“February 8 Sunday Sermon Manuscript”

Living as the Light and Salt of the World

Matthew 5:13–20

Introduction | Standing Before Two Awkwardly Paired Passages

1. This week’s lectionary presents preachers with a somewhat awkward configuration of the biblical text, because it brings together two passages from the middle of the Sermon on the Mount: “salt and light” (5:13–16) and “the fulfillment of the law” (5:17–20).

2. At first glance, and even upon a second reading, these two passages appear to be addressing different themes, which is why some preachers choose to focus only on salt and light, while others concentrate solely on Jesus’ declaration concerning the law.

3. I also remember times when I chose one of these two passages and shared it with the congregation, but this time I want to be a bit more courageous and read these two passages together by intentionally connecting them, a connection that I believe can be found in “biblical interpretation,” or more precisely, interpretation revealed through lived life.

4. Through these two passages, we can see Jesus speaking simultaneously about the identity a community formed by the kingdom of God should have in the world, and the way of life that community is called to embody.

5. To state the conclusion clearly from the outset, salt and light are not abstract virtues, but a missional way of life that interprets the law anew and lives it out.

6. The missional way of life described here refers to challenging the direction of maintaining the status quo and imagining alternative social experiences, shaking what has become familiar and exercising the imagination God has prepared for us as the way to understand salt and light.

An Experience from the Past Week

7. Last week, I attended the “Gathering of the Spiritual Leader” for two nights and three days, where on the first day we rented out Bubba Gump in Monterey for dinner, and although it was called a dinner, we spent the day eating nothing but rather poor finger food, before moving into worship, workshops, and free time beginning on the second day.

8. During breakfast on the second day, emails arrived simultaneously to all the pastors, announcing the list of churches that now require new appointments because their pastors will be leaving this year, along with a message inviting anyone who was interested to make contact.

9. From that moment on, what had been a calm and relaxed trip became filled with tension and curiosity, because when one encounters a pastor who is leaving a church, the natural response is to ask people what happened.

10. The pastor of the church that recently provided chairs to our congregation is also leaving his church and preparing to move to another appointment, so I followed the situation with interest and asked him what had happened.

11. The quiet, relaxed atmosphere of Pacific Grove, with its seaside calm, quickly turned into a time filled with tension, expectation, fear, worry, and curiosity, and it seemed that a single email sent to all pastors was enough to create that shift.

12. The passage we read today is familiar enough to invite the assumption that we already know it and understand it well, but I hope that these vague, status-quo moments—where we expect nothing different from usual—will become a time for us to read the text with renewed tension and curiosity through God’s imagination.

“You” — An Identity Given Not to Individuals but to a Community

13. The passage we read today tells us very simply, in Jesus’ own words, what kind of people we are: “You are the salt of the earth,” and “You are the light of the world,” and here salt and light are used not in the singular but in the plural.

14. That Jesus defines “you,” meaning those who follow him, as salt and light in the plural indicates that living as people of faith, as Christians, is not an individual choice but a communal one that requires commitment within that community.

15. In other words, living in the world as salt and light is not a concept referring to individual spiritual achievement, but a statement defining what kind of presence the community formed by those who follow Jesus must have in the world.

16. When we consider the nature of salt and light, we can also see that the community—that is, the church—does not exist for individuals, because light does not exist to display itself and salt does not exist to preserve itself.

17. To say that we are in the church and in the community means that we must not use the community to make ourselves visible, but rather that we have set the direction of our lives toward actions that allow others to be seen.

18. Light shines for those who have lost their way in the darkness, and salt dissolves in order to change other things, and Jesus is telling his disciples—those who follow him—to live in this way.

19. Those who believe in Jesus were not called to retreat from the world and hide, nor to remain in a safe religious space in order to avoid the reality given to them.

20. Rather, the mission of those who believe in Jesus is to challenge the maintenance of the status quo and to live, in the very middle of the world, as an alternative community that helps people imagine possibilities for a different kind of life, which is the essence of a missional life.

21. Recently, an incident involving a well-known preacher in Korea, occurring as he approached retirement, caused a significant stir within church circles when it was revealed that he made financial demands based on his contribution to founding the church he pastored.

22. Considering how many people had been moved by this pastor’s sermons, the extreme reversal made the issue feel even more troubling and controversial.

23. The underlying problem is that we ultimately failed to understand properly Jesus’ words about being salt and light, because if someone served as they were called and bore good fruit, then God used that person as an instrument, and believing that a community was built by personal ability mistakes one’s own ability for God’s power and misunderstands the community as existing for the individual.

24. While there may be many debates about this, we must remember that at our core we are people called as salt and light to shake established practices and to exercise alternative imagination, and that salt and light do not exist for themselves but reveal their effect entirely for the sake of others.

Why “Salt”? — A Presence That Brings Change

25. Let us now reflect more deeply on salt and light.

26. Why did Jesus compare the community of disciples to salt, when salt performs many functions such as seasoning, preserving, purifying, and bringing change?

27. The common point is clear: salt does not exist for itself, but has meaning only when it is mixed with something else.

