William H. Willimon - "Be Who You Are" (February 4, 1990)
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| - | Last week in the gospel lesson, | 0:11 |
| we began the Sermon on the Mount. | 0:13 | |
| And this week the sermon continues. | 0:17 | |
| "Blessed are you when they revile you | 0:21 | |
| "and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil | 0:23 | |
| "against you falsely on my account. | 0:26 | |
| "Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, | 0:31 | |
| "for so they persecuted the prophets before you. | 0:36 | |
| "You are the salt of the earth, | 0:40 | |
| "but if salt has lost its taste, | 0:45 | |
| "how shall its saltiness be restored? | 0:48 | |
| "It is no longer good for anything except | 0:51 | |
| "to be thrown out and trodden underfoot. | 0:54 | |
| "You are the light of the world. | 0:57 | |
| "A city set on a hill cannot be hid. | 1:01 | |
| "Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a bushel, | 1:05 | |
| "but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. | 1:08 | |
| "Let your light so shine before all | 1:13 | |
| "that they may see your good works and give glory | 1:17 | |
| "to your Father, who is in heaven." | 1:19 | |
| Now on most Sundays when you come to church, | 1:28 | |
| we're busy trying to get you to do something. | 1:33 | |
| You ought, you should, you must. | 1:37 | |
| The gospel in the imperative mood. | 1:44 | |
| As a young pastor I asked my people | 1:48 | |
| what they expected from sermons, | 1:50 | |
| and they answered, "We like a sermon that tells us | 1:54 | |
| "what we need to do to get right." | 1:58 | |
| Now our gospel lessons from this year come | 2:03 | |
| from the Gospel of Matthew, and nobody has ever accused | 2:07 | |
| Matthew of soft pedaling the should and ought and must. | 2:11 | |
| "Judge not, lest you be judged," | 2:17 | |
| Matthew 7:1. | 2:21 | |
| "Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide | 2:23 | |
| "and the way is easy that leads to destruction." | 2:26 | |
| "Every tree that does not bear good fruit | 2:30 | |
| "is cut down and thrown into the fire." | 2:33 | |
| Matthew is the Gospel of accountability and responsibility. | 2:37 | |
| Should, ought, must. | 2:43 | |
| So were you surprised by the way | 2:49 | |
| that Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount | 2:50 | |
| by telling the multitudes, | 2:56 | |
| "Blessed are you poor in spirit. | 2:59 | |
| "Blessed are you that mourn, blessed are the meek." | 3:04 | |
| Notice something missing? | 3:08 | |
| There's no should or ought or must. | 3:11 | |
| Jesus begins with blessings, | 3:14 | |
| blessings upon the unblessed. | 3:18 | |
| There's no imperative, just blessing, | 3:21 | |
| blessing among the poor, and the hungry, | 3:24 | |
| and the persecuted, and the meek. | 3:27 | |
| Blessing upon those whom the world has cursed. | 3:29 | |
| What he says here, he says to all. | 3:35 | |
| Wherever there are persecuted, hurting, hungry people, | 3:37 | |
| Jesus blesses them. | 3:41 | |
| But then in verse 11 of the Sermon on the Mount, | 3:47 | |
| the Beatitudes shift from the third to the second person. | 3:52 | |
| Jesus turns from the suffering multitudes, | 3:58 | |
| he turns and fixes his gaze squarely upon his own disciples, | 4:03 | |
| and says, "Blessed are you." | 4:09 | |
| Can you see him turn? | 4:14 | |
| Run the videotape back. | 4:16 | |
| Here he goes back again, blessed are you, blessed are you. | 4:17 | |
| And what he says now, listen carefully, | 4:22 | |
| is just for you, just for disciples. | 4:25 | |
| And we begin to squirm a bit, | 4:30 | |
| what with his gaze fixed so squarely upon us. | 4:34 | |
| Blessed are you, when they revile you and persecute you | 4:39 | |
| and utter all kinds of evil against | 4:44 | |
| you falsely on my account because | 4:46 | |
| that's the same way they treated the prophets before you. | 4:48 | |
| This little ragtag band of fisher folk and ex-IRS agents, | 4:55 | |
