Of Con Ed and Mortons
Today’s Gospel is always a winner for me, because it focuses on two things that I like a lot. One of them is light. The other is salt.
When I was growing up, my father was the keeper of the light, or rather, the master of the dark. We could never have many lights on in the house at the same time. My father would follow us around and systematically shut off the lights we left burning—even if it was only for a few minutes. Some of it had to do with his thriftiness born of a childhood living in the depression—he hated to pay the electric company, and tried to keep the bill as low as possible. But I happen to love light, lots of light, and when I walk into a room or an office or my own place, I turn on lights everywhere. I don't know why—it helps me see better, I guess, or maybe it makes me feel more secure. It made my father go nuts at times, however, and sometimes it could be quite comical if we were inhabiting the same space. A kind of silent war of lights going on and off, both of us knowing-but never acknowledging-what was going on. It must have looked pretty funny from the outside, seeing lights going on and off throughout the night. Of course, I would usually win because I'd stay up later than he would.
But I really came to understand my love of light when I became a filmmaker. Making a film (or a video) requires one fundamental thing: light. This may sound obvious, but you know you can’t see anything if you don’t have light. Light doesn’t really mean much except as a way to see everything that is. And a film of course, is moving, illuminated pictures of people and things. And when you are a filmmaker, you learn how to use light to reveal things and to hide them. You learn to shape the light, color the light, and in doing so make others feel things. Hard light versus soft light, blue light versus orange light, flood light versus spotlight. Whereever there is light, whereever anything is brighter than something else, your eyes and your mind automatically goes there. The absence of light can give you an uneasy feeling, the presence of light appears to reveal the truth and gives you confidence.
Light is so essential that God made it in the first day, didn’t he? “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night. God saw that the light was good. Jesus called himself the Light of the World. He called his disciples the light of the world too. That means us too.
So the second thing I like a lot is salt. I was in Blue Bell restaurant the other day, and I got a delicious sandwich, and these fries came with it. Oh mannnn. They were so good. You know why? Because they have just the right amount of salt on them. It’s perfect. I like salt on my steak, I like it on my popcorn, I like it in my mashed potatoes. I even like it on my margaritas. (Actually I don’t drink margaritas, but I know you do.) When I lived in Philadelphia, I learned how delicious it was to eat ice cream with salty pretzels. Sounds weird, right, but actually they work together, the salt and the sweet.
Like light, salt is essential to our lives. It helps control the balance between fluid inside and outside the cells of our body. It also controls blood pressure. It plays an essential role in nerve and muscle functioning. And it does make everything taste better. It decreases bitterness of foods, and enhances their sweetness.
You know, when Jesus was walking this earth, salt was incredibly valuable: everything was better to eat with a little more salt, tasteless without it. It was so important that solders were paid in salt. The Latin word for salt is “sal”, which is where the word salary comes from. To make vegetables more tasty, salt would be added, which is why it is called salad. Meat with salt was called sausage and gravy with salt was called sauce. But more importantly, nothing could be preserved without salt. Remember, they didn't have refrigerators. Just a little pinch of salt kept things from spoiling, rotting, corrupting. Ordinary people had a "salt bag." The salt with all its impurities was placed in the bag, and then used in soup or other liquids for flavoring. Eventually all the salt was gone, leaving only impurities, or the "dregs." This is what is meant in the gospel when our Lord asks, "what if the salt goes flat?" What would the world be like without salvation?
And as with salt, so too with light. In Jesus' time, there was no Con Edison, no light switches to turn on and off like water. They just had these little oil lamps which gave off only a little light—but which made the night less frightening and the dark more friendly, which enabled men and women to finish more of the things their hard lives required of them after the sun went down. In those days there was never enough light and never enough salt, and both were precious and indispensable to the lives of people when Jesus walked the earth. So when Jesus told his disciples, "You are the salt of the earth", and "You are the light of the world", he was talking about something very precious and very important, and something very scarce. And he meant that his disciples, you and I, through the gift of his love, are like salt—meant to improve the quality of human living, change what we touch, preserve from devastation this God-shaped, dreadfully scarred earth. And we are like light, and the gift of love we have from him is meant to stand out like a lamp on a stand, shine on like the light of the silvery moon, reveal oppression and hunger and the face of the afflicted so that justice can be accomplished.
Last week I was at the Sundance Film Festival just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. I’ve been going to that festival for a number of years. It’s a great time to meet up with other filmmakers and to watch the newest stories they have made by “shaping the light”. Of course it’s always better to see a movie with perfectly salted popcorn. One film that really touched me was called “This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection”, a beautiful story about an 80 year old woman in a tiny mountain village of South Africa. She is living in the darkness of a terrible death of her son, but leads a glorious fight to prevent a new dam from submerging her village forever. As I left the theater, I was inspired by the way in which we, each one of us, can be a light in the darkness of our world.
Main character of This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Right outside the theater was a plaza, and I was suddenly confronted with the upsetting sight of a whole village of homeless souls. A few were crying, several appeared to be in a drugged-out daze, many were surrounded by the squalor of garbage and cardboard shelters. All around us were the snow-covered mountains that surround Salt Lake City. It was here in 1847 that Brigham Young and his Mormon followers decided to settle and make their home beside the great Salt Lake. How beautiful it must have seemed then, a kind of new Jerusalem after their exodus across North America. Looking at the sad village of broken children of God, I wondered if they imagined how this tragedy might befall future generations.
Our task, my sisters and brothers, as followers of Jesus, is to be an overabundance of salt and light, to bring a fresh flavor to the world in which we live and breathe, to shine like Bethlehem's star for our brothers and sisters who are searching for something—someone—that makes life more human, that makes each day a day worth living.
In Isaiah's words: "share you bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless, clothe the naked when you see them, do not turn your back on your own, remove from your midst oppression, and satisfied the afflicted". Be, in other words--in Jesus' words--salt and light for your brothers and sisters outside this room. And, by the way, inside this room as well, for those sitting beside you, those back home in your families who could use another generous helping from your shaker, or the light from your smiling face to shine upon their broken heart.
Light and salt. Salt and light. There's never too much and never enough when it comes to the gift we've been given. God bless you your salt and your light.