Human is Human is Human is Human
Epiphany 5A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
In 1630, Puritan John Winthrop preached one of the most famous sermons in American history. His words included this oft-quoted line: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” America never was or ever has been a Christian nation, of course. But the Puritan leader hoped the colonists could live up to God’s calling for their new community by following “…the counsel of the prophet Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.” Those who assert that America is an exclusively Christian nation forget Winthrop’s reference to Micah and pretty much everything else in his sermon. Winthrop exhorted them, “We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.” (Diana Butler Bass, “You Call this a Prayer Breakfast?”, Sunday Musings, 2/7/26)
Winthrop’s words were a clear reference to our reading today from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” You are salt and light. Imagine how Jesus’s first followers might have understood being called salt and light. Firelight was the only light humans could make in Jesus’ day until the industrial age. Light came from the sun, moon, and stars. Salt was so hard sought it was used as currency to pay Roman soldiers. The word ‘salary’ derives from salt. Salt and light were a precious gift necessary for the health and flourishing of community.
You are salt and light. Remember what sorts of people Jesus addressed in his famous Sermon. The poor, the mournful, the meek, the persecuted. The hungry, the sick, the crippled, the frightened. The outcast, the misfit, the disreputable, and the demon possessed. “You,” he told them all. “You are the salt of the earth.”” You are the light of the world. (Debie Thomas) Modern people often miss the shocking, profound affirmation of human worthiness contained in Jesus’ message.
But notice, nowhere in Jesus’ beautiful words of blessing did he say ‘you are blessed’ but everyone else is not. Yet that is exactly how classical Christian theology has twisted Jesus’ message as if salt and light belonged exclusively to the church, or to the leaders of the church.
Ask an evolutionary biologist. They would remind you that you, and everyone who has ever lived, are bottled lighting and salty sea water. Jesus’ Sermon simply tells us what we already are. The Sermon on the Mount is a benediction upon the whole world. There is no border, no boundary, no line separating nations, no longitude, nor latitude that divides all living things from the blessings bestowed by God. As in highest heaven so it is also on earth. We are siblings in Christ—children of salt and light.
The salt and light in you can never be stolen from you, beaten out of you, or spoiled even by your own misdeeds. You are imbued with the distinctive capacity to elicit goodness, to grow in generosity and wisdom which leads to personal and global transformation. Human is human is human is human. (Debie Thomas)
Our lectionary points us toward what becoming human filled with salt and light means. St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians says we become part of a new humanity that contradicts the conventional way of the world. We become grafted into the undying life of God revealed in the self-giving death of Christ. Psalm 112 says such persons are “gracious and merciful” (verse 4), “generous” in “justice,” (verse 5), “not afraid” in the world (verse 8), and ready to give to the poor (verse 9). Children of God live a life given over to the well-being of community. Isaiah 58 answers the question of “Who belongs?” The prophet points us toward inclusion of those most unlike “us.” The new human person in Christ practices a large, embracing, notion of the neighborhood.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus designates his community of followers as “salt” (Matthew 5:13) and as “light” (verse 14), the ones who obey the Torah command to love God and to love neighbor. The “righteousness that exceeds” (verse 20) is not about punctilious moralism or self-enhancement through “goodness.” Rather, it concerns a reach beyond the self to the neighborhood and the world.
Thus, the righteousness of the psalm, the inclusiveness of the prophetic poem, and the new righteousness of Jesus add up to the “mind of Christ” in 1 Corinthians 2:16, the capacity to act and to give, even as Jesus gave himself for the world. “Such a human person unmistakably lives against the stream in our society. Clearly the Jesus community is peopled by folk with energy and courage to live beyond ‘business as usual.’” (Walter Brueggemann, Sojourners Magazine)
The people of God are salt and light. Good religion does not fail Jesus’ test of loving neighbors and enacting mercy. Taste and see. This month our nation remembers the story of Black history that began in America in August of 1619 when 20 slaves disembarked from a ship in Jamestown, Virginia, and the captain traded them for provisions of food. By 1860, the United States census identified four million slaves.
Now 400 yeas later, we acknowledge that neither the Civil War, nor the Emancipation Proclamation, nor the Thirteenth Amendment, nor the Civil rights movement fully abolished what Abraham Lincoln called the “monstrous injustice” of slavery.
The American claim to be a shining city on a hill will always be rudely contradicted by our everyday lives as long as Americans remain in denial about the reality of race and racism. Jim Wallis and Bryan Stevenson have called racism America’s original sin. The late great James Baldwin said, “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.” Jesus taught us human is human is human is human filled with salt and light.
Upwards of 200 million people are expected to sit before the blue light of their television this afternoon. Marketers forecast Americans will consume more than 11 million pounds of salty chips watching all or some parts of the Super Bowl. The light of Christ is the true light. The salt of grace is the true food that satisfies.
Our enslaved ancestors understood this. It is one of the most counter-intuitive facts of our history that blacks adopted the religion of their white oppressors, a religion intentionally used as a weapon in their oppression. Slave masters hoped to use the Christian gospel to keep the people they enslaved passive. Yet they, like the first followers before them, weak and downtrodden as they were, heard and saw something they weren’t supposed to see. They heard Jesus say that they were salt and light. Their lives had dignity and meaning beyond their economic worth. They were precious. They were siblings in Christ regardless of where they came from or who their family was. They caught God’s vision of the beloved community. They saw what it meant to be truly, fully human and alive. And what is that vision? The prophet Isaiah spelled it out. “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:9b-10)
