The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor: March 22, 2023

0:02 Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire and lighten us with your celestial fire. For if you are with us, then nothing else matters. And if you are not with us, then nothing else matters. Be with us, we pray, in the name of your beloved. Amen. Ooh, I love being back here again. I think I had brown hair when I started here. It is so good to be with you in one of the Holy Spirit's favorite nests. We fly in, we fly out, and in between, we rest under the great wings nestled against the heart. wherever you're sitting and wherever you're here I hope you can feel it and that you leave this service with a feather in your hair when Scott told me that the theme for this year's centennial series was the future of faith I had to laugh since at my age the future of faith is tomorrow it's now or never it's use it or lose it I give thanks when I wake up each morning for a new day, but don't ask me what day it is. If that doesn't bother me as much as it should, then that's because none of my long-range plans has ever panned out. The world kept changing. My place in it kept changing. The church kept changing. The only thing that never changes is change, which makes all of my plans now provisional. They depend, which makes improvisation a spiritual gift, and it turns faith into a path made by walking. Jesus famously likened faith to a mustard seed, which is about as big as the point of a sharpened pencil. That little, he said, was enough to move mountains, which may have been his way of keeping the disciples humble since none of them ever pulled it off. Or maybe the mountain was another of his metaphors, in which case the

2:13 problem was no one ever thought about moving it shovelful by shovelful over a lifetime, instead of all at once with some kind of magnificent show of force. Either way, the people Jesus praised for their faith were the least likely people in the frame, not just that widow Scott talked about, but also a blind beggar, a Roman centurion, a Canaanite woman, a Samaritan leper, outsiders for the most part, who had come to the end of what they could do for themselves. That's what they had in common, their need.

2:51 So today on the large topic of this series, I'm thinking of all the small provisional ways, all the small provisional things that make up a life of faith, and how easy it is for them to get lost in the faithful desire to solve the huge problems of our time. According to Matthew, Jesus started his first public sermon, the big one on the mount, by focusing on the little people in the crowd, the poor in spirit and the ones mired in grief, the meek ones who had a hard time speaking up for themselves, the ones hungry for a bowl of justice that never came. Blessed are you right now, he said to them, for what lies ahead? You can't see it now, but the way you are on is the way.

3:45 Then he told them who they were and what they were for. You are the salt of the earth, he told them. You are the light of the world. It's the you that makes these teachings 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. You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.

4:14 Those things meant different things to his first listeners than they do to us. They were harder to come by, for one thing. Surface salt was rare. Fire was required for the other. One was expensive. The other was volatile. The human body couldn't produce either one 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. Light was for shining. Whoever his listeners were and why ever they were there, Jesus was speaking to their identity. He was speaking to their purpose. that's enough right there to work with but since he 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 and what kind of world if anyone in the crowd that day was over a hundred they might have remembered a free homeland 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 that cost a lot of lives.

5:37 While Jesus was still in diapers, the crisis following King Herod's death pitted Jews against Jews and Jews against Romans with a reverb that lasted the rest of Jesus' life. If he had a big audience for his first sermon, it was built on the live hope that someone, maybe him, could turn that tide. By the time Matthew wrote his version of the sermon down, things had not gotten better, but worse. Emperor Nero had taken a perverse interest in the early Christian movement. Peter and Paul were both dead, along with Jesus' brother James. The first Jewish war against Rome had failed after years and years of fighting, leaving the city of Jerusalem in ruins and her people scattered. 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 CE, but it's possible.

6:42 If he did, then that may have fueled his vision of the end times, when the sun will be darkened, he wrote, and the moon will not give its light. The stars will fall from heaven and the powers of heaven 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 if jesus had said you are the rare metals of the earth that would have been better if he'd said you are the lightning of the storm but he didn't say that he just told people they were salt and light, and that's what Matthew wrote down. And just like that, what is God up to wasn't the only question anymore. There was another question, implied, not spoken, that when something like this, what are you up to, you seasoners of the earth, you brighteners of the world? Never mind who I am for just a minute, who are you?

7:57 And what can you bring to the table? you're free to believe Jesus was only addressing the Christians in the crowd, though they weren't calling themselves that yet, that he was counting on them to step up the salt and light production so his movement would grow. People have been reading the sermon 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 Jesus wasn't seeing it that way. that he was seeing the whole earth spread out before him, that he was seeing the whole world and was doing his best to describe an improbable way of life that could turn things around if people, any people, would just give it a chance. In Greek, the you here, you are, you are, you are, it's not singular as in you are the light of the world and you and you.

