All right, 12:32, huh? We got to get those people to the on that on the train at 12:32. So, we’re going to do some quick work in uh in scripture this morning. Coming back to the sermon on the mount uh over the summer, we looked at the biatitudes. There’s a real sh thematic shift from the biatitudes we looked at in the summer to what we see in verses 13- 16 today of Matthew 5. The biatitudes really concerned with uh the character that Jesus wants to see in kingdom people in people who he says uh will enter by the narrow gate and will choose uh the more difficult or will navigate a more difficult road in life. He says that uh he wants his kingdom people to have a humility about them. They’re poor in spirit. They mourn broadly because they know that their hearts and their world isn’t what it ought to be yet and what it will be one day. uh they exhibit meekness and mercy in their relationships with people. They love to diffuse conflict if they can. They hunger and thirst for righteousness. Their hearts are becoming increasingly pure, a little less complicated, less hypocritical. And despite the fact that biatitude people, their lives are oriented toward others. They’re still going to uh face some push back and some persecution uh by those who have entered by by a wide gate and who are walking an easier road in life. And because of that contrast, they’ll be targets for criticism. Yet they can rejoice because they’ll have an ultimate reward in heaven. So Jesus began his sermon by talking about the character development of those people who follow him. In this passage, he shifts from the character of kingdom people to the influence of kingdom people. And Jesus makes that shocking statement that people like us are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. And doesn’t that strike you as a little odd? Isn’t Jesus expressing maybe a strange kind of confidence in people like ourselves? Maybe being a little overly optimistic in terms of us. Yes, we want to follow him. We’re here together because we want to follow him. But we know that our our growth in kingdom beatitude character, it’s not complete. And uh to represent Jesus as the salt of the earth and the light of the world, that seems pretty advanced for us. But you know, when Jesus first spoke these words, he wasn’t addressing any group of spiritual elite Navy Seals, the most highly committed people in Israelite society. He spoke it just to rough hune bluecollar northern folk who’d probably never much influenced anyone in their lives beyond their families and a small circle of friends. But Jesus says without an ounce of irony or sarcasm, you’re the salt of the earth and the light of the world. What what’s even more amazing is that when Jesus spoke these words, the greatest of the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, they had already lived and that thought deeply about things and that expressed their wisdom. They had made their contribution to humanity and uh they’d all been dead and long gone for centuries before Jesus spoke these words. Yet Jesus doesn’t refer to those great lauded Greek philosophers as having been the enlightened luminaries the world of the world. He says these fishermen and these common insignificant folk sprawled out on that Galilean hillside. They’re the true luminaries. He said you’re the light of the world. And in saying that, he’s speaking confidently. He’s speaking prophetically over them. He knows exactly what they’ll become. He’s speaking into their destiny. And as it turned out, in fewer than 300 years, those folks in front of Jesus and others who would come after them would so upend and revitalize things in the world that no less a figure than the Roman emperor himself would ascent to being a follower of Christ. And from the very humblest of beginnings, Christianity would be the uniting religion of the entire expanding Western world. Jesus knew that the world would go on to be thoroughly salted and thoroughly enlightened by through the lives and ministries of those who followed him. And they would gain this outsized influence over the world. And they would do it without any power, without any coercion, without any military or political leverage. It would just happen. So he’s speaking these words prophetically over that mly crew of people on the hillside. but he’s also speaking very confidently about us and prophetically into our lives, knowing that this sermon was going to be as alive and relevant for us as it was for them. So this morning, we’ll take a few minutes just to reflect on those two basic metaphors that Jesus speaks prophetically over our lives that were salt and light for our time, for our city, for our generation. And then because Jesus talks about the possibility of salt losing its saltiness and light becoming hidden, we need to think about how that can might be a might happen in our lives. And we’ll make one specific application uh we’ll at least talk about that that will help uh prevent us from losing our effectiveness as salt and light in our world. So first let’s just look at the metaphors that Jesus uses in describing us. Says you’re the salt of the earth. And everyone who’s studied and reflected on that passage for the last couple thousand years has seen probably two applications of what it means to be