A Sermon: What Happens when I Try to Write a Sermon in McDonald’s (Text: Matthew 5:11-16)
[I preached this sermon on October 13, 2019 at Northminster Presbyterian Church in Pearl River, LA]
I have superpowers.
No, I can’t fly or bend inch-thick iron bars or explain why there are 14 schools in the Big 10 football conference and 10 schools in the Big 12.
But I have my own superpowers, and at the risk of drawing the attention of some three-lettered government agency, I’d like to tell you about one of them: super-hearing.
I can’t hear dog whistles or people whispering a mile away. It’s more subtle than that, and I can’t really control it. Let me explain with an example.
Last Saturday, I had nothing written down for this sermon, and it was starting to bother me. I had ideas, but I never know whether an idea is any good until I try to put it into actual words, in actual sentences and actual paragraphs.
So, I got out of the house and went to McDonald’s to get a drink and try to write. I had a notebook, an obscene number of pencils and pens (just to be sure I had one that worked), and my phone, which has a Bible app on it.
I sat down with my Diet Coke and started to write. The first attempt stunk. The second one was OK, I suppose, but I must have looked, perhaps puzzling over the next word, or sentence, or paragraph.
That’s when an 86-year-old man set a Bit-O-Honey candy in front of me.
“Haven’t seen one of those in a while, have you?” he said. To me.
I told him I hadn’t, and he told me he bought it at Cracker Barrel.
And then he, and an 88-year-old woman, who’d just been to a birthday party for a 90-year-old woman, began to talk with me.
The two didn’t know each other before, but they both wanted to talk … to me.
That’s how I know their ages and what the woman did earlier that day. They called me a kid when they found out how old I was.
This is how my super-hearing works: People just start talking to me out of the blue about everything they can think of. My favorite example of this was when I was on an airplane, and three women just started chatting with me about their menopause.
But last Saturday, these octogenarians just mainly wanted to reminisce about the old days (and “old -time” candies like Bit-O-Honey) and complain about the kids these days.
I left after an hour or so, telling them that I’d get in trouble if I was late for dinner.
Now I know that the lectionary has us working our way through Luke, but these passages in Matthew have been on my mind a lot.
It’s been bothering me because I haven’t been feeling very salty or particularly luminescent, and the way I’ve always been taught to look at these passages (at least the ones about salt and light) is that they are kind of like Christian motivational posters:
"Be More Brackish"
or
"Don't Be a Bushel-Bunny"
But this posits a world where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount in order to galvanize his associates to optimize the effectiveness of their skill sets.
More importantly, and more incorrectly, it posits a world where the Sermon on the Mount was something like a TED talk, given to wealthy and accomplished people whose talents and abilities have (in their minds at least) made them wealthy and accomplished.
But the Sermon on the Mount wasn’t given to the intellectual, spiritual, or financial elite. Matthew tells us who Jesus was talking to:
"So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them.”
You mourn, and you are blessed. You will find comfort.
You are meek, and you are blessed. God holds the earth for you.
You are God’s salt, Jesus says, formed of earth, and if other’s lose their taste for salt, if others “revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Whatever they say, whatever you tell yourself, you are heaven’s rock stars.
You don’t have light; you ARE light. God has made you light, and God isn’t the kind of idiot who hides that light under a bushel. God is the kind of idiot who loves the unlovable, trusts the incompetent, loves what you do, but loves YOU more, gives God’s life for and to the very people who don’t deserve it. Because God can’t help it.
Another superpower of mine is hearing God sing to me. (Some might call that a “delusion”… ) I can’t really control that either, but a group I love called Pomplamoose recently covered a song called “White Flag” by Dido. You can listen to it here, but for now, hear what I heard God saying:
“I know you think that I shouldn’t still love you, or tell you that. But if I didn’t say it, well I’d still have felt it. Where’s the sense in that?
“I promise I'm not trying to make your life harder or return to where we were, [but]
“I will go down with this ship. I won’t put my hands up and surrender. There will be no white flag above my door. I’m in love and always will be.”
Then, I hear my voice in the song: “I know I left too much mess and destruction to come back again. I caused nothing but trouble; I understand if you can't talk to me again.”
But God cuts me off: “If you live by the rules of ‘it's over’ then I'm sure that that makes sense. But it doesn’t.
“I will go down with this ship. I won’t put my hands up and surrender. There will be no white flag above my door. I’m in love and always will be.”
The salt in the tears and salt in the sweat of those who believe they are lost and sick and lonely and unworthy and broken, people who worry about making the next month’s rent or getting the next meal, people for whom the pain of loss and disappointment only gets dulled when they see the bottom of a bottle or feel the prick of a syringe, they are the salt of the earth.
Jesus calls us not to lose sight of their light. Jesus warns us not to lose our taste for their salt.
Thursday before last, I got the pleasure of attending the regular meal and fellowship at the Miramon Center, a center for transitional housing for homeless men. Jim and I and three others (Tom, Kevin, and Mark) meet with the men roughly every other week for dinner and discussion.
This time, some of the residents were upset because they strongly suspected that there was drug use going on in or around the Center.
Now, the rules of the Center are that if you are caught using illegal drugs on the property, you will be immediately evicted. There was a call for harsh consequences for any indication of drug use.
But then, the conversation changed (and I’m going to embarrass Jim, even if he’s not here, and say that his words started the change). Using drugs is not “getting away with something.” Using drugs is a destructive, terrible trap. The addicts need to stop, but we as a community need to be ready to give them the tools and love that they need to get out of that pit.
No one wants to see the nasty consequences that would result from some kind of drug bust at the Miramon Center, and there are some people who we can’t help. But these are men, not things. They are God’s light and salt. We who have some measure of privilege or power are called to use that power and privilege for their benefit.
Jesus places no conditions on being salt or light, so don’t think you’ve satisfied them, or that you haven’t. Jesus doesn’t lay down a set of standards and practices. Jesus looks out into a crowd of sick, demon-possessed, poor people (with maybe a few merchants or moms or tradespeople) and says, “You are the salt of the earth, and the light of the world.”
We all have things about us we hide because we want to, and things about us we hide because we think we have to, and things about us we don’t want to hide, but just can’t find the opportunity to share. None of those things make us more light-like or saltier. None of those things make us less light-like or saltier.
God in Christ and the Holy Spirit walks through this world, surprising, even shocking folks who don’t think they have any light and putting them, putting us, on lampstands with those Fresnel lenses they use in lighthouses so that their light will shine into some dark corner no one seemed to notice.
And sometimes, now and then, we get to see what’s going on. Like when two old people want to talk about the old days in McDonald’s. Or when some recently homeless man needed to hear that his addiction doesn’t mean he isn’t loved, and never did.
You are the light of the world, whether you think you are or not. God will not hide your light under a bushel. God will put you on a lampstand, no matter what you or anyone says, so that all the world can see the wonder you are. There is no white flag over God’s door. God loves you, and always will.
In the words of pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber:
"You are a broken jerk and Jesus trusts you. Don’t wait until you feel as though you have met the conditions of being holy. Trust that Jesus knows what he is doing. And that you already are salt and light and love and grace. Don’t try and be it. Know that you already are. And then, for the love of God, take that seriously. The world needs it."
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