Texts: Genesis 24: 50-67; Matthew 5: 13-20
In his sermon. “A Model of Christian Charity,” the Puritan John Winthrop preached on much of the fifth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, but his sermon is most remembered for his phrase “a city set upon a hill,” which he used to describe the new community he and his followers were forming and which has been appropriated by many in political and religious life, including John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
Born in the shadow of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Winthrop had not been trained as a preacher, but as a lawyer. Although not one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay colony, he became involved when Charles I, the King of England began going after the “Nonconformists,” as the radical Protestant groups springing all over England were called. The tables would be turned on the King by Oliver Cromwell who was just as narrow-minded as the King had been.
More than 400 men, women, and children joined Winthrop on the Arbella and three other ships that set sail on April 7, 1630, arriving in Salem on June 11. Just before the company left the lead ship for shore, Winthrop was asked to deliver a sermon. Choosing Matthew 5 as his text, he said: “We are a company, professing ourselves [to be] fellow members of Christ ….[with] the end to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord....” He compared the bond of the community assembled to that of a marriage, with all of its promises and commitments.
Winthrop continued: “We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own , rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body... For we must consider that we are as a city set upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So, if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world.”
The Puritan society Winthrop helped to form, however, meant a strict conformity to the rules that the leadership established, leading to the expulsion of people such as Anne Hutchinson, who then went to what was called Rhode's Island to establish another city on a hill committed to religious freedom. Winthrop's son helped to establish the Connecticut Colony, combining New Haven and Hartford from where our spiritual ancestors fled down into New York’s Gravesend, and ultimately to the shores of Sandy Hook establishing this colony of Middletown 350 years ago. Every one of these searchers had great expectations for the communities they established.
In calling his listeners to a better righteousness, as some have called it, Jesus has called us to live not just ethically but morally. Telling us that we are the salt of the earth sounds nice but it is really difficult to live that way. The qualities of salt are different than those of sugar. Salt doesn't stick in our mouths the way that sugar can. Salt enhances the taste of foods in a way that sugar cannot. We often talk of over-sugared items as sickeningly sweet. Salt adds pungency in a way that even peppers do not.
There's an old fairy tale that crosses national and cultural borders about a king who asks his daughters what is the most indispensable item, how much the daughters love him, etc. The oldest says the most indispensable item is sugar or she loves her father as honey; the second says wood for fire or loving father as sherbet; the third says salt. Driven out, the youngest becomes a kitchen maid and on the day of her older sister's wedding, she withholds salt from the food and it is sour! All's well that ends well, of course, because this is a fairy tale, when the king realizes the daughter who said salt was right and is reconciled with her.
Without the pungency of salt, life is sour, to be sure. Karl Barth claimed that to be the salt of the earth was ethically impossible, leading one to despair. True, we cannot always be the salt but it is a goal, it is an expectation that we will act as the salt of the earth, of the world.
In his novel, Great Expectations, Dickens has his protagonist Pip say: “I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.” The combination of our successes and failures do indeed constitute who we are, who we have become. That combination even helps to determine how we view our futures. Even though we may strive toward always being on the side of the successes, we need to recognize that our failures do not unmake us but rather teach us lessons that enable us to move ahead.
If we look at the story of Rebekah from this morning's reading in Genesis, we see a story of a young woman willing to take a risk, travel with a caravan to a land she did not know, to be put into marriage with a man she had never met. It was, of course, the custom of that day, and in some parts of the world it still exists today, that people enter into what we would call arranged marriages within a clan or family. Although marriage has, of course changed, especially within the last two centuries for most of us in the Western world from an alliance of families or solidification of property interests to an alliance of love, we should note that the text tells us that Isaac loved her.
Marriage certainly is full of great expectations, some of which are met, but some of which are not. In marriage and our committed relationships, we strive to make our relationships to reflect the pungency – perhaps the word vibrancy is more accurate – that salt has, balanced, of course, with the sweetness of sugar.
Much like the call of Jesus to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, our relationship in this community of faith known as Old First is a response to the moral imperative we have in the Gospel. Much like Winthrop's call to build a community built on the vision of Christian charity, as he termed it, we are called to live together even as we disagree over approach and method. In fact, it is that very diversity within our community of Old First as well as the community known as the United States that enables us to thrive and grow.
Our community of faith, indeed, any community of faith, is like a marriage. We enter into it with great expectations; sometimes those expectations are dashed; at other times, fulfilled. The point of the Gospel is to tell us how we should live with each other; what we then need to do in any kind of community or relationship is to figure out how we can deal with differences of opinion and approach in living our faith. Our pungency should not serve as a barrier but as a call to new encounters with the world. In this portion of the Sermon on the Mount and in the portions we will be reading over the coming weeks, Jesus is talking about how we are to engage with others in this world. The expectations are high and we may not meet them, but we should always try.
Let us pray: Bring us, O God, through your grace, to that place where we are better able to meet your great expectations of us. In the name of the One who is our model in living, even Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.