28. In the Beatitudes, Jesus already described the world in which the disciples live as a reality where poverty and wealth coexist, where grief and loss are present, and where oppression and violence, injustice and justice, war and peace continually collide.

29. Jesus’ disciples are entrusted with the task of “salting” within this reality, not by leaving the world, but by entering deeply into it, shaking its structures, and awakening once again the possibility of life.

30. That is why Jesus introduces the uncomfortable imagination that salt can lose its saltiness, because although this is chemically almost impossible, he honestly acknowledges that the community of disciples can become powerless and lose its mission.

31. He then clearly warns that salt which has lost its identity will ultimately be thrown out and trampled by people, a warning not meant to stir fear, but to call the community to continually examine its identity.

32. This warning leads us to ask whether we are still salt, or whether we are choosing safety and slowly losing our saltiness.

33. When we think more deeply about this verse, it may suggest that when the church struggles and loses its vitality, it may also be losing its saltiness to the same degree.

34. If the church no longer influences the world as salt, then it will ultimately be discarded, and this is what the warning implies.

Light Cannot Be Hidden — A Way of Life That Is Revealed

35. The image of light follows the same logic, as Jesus speaks of light and declares that it cannot be hidden, just as a town built on a hill cannot be concealed and a lamp is not placed under a basket.

36. This challenges the assumption that a Christian life should be quiet and hidden, because the light Jesus speaks of does not mean self-display, but public responsibility.

37. The words “so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” mean that the lives of Christians should become a channel through which people can see God again in the world.

38. What matters here is “works,” not words or confession, because light does not shine only inside the church, but becomes true light when it shines in places people ignore and abandon.

39. This is what a missional life looks like, as the church must first ask whether it is truly living such a life before it goes out into the world to make claims.

40. Faith is not an individual achievement, nor are we called to live quietly for self-satisfaction or to secure a flawless ticket to heaven by avoiding problems.

41. Our actions reveal light to others and bring change like the taste of salt, meaning that the direction of our lives as a church community must be set not toward passive conformity, but toward becoming a challenge and stimulus that invites people to imagine a new and alternative way of life.

“I Have Not Come to Abolish the Law” — Jesus’ Interpretation

42. Beginning in verse 17, Jesus suddenly turns to the topic of the law, saying, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,” and although this may seem disconnected from the words about salt and light, the two passages are in fact deeply connected.

43. Jesus presents himself not as a destroyer of the law, but as its interpreter, one who does not remove Scripture but fulfills in life the will of God to which Scripture points.

44. Although the law was originally a gift meant to clarify humanity’s relationship with God, in Jesus’ time it was often used as a tool of discrimination and as a foundation for power.

45. Those who kept the law well were regarded as righteous, while those who did not were easily excluded, and ironically this exclusion was carried out through religious leaders, teachers of the law, and Pharisees.

46. Within this structure, Jesus’ gospel was an uncomfortable message, but for those who had long been marginalized by the law and had given up their relationship with God due to exclusion and separation, it was truly good news.

47. The “better righteousness” Jesus speaks of is not a righteousness of stricter rule-keeping, but one that draws closer to the heart of God.

48. This is why Jesus calls it “the least,” because those who boast in keeping greater laws while failing to do this least thing—the scribes, Pharisees, and teachers of the law of that time—

49. are told that if they fail to practice drawing closer to the heart of God and creatively revealing a new direction and way of life through the works of salt and light, then the rest of their law-keeping has no meaning.

50. Through the definitive declaration that they will not enter the kingdom of heaven, Jesus emphasizes a life that chooses action over confession, relationship over status, and mercy over achievement.

A Missional Life — The Church as an Alternative Community

51. Returning to the beginning, we must ask again what salt and light mean, because they are not simply moral exhortations to be good people, but a way of life that lives the kingdom of God in advance and bears bodily witness that this world is not all there is.

52. A missional life is not one that conforms to its given environment, but one that shakes it, showing in a world ruled by competition, exclusion, efficiency, and performance that another order is possible.

53. The church must therefore be a community that offers such an alternative social experience, so that before anything is explained with words, the way we live together becomes the question itself.

54. For this reason, the church must continually imagine different relationships, a different economy, and different priorities from those we currently hold.

55. We must shake what has become familiar and imagine toward something more adventurous and untried.

56. And without stopping that imagination, we must become a community that practices it, even in small ways, because that is what it means to live as the light and salt of the world.

Conclusion | Today, Once Again, as Salt and Light

57. Beloved congregation, Jesus is still asking us today whether we are still salt and whether we are still light, or whether we are losing our flavor in safety and familiarity and hiding our light.

58. Salt and light are not a path to becoming special people, but a way of revealing the kingdom of God through what is ordinary, so that when God’s justice, mercy, and faithfulness become even a little clearer in our daily lives, choices, and relationships, light is already shining and salt is already seeping in.

59. This week as well, and in the time ahead for this community, I pray that we will stand as a missional community that goes beyond maintaining the status quo and imagines and lives out alternatives, and that we may live as the light and salt of the world in the name of the Lord.