| and people off the street and women of the night, prophets? | 5:00 | |
| Simon Peter swatted a fly, | 5:07 | |
| Nathaniel nudged Mary Magdalene | 5:11 | |
| who let out a toothless grin. | 5:13 | |
| "Us, did he say us, prophets?" | 5:16 | |
| "Yeah," says Jesus, "Prophets, | 5:21 | |
| truth-tellers of Israel. | 5:25 | |
| "You are the salt of the earth. | 5:27 | |
| "You are the light of the world. | 5:30 | |
| "You shine." | 5:33 | |
| Now the Greek, unlike the English, | 5:38 | |
| needs no pronoun before a conjugated verb | 5:40 | |
| unless it's used for emphasis. | 5:45 | |
| And Matthew puts a pronoun here | 5:49 | |
| in order to underscore the "you." | 5:53 | |
| So you see, it's not just, you're the salt of the earth, | 5:57 | |
| you the light of the world. | 6:01 | |
| It's, "You are salt, | 6:03 | |
| you are light." | 6:09 | |
| It's a gospel made personal. | 6:14 | |
| And note that he doesn't say that they ought to be salt, | 6:19 | |
| or that they should be light, he just says they are. | 6:22 | |
| The gospel in the indicative mood. | 6:26 | |
| And you wonder if any in that ragtag bunch squatting | 6:33 | |
| in the dust of the Galilean hillside could take it in. | 6:37 | |
| What a way to begin a revolution, | 6:43 | |
| with just those 12 or so. | 6:47 | |
| Salt, salt is like that, | 6:54 | |
| it's just tiny little grains, | 6:58 | |
| yet utterly essential. | 7:00 | |
| Salt is not significant in itself. | 7:03 | |
| Nobody sits down and eats a bowl of salt. | 7:09 | |
| Salt is essential for what it enables to happen. | 7:14 | |
| Try going on a salt-free diet | 7:17 | |
| and see how you like your grits. | 7:19 | |
| You, you disciples are just so small, | 7:23 | |
| yet if you sprinkle a few of you around in places like | 7:29 | |
| Jarvis or Adcock, there's no telling what you would stir up. | 7:33 | |
| Of course, salt was also used in that day as a preserver | 7:39 | |
| and a purifier, but Jesus isn't interested in that. | 7:42 | |
| He's talking about salt as essential for flavor. | 7:47 | |
| You, you, you disciples. | 7:52 | |
| Without you, the earth would lose its zest. | 7:54 | |
| Without you, the world would be just boringly insipid. | 7:58 | |
| Salt. | 8:04 | |
| This chapel was built over 50 years ago | 8:08 | |
| and 50 years ago, | 8:13 | |
| Christians thought of ourselves as culturally significant. | 8:17 | |
| We were the majority | 8:22 | |
| and this chapel sitting as it does | 8:26 | |
| right in the middle of the Duke campus, the biggest, | 8:28 | |
| most impressive building on campus in a way, | 8:30 | |
| was assembled for the American church's | 8:33 | |
| self understanding in American culture. | 8:36 | |
| We were the majority, this was our world, our country. | 8:40 | |
| It was our campus. | 8:43 | |
| Today, those of you who are younger today, can you, | 8:48 | |
| can you even imagine that there was such a time | 8:53 | |
| when they closed the tennis courts on Sunday morning | 8:58 | |
| and they didn't play basket ball games on Sunday, | 9:02 | |
| even with Catholics. | 9:04 | |
| Where are you endangered by the stampede | 9:09 | |
| as you left the dormitory this morning? I doubt it. | 9:12 | |
| Here, even in allegedly Bible Belt Durham, | 9:19 | |
| when my family goes to church on Sundays, | 9:24 | |
| even in my middle-class neighborhood, | 9:27 | |
| we are a minority. | 9:30 | |
| And you come to feel small and insignificant. | 9:35 | |
| Just, just a few grains of salt in a vast goulash | 9:40 | |
| of secular indifference mixed at times | 9:45 | |
| with just a dash of hostility and derision. | 9:48 | |
| The other day, one of you was telling me | 9:54 | |
| that you had made a decision not to use alcohol | 9:58 | |
| in order to have a good time at Duke. | 10:03 | |
| And your reasons for doing so, as you reported to me, | 10:06 | |
| were just purely personal arising from a conviction | 10:10 | |
| that you couldn't relate to people with as much honesty | 10:14 | |