salt. One is just the way it flavors food even far back in in ancient Job. Job chapter 6. Job asks, “Is tasteless food eaten without salt?” And of course it isn’t. We would never take on some chips or some fries and not salt it because it would taste like cardboard. So Jesus is saying here somehow that the world is in desperately need of some of the spice and the flavor that we bring to it because as exciting as sin and unrighteousness, new ideas, personal experimentation, there’s great promise to all of that initially, but over time it becomes boring and tasteless. William Kavanaaugh describes the ironies of our consumeristic culture. we keep buying stuff. And he writes, “What really characterizes consumer culture isn’t attachment to things, but detachment. People don’t cling to things, they discard them and buy other things.” And all he’s saying is that the consumerism of our age is propelled by our boredom. And boredom is characteristic of every age. things and experiences and substances and relationships. They seem to offer so much excitement but eventually become as tasteless as cream of wheat porridge. Famously stirring classic confessions. Augustine his lifespan spanned the fourth and 15th cent uh fourth and fifth centuries AD. But he sounds very much like a modern man as he speaks in his confessions about his preconversion life and his sin, his lusts, his habits, uh, his cultic involvement. Prior to coming to faith in Christ, Augustine, he really didn’t deny himself anything when it came to pleasure. And he writes, he said he would ponder the question, why, if we could live forever in unending physical pleasure without any cause for fear, why wouldn’t we be happy with that and not ask for anything else? See, it struck him that physical pleasure, and Augustine thought a lot about sex, why wouldn’t that keep us satisfied? But it never did. He never found a comfortable position that he could rest in his sin. As part of his confession to God, he wrote, “Oh, the twisted roads I walked. Woe to my outrageous soul that hoped for something better if it withdrew from you. The soul rolls back and forth onto its back onto one side and then another onto its stomach. But every surface is hard and you’re the only rest. So as much as Augustine tried to get his life to taste good and hold some flavor before he bowed to Jesus, it just never ended up that way for him. Jesus believes better for us. He says that our lives are meant to hold their flavor so that being around us brings something spicy and flavorable, tastes better. Life tastes better for everyone around us. When we talk, our words and our our ideas contain a flavorful potential. Colossians 4:es 5 and 6, Paul writes to us, “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to respond to each person. So gracious speech, it can be very clear and to the point, might even burn a little bit like salt, but it’s kind and it’s thoughtful. It’s respectful. It’s helpful. So Paul says that as we address those who are outside the kingdom of God, looking in, our conversations with them can have this compelling, flavorful quality to them. So our words don’t come across as tasteless, religious, fundamentalist cream of wheat. Rather, it’s like it’s like jerk chicken or uh or pumpkin pie. We’re the salt of the earth. We bring flavor to those whose taste buds continually shrivel because they haven’t yet been able to taste and see that the Lord is good. But we have been able to do that. So that’s the flavor we bring to our conversation. Go a little further. In Jesus’ day, the second very practical use of salt of course was to preserve things. Jesus’ disciples knew all about this. They were lot number of them were fisher fishermen and they lived up in the northern sea of Galilee and they would sell a lot of their catch to the greatly populated southern part of Israel that was 125 kilometers south. Transportation was slow, refrigeration non-existent. So, of course, they would rub coarse salt into the meat to slow the natural process of decay. We all know we we go to the grocery store, we bring up bags and bags of dead things, dead vegetables and dead fruit and dead meat, and it’s all been cut down in its prime. It’s been torn away from its source of life. So, we take all those corpses and we quickly stuff them into our fridge and freezer so that their death won’t be as obvious for a while. It’s a desperate, all of our food’s a desperate state. It’s a race against time to try to eat the bananas before we have to throw them in the green bins. And every now and again we we clean out something in the back of the fridge and and it’s been forgotten and aromatically we realize that death is everywhere. It’s all around us. So we’re referring to us as the salt of the earth. Jesus is saying he wants us to be rubbed into the meat of our culture into a decaying world so it doesn’t uh rot too quickly. The microbes, the bacteria are always at work. But people without Christ are said to be spiritually dead. Left alone, our world will decay. But the time hasn’t come yet for God to destroy and remake the earth. So God uses various things like laws and governments and the conscience that he puts on people’s hearts just to keep society from slipping into chaos and darkness and anarchy. But no matter how much