the worst, at maybe the last moments of their lives, with dreadful images that we may never forget. It's an unnatural state of affairs. Trauma by proxy, with no path to healing or action attached.

32:28 The second problem is what a lot of us have done with our felt helplessness, which is to cover it with rage for those who face outward, or to bleed it with despair for those who turn inward. Giving public voice to one or the other or both of those has become a kind of spiritual practice for a lot of people I know. One of the few faithful things they can think of to do with their abiding wish to be salt and light in the world. If they can't stop the pain, the least they can do is keep it front and center as a sign of solidarity with those in the middle of it. And since lament like theirs has an honored place in the life of faith, it's not the fidelity of the lament that's the problem. It's the sustainability of it. As Dr. King reminded us, people can wait hundreds of years for the arc of the moral universe to bend toward justice.

33:31 And the testimony of those who have come through includes building resilience into resistance and doing lots of singing through tears. Thank you. The third problem is a particularly American one, I think, which makes it an American Christian one as well, and that's how much we love bigness. I'm not thinking of king beds and 16-ounce steaks right now, though they come readily to mind, but about how much value we assign to bigness, big salaries, big numbers, big wins. Sorry, Duke. We love global initiatives, worldwide ministries, whole earth solutions, saving the planet. Big makes the news whether it's salty or not. And that can really do a number on people who are doing great things with small amounts.

34:27 I still remember endorsing a book by a California pastor whose bio said he'd come to a 120-member church several years earlier that had grown to 80 under his leadership. And he meant it. He gave a lot, he asked a lot, and he stayed 20 years without pay. He wasn't dazzling, and he knew it. He and his life-saving church were very small deals.

34:56 So that's why I want to make a case for salting the earth by hand this morning. One tablespoon, maybe one-eighth of a cup, whatever you can hold in your hand. not instead of other quantities, not instead of other methods, but alongside them in a big troubled world where it's sometimes hard to believe that Jesus was right about us at all. before my power came back on a couple of weeks ago i kept going over and over what he said to his followers to make sure i hadn't missed anything or added anything and i had added some words that weren't there he never said you are the salt of the whole earth he just said of the earth not all of it necessarily most of the people he was talking to hadn't seen any more of the earth and they could cover over a few days on foot. Traders, pilgrims, Roman soldiers would roll in with news from other places, but that was all secondhand. And beyond that, dragons.

36:00 The earth people knew was the part under their feet. When it came to the salt, Jesus didn't say anything about mining it or shoveling it. He talked about tasting it. Arguably the most intimate of the five senses since it involves taking something inside yourself. But at any rate, when you're tasting it, a small amount to be increased sparingly. As anyone who has spoiled a stew with too much salt knows, you can't even give it to the dogs. It's bad for their kidneys. When he moved on to light, Jesus did not say, You are the light of the entire world. He just said, You're the light of the world. First he chose a city on a hill to make his point. Did you hear that? But did you hear how quickly he switched to another metaphor to make his point? Maybe too few people in front of him had ever been to a city or seen one on a hill.

36:59 So he went instead to one of the most common household objects of the day, a small clay lamp that would fit in the palm, covered with two holes in it, one for olive oil and another for a wick. During the day, it would have been easy to overlook as just a paving stone, but at night, all the difference in the world.

37:24 Maybe I had to be reading by my own small lamp that night to hear him in a different way this time, reminding me that the earth includes my pasture and my neighbor's small stand of Leland Cypress and the groundwater that feeds both our wells and all the other homesteads on our two-mile dead-end road. The earth's under my feet, wherever in the world that is. and that world includes my county and its courthouse and its community hospital, school district, voting precinct, and volunteer fire department. What better place to be salt and light? When both are in short supply, a little is a lot, and near is closer than far. The morning after the ice storm, two weeks ago, my husband Ed and I woke up to see a 30-foot white pine lying across our driveway.

38:28 We'd heard a lot of other trees cracking and falling during the night. We just didn't know where they were yet. The power was still out and all the outside water was frozen, so if we wanted to haul some thawed buckets of it to the horses, we'd have to find a way around the pine and then take our chances on a downhill slope of ice. While we were still trying to work up the nerve, my phone blew up with messages between 19 different people. Here's a bit of the thread. Is everyone all right? The Elrods don't have a generator. They've been cold all night. Oh, we also know the Taylor's driveway has lots of trees down. Charles and I are going to both houses with a tractor and chainsaw. Who else needs help? But we have a generator and the ability to cook. If anyone needs our house, please let us know. There's an elderly man lives alone down the road whose daughter's calling me.

39:26 Best thing's to call the sheriff. Did it. The sheriff's sending someone to do a welfare check. I knew someone would know someone over there since it's so close. Jeannie, we have the gas stove on the back porch if y'all need to use it. Good here, we have a wood stove. I have vodka, if that would help anyone.

39:47 I did not know who half these messages were from. I'm kind of a private neighbor. But by the time I found the neighborhood roster and started matching names to numbers, I heard a tractor outside. And I looked out the kitchen window to see a bunch of people in puffer jackets and orange stocking caps. walking toward my house with chainsaws. They'd already cleared the driveway, they said, when I went out to meet them. Then they got to work on the white pine, laughing, laughing, as they hauled limbs and threw balls for my two dogs. By the time I knew all their names, they were gone. Done. Charles and Rebecca were the last to leave, riding away on their green tractor with a guy named Herbie, balancing on the three-point hitch and back. Then a young fellow named Eli came back to the house in his pickup truck and said he was going to the gas station. Would we like him to refill our empty cans while he was there?

40:48 Yes, we would. When he came back with fresh fuel for the generator, he pressed a wad of bills and coins into my hand. Your husband gave me too much money, he said. I said, well, how about something for your trouble? He said, no, ma'am, I don't do that. Just glad to help. After he pulled away, the great quiet of the past two days returned, but it was full this time. Every time I looked at the pine sawdust, I heard the laughter again. The dogs brought their slobbery balls into the kitchen to sleep. By the time the power came on early the next afternoon, the local salt and light team had already put things right. On the earth, in the world, when it mattered, for a time.

41:47 It was so much more than enough. If there's a moral to this story, it's about how much healing there can be in what's close at hand. A teaspoon of salt, a lamp made to fit in your palm, nothing you'd expect to change the world, to make the earth tilt on its axis until it's passed, from hand to hand to hand, which feels the opposite of helpless, which lets bigness become optional.

42:25 Omnipotence was never in the cards for us. It's the closeness that matters. Maybe that's what Jesus saw, how close people had to come to one another to pass the salt, how closely they had to put their heads together to share the same light. you'll be the judge of that. For now, for this time, it is so good to be with you today. Look at you sitting all so close together and looking all shiny like that. May the God who lit you up keep you in abundant life and may you never...