| and intensity as you wished | 10:17 | |
| if you were killing your brain cells with booze. | 10:22 | |
| Now you told me that while this was a personal decision | 10:25 | |
| on your part, you had been surprised | 10:29 | |
| by how threatening | 10:35 | |
| your behavior appeared to be ever, to be to everybody else. | 10:36 | |
| I mean people you hardly even knew coming up to you | 10:41 | |
| at parties and making some wise crack | 10:45 | |
| about Miss Goody Two Shoes. | 10:47 | |
| You said people just seem to be just driven crazy, | 10:51 | |
| but you had said no. | 10:55 | |
| That they couldn't party themselves if there was one person | 10:58 | |
| left running loose on west campus who didn't need to be | 11:02 | |
| drunk to carry on a conversation with the opposite sex. | 11:06 | |
| You get my drift? | 11:11 | |
| In a world where there are no values, | 11:14 | |
| anyone who believes anything is going to be perceived | 11:18 | |
| as a threat to the establishment. | 11:22 | |
| Anyone who has even just one ounce of self possession | 11:29 | |
| has a way of underscoring | 11:35 | |
| how enslaved we are | 11:36 | |
| to the status quo, | 11:41 | |
| so they got to convert you | 11:47 | |
| for fear that you might subvert them. | 11:48 | |
| And they know. | 11:53 | |
| They know just a little bit of salt goes a long way. | 11:55 | |
| Whenever I venture out of this place | 12:03 | |
| and go somewhere else to speak, people invariably ask me, | 12:06 | |
| how many students do you get in the chapel | 12:12 | |
| on a Sunday morning? | 12:15 | |
| We've seen them at the basketball games. | 12:16 | |
| Do any of them ever come over to the chapel? | 12:19 | |
| And I usually answer, not all that many, | 12:25 | |
| but fortunately just enough to get the job done. | 12:28 | |
| We don't get all that many students. | 12:34 | |
| Fortunately we get just enough of the right students | 12:36 | |
| to keep the whole campus nervous. | 12:40 | |
| As Jesus explained it later in Matthew, many are called, | 12:45 | |
| but only, only just a few are chosen. | 12:49 | |
| Light, like salt | 12:55 | |
| is mainly of significance | 13:00 | |
| in what it enables to happen. | 13:02 | |
| You don't stare at a light bulb. | 13:05 | |
| Light is valuable only in what it enables to happen. | 13:08 | |
| It enables you to see something else. | 13:12 | |
| Switch on a light and a dark room is utterly transformed. | 13:15 | |
| You are the light of the cold cosmos, says Jesus. | 13:21 | |
| And the word he uses is cosmos. | 13:27 | |
| Without you, the world cannot see what it is. | 13:32 | |
| The world has no means of seeing that it lives by lies | 13:38 | |
| until it meets someone who lives truthfully. | 13:44 | |
| We read this year of just one little tiny | 13:51 | |
| reformed church pastor in Romania, | 13:55 | |
| just going about his business, | 13:58 | |
| just obeying God rather than the government, | 14:00 | |
| unlike his bishops. | 14:02 | |
| Just one little Romanian pastor | 14:04 | |
| brought down a whole government. | 14:06 | |
| People of the world do not know that they're superficial | 14:12 | |
| until they come face to face with somebody who isn't. | 14:17 | |
| The world needs you, bad, to be redeemed | 14:22 | |
| before it can know that it has fallen corrupt, sin filled. | 14:27 | |
| The world has got to stumble across | 14:32 | |
| just one free person still running loose | 14:35 | |
| before the world sees how enslaved it is | 14:42 | |
| to a host of cruel masters. | 14:44 | |
| You're the only light the world has got, says Jesus. | 14:49 | |
| You hide your light under a basket | 14:54 | |
| and everybody is going to stumble. | 14:57 | |
| You, light. | 15:00 | |
| And the world is quite right in assuming that | 15:05 | |
| you can judge the truth of Jesus | 15:10 | |
| by the sort of people | 15:14 | |
| that faith in Jesus is able to produce. | 15:15 | |
| Disciples who don't look like disciples, | 15:21 | |
| churches which have chameleon-like blended in to the | 15:25 | |