a nation thinks its security comes from its laws and its police force and its weapons, the only real security any nation has is the character of its people. If people are becoming increasingly evil, we won’t be able to hire enough policemen to uh ensure safety. So God says to carry our biatitudes and our character into the world, get rubbed into it. Stay in close enough contact with our culture that we can make a difference. Our lives, our character, our speech, the way we diffuse conflict, our worship, our prayers on behalf of our city and on behalf of the people in our city, all of that is a preservative of things. I don’t think any of us would want to live in a city that uh had all of God’s people, all of the biatitude people removed from it, where every neighborhood was without any Christian influence. Some folks in our world, they they think that’s a good idea. And the late Christopher Hitchens, he was quite brave to say in his book, God is not great. He said, “Religion poisons everything, and the more we get rid of it, the better.” But uh it wasn’t really true for himself personally. His friend Larry Taton was a Christian man and he writes poignantly of how Christopher Hitchens uh as he was suffering from the cancer that would eventually take his life. Christians were the people he most wanted to hang around with. Even as he publicly debated them and sought to win points of points against them on stage, he preferred to travel with them. He read the Bible with them. He weighed the cost of conversion. He admitted that the resurrection was not without appeal to a dying man. Quietly, unobtrusively, the people of God, the salt of the earth were having that flavoring and preserving effect even on him. And after calling us the salt of the earth, uh Jesus’ second metaphor is the light of the world. Salt does its work in its quiet, unobtrusive way. Lights very open and outward. Salt’s invisible. You can’t miss light. Jesus called himself the light of the world in John chapter 8. And we’re we’re to reflect his light into the world. The effective reflectors. Ephesians 5 says, “At once, one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. For the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to discern what’s pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but expose them.” So, we’re to live as children of light. Find out what it is that pleases God. Be used by him to expose deeds of darkness. That’s what light does. Jesus says, “If we do that, we’re like a city on a hill, a lamp that’s lit in a dark house.” And all of that, of course, means that we can’t really be secret agents in our world. If we try to keep our Christianity a secret, either the secret’s going to destroy our disciplehip, we won’t be good disciples of Christ, or else our disciplehip will eventually our secret will be out. So God places us in a dark world very strategically. We just shine where he puts us. We can’t think if I just keep my head down, keep my nose clean, I’ll get out of this classroom or this office or this neighborhood without exposing myself for who I am. Rather, Jesus says we’re the ones to expose the deeds of darkness around us. So, hiding isn’t an option. It’s a ridiculous picture of going to all the trouble of lighting a lamp in a dark room and then covering it over with a with a basket. It’s absurd. No one would do that. Dietrich Bonhaofer, the uh German Lutheran pastor who was hanged by the Nazis at age 39 near the end of World War II. He was one who was very willing to shine courageously as a light and expose the dark deeds of not of the Nazi regime. And prior to his death, he wrote, “Christians can’t escape into the invisible. A community of Christ which seeks to hide itself has ceased to follow him.” So those are the two metaphors that Jesus uses to refer to the essential influence of kingdom people. And he speaks to that incoherence of salt losing its flavor, taking a lamp and covering it with a basket. And Jesus says to us, let our light shine before others so they’ll see our good works and give glory to our father who’s in heaven. So that’s really where we want to end up. That’s the calling of this passage on our lives. But let’s take a little bit of time this morning just to think about one specific way that our salt can lose its saltiness and our light can be dimmed. One way we need to keep our guard up if we’re going to have any luminescence at all. And I think of the way that we consume news, the way we consume information, the way we participate in social media. Uh, I don’t know if there’s a greater danger to our Christlike influence than diluting our attention over the way we respond to and take in information. All of the demands and the events that come to us freshly packaged every day and demand our attention. Henry David Thorough was a 19th century American naturalist, an essaist, a philosopher, probably best known for the years that he spent off the grid in the woods of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He lived in a time in the 19 mid-9th century when the volume of available information was expanding exponentially. The early printing presses of colonial America, they hadn’t progressed much since 15th century Germany. But between the years 1800 and 1840, technology just erupted. First, there