8:56 It was plural, as in all y'all are the light of the world. All y'all are the salt of the earth. It was a huge vision, but with very 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?

9:18 I was going to say barbecue sauce, but I don't want to get into that until lunch, okay? Salt has become such big business that with a few keystrokes now, you can order jalapeno salt, chipotle salt, and 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 sauce for my birthday last year to put to put on salmon and another rosemary sage-infused salt for roast potatoes. They're good when I remember to use them, but they're so fancy, I just keep saving them. I don't know for what. Same thing with light. I don't know if you've shopped for light bulbs lately. But when I couldn't figure out why the lights in my bathroom made one side of my face look like I was at the dentist's office and the other side like I was on the porch at sunset, it took a trip to Lowe's to find out that my LEDs came in three different kinds.

10:26 Refresh with a cool and energizing tone that invigorates the spaces where you need to be more active. Reveal provides whiter whites in rooms where clarity matters. And relax. That warm tone perfectly creates the cozy atmosphere you need. Problem solved. I just need to figure out whether I wanted to be revealed or relaxed when I was in the bathroom. You know, they're just metaphors, but they work, not least because they travel well from generation to generation. The future of faith is counting on that. In the case of our sauced up, brightly lit age, they raise good questions about the basic necessities Jesus had in mind. For instance, does salt have less flavor if the only ingredient in it is salt? Or, if someone's calling for your help in the dark, does it matter whether or not your light is cozy?

11:32 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. Believing that more is always better is another thing to watch out for, even when it's well-intentioned. Jesus wants more salt. We'll set up a worldwide production company. He wants more light. Ten thousand lumens coming right up. Only Jesus didn't say more. He didn't even say some. He said, you are. You are the salt, the light. It was a statement of fact, not an instruction. We're the ones who decided the portions had to be big.

12:19 Truth is, too much of either of those things can ruin everything. If you're a cook, you know how much salt and sugar look alike, especially if you keep them in glass jars. And the first time you get them confused so that the whole sweet potato pie goes into the trash, you never use them again without tasting them first. Are you one of those people who salts your food before you take a bite? Why do you do that? Too much light? It's such a tonic for most of us. It's easy to forget that light can also burn and blind. A 40-watt bulb is plenty to read by at night, but look right at that bulb and you can put your book down because your eyes aren't going to work for a while. And if any of you ever held a magnifying glass over an ant when you were little in the sun, bad ant karma coming right up.

13:17 Or maybe you spent too much time in the sun yourself and you have to see the dermatologist every six months now to take a look at those spots. 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. The future of faith cannot be measured in big numbers. It counts on people who can resist growth charts that go up and up and up because they know flavoring is a subtle thing and so is shining. Little goes a long way. Too much sets the world on fire. What I love most about the metaphors is there's no talking in them, says the talker. Salt doesn't explain, it flavors.

14:16 And light doesn't preach, it shines. Both do their work quietly in a very loud world. I don't know if you know, there are more than 2 million podcasts online now with 48 million episodes. Depending on whom you ask, about 700,000 hours worth of videos are posted to YouTube every single day. The number of self-published books has increased 264% in the last five years. A whole lot of people got a whole lot to say. If you read Time Magazine, you might have seen some of those statistics in a recent article by a guy named Dan Lyons about talkaholics. Dan says he was one, but it wasn't all his fault.

15:10 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, subtitled The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World.

15:37 He also taped a piece of paper over his computer screen that says, quiet, listen, shut up, 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 without dumping the whole salt shaker in.

16:01 Future of faith could use a dose of that, at least the largest, noisiest ones could. Ask younger people while they're not in congregations, and at least one of the answers will be the slippage between speech and act. They want to do faith, not hear talks about it. They want to be salt and light, and they're not waiting for anyone to tell them how. Day by day, they're making meaning and finding purpose and reclaiming the faith that is in them in ways too small to measure.

16:36 For them, the future of faith really is tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Whatever day it is, it's now or never. Use it or lose it. Let your little light shine. 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, in this world. 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 our light. you are, it's not an imperative. It's just the truth. so y'all take care here don't let anyone turn your salt and lightness into such a burden that you get exhausted just thinking about it fancy's not better than plain bigger's not always better sometimes you have to do something small enough to matter Jesus said a lot more about mustard seeds than he did about the cedars of Lebanon not to mention look at you no matter where you're sitting and why ever you're here there is just light