| wall paper of a secular culture are not much help | 15:29 | |
| in showing anybody the way out of the dark. | 15:33 | |
| Jesus therefore sarcastically says that salt, | 15:39 | |
| which has stopped being salt, is moronde, | 15:42 | |
| stupid, moronic. | 15:49 | |
| It deserves no better than to be the doormat of the world. | 15:54 | |
| I was in a church meeting and we were discussing sending a | 16:02 | |
| resolution to the state legislature, | 16:05 | |
| asking the state government to make all state buildings | 16:08 | |
| accessible to the handicapped. | 16:11 | |
| Our righteous indignation just boiled within us | 16:15 | |
| as we were busy sending directions to the government | 16:19 | |
| about how to be just. | 16:23 | |
| There was a woman at the meeting, | 16:26 | |
| a mother of a handicapped daughter, and she rose to speak | 16:29 | |
| and she said, "You hypocrites. | 16:32 | |
| "How many of you are in churches that are | 16:36 | |
| "totally accessible to the handicapped? | 16:38 | |
| "How many of you have Sunday school classes | 16:42 | |
| "for the retarded? | 16:44 | |
| "How many of you have a transportation program | 16:47 | |
| "for the elderly?" | 16:49 | |
| Her words hit home. | 16:55 | |
| It's always easier for the church to be merely indignant, | 16:58 | |
| to spend somebody else's tax money to work justice | 17:03 | |
| rather than work justice right in our own home. | 17:07 | |
| But the government has no means of being salt, light. | 17:12 | |
| It's you are the salt of the earth. | 17:19 | |
| You are the light of the world. | 17:23 | |
| The world is quite right in ignoring us, and treading us | 17:28 | |
| under foot as Jesus said they would of worthless salt. | 17:33 | |
| If we present no better alternative to the world than that | 17:38 | |
| which the world already has by its own means. | 17:44 | |
| But the good news is, | 17:51 | |
| the good news is that it's a great | 17:56 | |
| gift to know that your little life counts for something. | 17:58 | |
| That your little life and light are caught up in | 18:04 | |
| some great, vast, cosmic program of Jesus. | 18:09 | |
| You are the way that Jesus is busy | 18:14 | |
| revolutionizing the world, turning the world upside down. | 18:17 | |
| You are the means by which Jesus is busy | 18:22 | |
| enlivening the whole universe, | 18:25 | |
| and that makes the little things you do, | 18:28 | |
| little things like the way you spend your money, | 18:31 | |
| the words by which you speak to other people, | 18:35 | |
| the way you use your body and other people's bodies, | 18:39 | |
| the jokes you tell, the manner in which you spend your time, | 18:44 | |
| these are transformed from being purely personal matters | 18:51 | |
| into great cosmic witness | 18:59 | |
| to the light of the world. | 19:04 | |
| We're in the season after epiphany. | 19:10 | |
| And epiphany means revelation, manifestation, | 19:14 | |
| light. | 19:19 | |
| That's why the music today is about light, | 19:20 | |
| and of course in this month beyond Christmas, | 19:23 | |
| the epiphany that we're talking about is Jesus. | 19:28 | |
| Jesus, the one whom Bethlehem star foretold | 19:31 | |
| Jesus is the light of the world. | 19:36 | |
| So maybe you come to chapel to be close to | 19:40 | |
| the light of the world, and in a few minutes you're going | 19:43 | |
| to come shuffling up here to the altar to be handed | 19:47 | |
| bread in the name of this Galilean light of the world. | 19:51 | |
| Well, does it surprise you | 19:59 | |
| when Mister Light of the World | 20:04 | |
| turns around and focuses his searing laser beam on you, | 20:08 | |
| on your little life, | 20:15 | |
| and he speaks to you and calls you | 20:19 | |
| His light of the world. | 20:23 | |
| You His salt of the earth, | 20:27 | |
| you His bread blessed | 20:33 | |
| that He might give you | 20:40 | |
| as food for a hungry world. | 20:44 | |
| He's talking about you. | 20:52 |