were steam presses, then stereotyping and electrotyping, and I don’t know what any of that means, but apparently it changed the world. communication infrastructure was being transformed by the telegraph, railroads, photography. So the world was just shrinking dramatically. I mean to go from slow printing presses or or words carried by hand, carried on by horse or sail to now words printed on steam presses carried by wires and rails. Probably the same kind of transition from pre-enter internet to internet culture in our digital age. So, Theorough and his contemporaries, they experienced a 42,000% increase in printing communication efficiency and they felt the disruptive power of that. Henry David Thorough he he took off to the woods and one of his major essays, life without principles, he drew from the Bible, and he talked about how the distractions of even a single daily newspaper could steal our attention away from and be an infidelity against our creator. He says that if we live and move and have our being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire, he says those things will just end up filling the world for us. And he says it’s nothing less than idolatry. He saw the telegraph part of a problem and he quipped once that once the transatlantic telegraph cable was finally laid. He said, “Per chance, the first news that will leak into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” See, he really envisioned our age where as spectators we consume news from far away, various degrees of relevance. They could come shooting at us without any narrative, without any proportionality. It’s all stitched together by the mere fact that it all occurred on the same day. And that’s why it’s called news. do observed, “It’s hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember.” So he saw no need to be informed of Princess Adelaide’s cough, but despite his voluntary retreat from the daily news, he wasn’t disengaged at all from the important events of his time. He was a lifelong abolitionist. He helped runaway slaves. He participated in abolitionist causes. spent a night in jail because he refused to pay a tax that would have helped fund the Mexican-American War. It was a war he felt that was unjust. As Jeffrey Bilbro notes, for Thorough, social engagement flowed not from an obsession with the news of the day, but from his commitment to eternal moral truths. When we attend too closely to secular temporal affairs, we desecrate our minds. There are lasting, even eternal consequences for what we give our attention to. That’s why Paul instructs the Colossians to set your minds on things above, not on things that are on the earth. Thorough agreed. He he felt that our minds were like innocent little children. We needed to be guardians of our minds. Very careful what we uh thrust on their attention. He made one compelling statement that if nothing else stays with us today, I think the statement probably ought to. He says, “Read not the times, read the eternities.” So move away from unhealthy mental diets where the algorithms feed us our news feed and and they try to get us outraged and upset or they feed us the drama or the amusement we want. News stories presented as a as a zero sum game. These are the winners. These are the losers. We just can’t afford to think of the events of our lives this way. Bill Bro comments, “Fixating on winning may be a good strategy for politicians and media companies, but it’s not a Christian way of attending to the events of our day. The way we swarm on social media from one thing to another, this really affects us. If we want to be salt and light in our world, if our minds are jammed full of the events of the day, it’s really going to dilute our effectiveness in being salt and light.” Novelist Barbara Kingsolver writes of uh her family was pretty removed from television. She was talking with a friend who was shocked that she hadn’t heard of the airplane crash which had taken the life of John F. Kennedy Jr. some weeks earlier. And King Solver, she remained quite involved in her local community, but she wrote, “It would make no real difference in my life. It’s not that I’m callous about the calamities suffered by famous people. They’re heartaches to be sure, but heartaches that are genuinely experienced only by their own friends and families. He says, “It seems somewhat voyeristic, also absurd to expect that JFK Jr.’s death should change my life any more than a recent death in my family affected the Kennedys.” On the matter of individual tragic deaths, I believe that those in my neighborhood are the ones I need to attend to first by means of casserles and whatever else I can offer. I also believe it’s possible, she wrote, to be so overtaken and stupified by the tragedies of the world that we don’t have any time or energy left for those closer to home, the hurts that we should take as our own. Very much saying the same thing as ancient St. Augustine when he noted, “All people should be loved equally, but you just can’t do good to all equally. So you should take particular thought for those who as if by lot happen to be particularly close to you in terms of place, time or other circumstances. So that would jive very nicely with what Jesus says. Let your light shine before others. They may