Sermon on the Mount: Hope for the Future

Let us pray...

Would you agree with me if I said that this life is difficult most days at best and really challenging others? Would you also agree with me if I said that when life's a struggle, it's easy to wonder: Where's God in this situation?

Some of you may know of a band called, Sixpence None the Richer. Sixpence is a Christian alternative rock band that has seen some really great success but that was not always the case for them. In the beginning and along the way they have struggled. For almost two years, the members of this award-winning band were unable to create new music. When their record company folded, they found themselves on a new label and entangled in complicated contract problems that made it legally impossible for them to work on a new album. Their creativity was "put on hold." Their finances suffered. They went on lengthy, exhausting tours just to make ends meet.

They wondered, they prayed, they cried. And one band member quit. In fact, the remaining members wondered if they should call it quits, too. But after two years of struggle, they were released from their old contract - and found themselves with yet another new record label, and this was all within the first five years of their making music. Since then, they have seen much more success and recording deals. There is one thing that really strikes me about this band…the struggle they faced over the album could have taken them to the deepest/darkest depths of despair. However, their faith that God would lead them, helped them to deal with all the pain and sorrow. Band member Dale Baker said (in 1998), “It was awful to go through hard experiences. And hopefully we'll never have to repeat what we went through over the last couple of years. But I think when things are going well, we have a tendency to sit back and say, "Oh, things are okay now, and I can take it easy." But that's not a good thing to do. You need to keep your relationship with God strong at all times. So when the tough times hit, you are better prepared to handle whatever happens.

When you think about it, really, the whole of Scripture is about people who go through struggles. It's about challenges and painful experiences. And the message is to remain strong through prayer and through relying on Christ. And, like Dale says, we need to do this especially when things are going well. If we don't, we'll collapse and crumble when hard times come our way. -Michael Johns, "Faith in tough times," Campus Life, September-October 1998.

Some Background:

For us today, this might seem like a no brainer, right? I mean we hear all the time how we are to not give up and live with perseverance so that our faith continues to grow and we continue to move closer to God. We have heard a lot about this lately…and in my mind this all comes down to how Christ commanded us to live. So, I want to spend just a moment on what we talked about last week…

Last week, we began looking at a piece of the Sermon on the Mount, a sermon in every sense of the word, given by Jesus very early on in his ministry in the Galilean countryside. We took a look at just three of the blessings Jesus said would come to us if we did certain things as his followers. Of the 8 total, we looked at what it meant to truly let God have pieces of us by opening ourselves to God’s all encompassing love, everything that we need to live in this world is already inside of us now, and when folks come against us, it probably means that we are doing something really right. The ultimate hope that we gained from looking at these pieces is that we are all wonderfully and beautifully made just as God intended and that when we realize that there is no physical thing we need to live in this world, we can empty ourselves and allow God to truly work through us.

With me on these? Good because this morning, we are going to take this idea of allowing God into our hearts just a bit further as we look at the next section of the Sermon on the Mount. Now, if you were paying attention last week in our Time for All, the Sermon on the Mount actually covers nearly 3 full chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, so we will be looking at this teaching more in the coming weeks as well…for now, let’s take a look at the idea of We are Salt and Light to the world and the other concept of what it means to live in righteousness.

Salt & Light

Much has been said about what it means to be salt and light to the world and I am not even going to attempt to re-create or ever add a different layer to it for us today. However, I do desire for us to understand why Jesus may have instructed us to be different than everyone else and in my mind, this is what these passages really mean...

Matthew 5:13 The Message

“Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You’ve lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage.

Again, I have given you here the Message translation because it says it way better than I could ever re-write it for us to comprehend…read the passage...

Let me ask you something, what does it mean to be useless? I would venture a guess to say that many, if not all of us, have felt like we are not contributing at some point in our lives. That feeling is what I think Jesus is referring to in this passage. That utter feeling of not being able to accomplish or do what is necessary. The reason I think he might have used salt as a metaphor is because salt was/is a very common seasoning. In the area around Jerusalem, it was used to provide not only taste to things that had no real taste but it was extremely important to preserve foods from spoiling and in the days before a refrigerator…you get the idea.

So if you think about it from that perspective, using salt to represent what we are to do in this world…add a little flavor, i.e. not sit back and let our traditions and SALY (SAME AS LAST YEAR) dictate our lives. When we get complacent and stick strictly with what we have always done as the only way to do things, we are like salt that is not salty…i.e. is as tasteless as that which the salt is to help.

Let’s take this just one step further...

Matthew 5:14 The Message

“Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill.

If you think about our little church here, how far away can you see our steeple from here? Right, exactly. While I don’t think we should be known as the little church on the hill with the brightly lit steeple that you can see for miles around, I do think it helps people to associate this place with the promises of God. We are like a little city on the hillside, set here to provide a sanctuary, a place for hope and rest for weary travelers. Did you know that’s why churches built such tall steeples to begin with? Think about the late 1700’s through the late 1800’s and early into the 1900’s…what was the primary mode of travel? Right horses, maybe buggies…how many of them had headlights or ways to see above the trees or even through the trees? How many paved roads do you think existed?

You’d be right if you were thinking, well, duh pastor, none! And again, I ask the question, why do so many churches built in that time era have such tall steeples? They were the beacon that brought people hope and they knew that under that steeple was a room, maybe with some heat, but definitely a place where they could find rest and grow closer to God. Our church buildings served that purpose…but because I don’t think SALY is always right…do they still serve that same purpose or perhaps are they a tradition that we like to hold onto too tightly?

I honestly think that Jesus might have meant that we need to let go of the traditions that hold us back so that the light from within this building can continue to grow in intensity and attract a whole new way of being in this world. Listen, I am not saying take down the steeple, but what I am saying is and I guess really this is our challenge as we move into the future together…what traditions are holding us back or keeping us from being more in the world? Moreover, what does it mean for us to have the purpose of being the steeple ourselves?

You see, for me, Jesus speaking about being the light to the world is not so that we take on and do exactly as him…I think that is way too high a bar to set for ourselves and none of us are created to be just like Christ, but I do think that we need to be able to take the light that Christ shined on the world and at the very least refract it a bit like our stained glass windows refract the sun that streams through them so that we can direct others to know God better, to direct others to be just as salty as we are, and to also become a beacon for still others to come to know God. There is great hope in knowing that God, through Christ, has given us this instruction and allowed us to be who we are…there is hope that we as a community of faith can grow further in love with one another and that our light, our collective light, will bring others to know God’s love too…Amen.