see your good works and give glory to your father in heaven. Obviously the people in close proximity as if by lot to us, they’re the ones who are most going to notice our influence as salt and light. So, I was thinking about these matters the last couple weeks with the aftermath of the death of uh Queen Elizabeth. I’d admit that concerning the monarchy, I’m probably 90% disinterested and 10% cynical. And I and I always have been and I I I didn’t want anything to do with all the wallto-wall pomp and circumstance and pageantry and the cues and various locations of the Queen’s Casket. Charles Taylor maintains that a a Christian sense of time, it doesn’t follow the linear progression of events. With the Christian sense of time, all everything passes through the lens of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. They become the grid by which all other events are evaluated and understood. And more out of apathy than any conviction, I paid almost no attention to any of the events leading up to the Queen’s funeral. Monday morning quite early I flipped on the radio and and I was dismayed at learning I was more funeral coverage only to realize that that heaven was really meeting earth at that moment suddenly the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus it was at the nuclear center of the day’s news the world at least for a few moments was reading the eternities not the times the sas Jonathan vonmar and he turned tuned into the funeral he didn’t know what to expect. Later that day, he wrote, “The Queen’s funeral may be one of the most watched declarations of the Christian message of all time. Estimated that maybe four billion people on the planet might have watched it.” For years, the Queen faithfully used her Christmas message to convey her Christian beliefs. At her funeral, which the king queen planned herself, she reminded people of eternal truths one last time. He goes on, “There were rumors that the service might be the sort of watered down ecumenical offering that the shambolic drifting Church of England specializes in these days. But the order of service began with these words from the King James version.” I am the resurrection and the life, sayeth the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whatsoever liveth and and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall beho behold, and not another. He says there was nothing cheap or modlin about this. It wasn’t one of those uh modern funerals with pop music and some kind of mockish celebration of life. He says it was a cleareyed recognition of death, eternity, and the necessity of salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. Writes about how uh the the new prime minister of the UK, Liz Truss, uh was required to read the words from John 14 without a hint of ecumenicism. Jesus saith unto unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the father but through me. And all of this at the queen’s behest. And as those readings were recited, he writes, “The assembled leaders, most of whom believe not a word of it, and despise those who still hold to the words of that book. They bowed their heads respectfully for a moment. They might not believe the words being read, but the queen did, and she had her last word in the order of service she helped to plan.” Another British SAS Paul Kings North. He noted this particular uh camera shot on that day where uh a shot from above. It’s uh the Westminster Aby’s in the in the form of a cross, the Queen’s caskets. It’s right in the middle of it. And he wrote at the end of the funeral today, the orb and the scepter symbolizing the queen’s spiritual and temporal authority were removed from the top of her coffin along with the crown and it was given over to the care of the church. At that point, Elizabeth became symbolically what she’d always been in reality and what we all are, small, ordinary people, naked before God. He says, “What’s meaningful about this royal death is that the late queen really believed this.” And so, that’s just our call uh from this word this morning is to try to read the events that are happening around us through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. It happened this week and it’s meant to happen in our lives with all the news that we consume. To do that effectively, we have to like Henry David Thorough or Barbara King Solver, we have to retreat a little bit from the exterior world. And this application is very individual for each of us this morning. We all just have to know we have to live enough off the grid to be able to understand the events and take the time to understand the events in terms of the life and the death and the resurrection of Christ. If we do that, we can attempt what thorough encouraged us to do. Read not the times, read the eternities. Let’s pray together. Father, I pray that would be our life and our response to the news and to uh to the things that come our way, our news feeds, uh just the various social media things we participate in. I ask that you’d give each of us an individual application to make uh from this passage today that we would understand ourselves as salt and light that our that our city really needs us to be and we would uh start reading the eternities and not so much the times. We pray it in Christ’s name. in.