Isaiah 58:1-9a; Matthew 5:13-20
February 6, 2011
Fish Gotta Swim, Light Gotta Shine
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,
let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
I learned that song at a pretty young age and I’ve led kids in singing it many times since. “Let your light shine,” says Jesus in our Gospel reading.
Do we read the rest? Do we know the rest? “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”
We’ve been a little vague about what that is supposed to mean. Whether rightly or wrongly, I always assumed that letting my light shine had something to do with other people becoming Christians and joining the church. This was a comfortable notion for mainline folks, since it meant that all we had to do was to “let our light shine” and people would be drawn to us and to our church. We wouldn’t have to embarrass ourselves. We wouldn’t have to learn any new skills. We wouldn’t have to talk to anyone about God, which we find unbelievably hard to do. Church growth would just happen. All by itself. And all we had to do was to “let our light shine.”
Never mind that we never bothered to decide just what “letting our light shine” meant. Never mind that when I was growing up in the church, the church was growing because of the baby boom, not because of shining lights. Let’s face it, however much we have sung about letting our lights shine and however much shining we have done, we United Methodists haven’t made converts in any appreciable numbers since the 1880s.
Never mind all that. We were supposed to let our light shine so that other people would see our light and join us and they in turn would let their light shine so that still more people would see our light and join us.
I’ve often puzzled over this vision of growth for the church. Each church member brings two people into the church. They bring in two more each, and so on. This is a familiar mathematical puzzle called “the king’s chess board.” The way I heard it a king borrowed money from a shrewd banker. When the king asked the terms of repayment, the banker, said, “I’d just like a few pennies. If you majesty will take his chessboard and place one penny on the first square, two pennies on the second, four pennies on the third and so forth until each square on the chessboard is covered, I’ll call it even.” The king agreed, not realizing, of course, that this agreement would bankrupt him. In fact, the total would amount to one hundred eighty-four quadrillion, four hundred sixty-seven trillion, four hundred forty billion, seven hundred thirty-seven million, ninety-five thousand dollars. This is a lot of money. The banker settled instead for the hand of the king’s daughter.
I get a little leery anytime I hear a scheme of exponential growth. A scheme of exponential growth must sooner or later run into the fact that we and our world are finite. This is the wall that caused Bernie Madoff’s operation to come unraveled. But that doesn’t keep us from dreaming this particular dream.
I imagine that Jim Skinner, the CEO of McDonald’s, may indulge in the fantasy of exponential growth. He may only talk in terms of increased “market share.” He, like any other business person, would like to increase the share of the market that comes to his organization. But what is the upper limit of that fantasy? Does he really imagine that there might come a day when the only restaurants in the country, or even the only fast-food restaurants, are McDonald’s? If so, he is shooting himself in the foot, since an “all McDonald’s all the time” diet would kill off his customers. In his case at least, a scheme of exponential growth is neither possible nor even desirable.
Infinite expansion is a dangerous fantasy. Three examples of infinite expansion come to mind. The first is the chain letter. We’ve all gotten them. Send this letter to ten of your friends! Sometimes there are even threats: Someone didn’t forward this letter and they slipped on ice and broke a leg, got fired, discovered that their spouse was cheating on them and were featured in People magazine as among America’s ten worst-dressed people. But the king’s chessboard tells me that I had better break the chain before the Internet is occupied full-time just passing this letter around. If you send me a chain letter, I will not forward it. Just so you know that it’s not personal; it’s a matter of principle.
Another less fun example of exponential growth is what happens when a virus against which we have no immunity enters our bodies. The virus invades a cell and uses the cell material to make more copies of itself which then enter other cells where the process repeats. Until what? Until it kills its host, which is a really stupid thing for a virus to do. If it should succeed in killing every human on the planet, what then? A well-adapted disease does not kill its host, but settles instead for making its host miserable, like the virus that causes the common cold.
The third example of exponential growth is an unmitigated disaster: a thermonuclear explosion.
Why should the Church take as its image of growth a process shared by chain letters, virulent diseases and thermonuclear war? Is it possible for the Church to grow to include everyone on the planet? Would that even be desirable?
That is assuming, of course, that we know how to grow the Church that way. But we don’t. I’ve been around the church growth movement for most of my career, although I have to confess that the king’s chessboard keeps me from taking it too seriously. My overall impression of the literature that this movement has generated is that we have some pretty good ideas about how to grow new churches in growing suburbs of growing cities. That, quite frankly, isn’t saying much.
About turning one hundred forty year old stable congregations in stable communities in rural Iowa into growing congregations we know hardly anything at all. Our denominational leaders keep telling us that we should grow and they keep shoving at us the latest packaged program guaranteed to make us grow.
I’ve been around just long enough to have learned a secret which I will share with you, if you promise not to tell anyone else. Do you promise? Here it is: No one knows what they’re doing. No one knows how to make congregations like ours grow. Oh, sometimes it happens. I assume that it has something to do with the right combination of pastor and people at the right moment in history in the right place in the space-time continuum. The trouble is, I’ve never seen anyone bottle it, turn it into a method that anyone could simply apply, with a few adjustments, to another combination of pastor, people and opportunity. There are no methods, only stories of people who experienced it, and, truth to tell, very few even of those. No one knows what they’re doing!
No one knows how to grow First United Methodist Church. Our superintendent Anne Lippencott is a pretty savvy pastor, but she doesn’t know how to grow our congregation. Jaime Glenn-Burns is a gifted consultant, but she doesn’t know how to grow our congregation. Bishop Trimble is a fine pastor and bishop but he doesn’t know how to grow our congregation. And I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the salespeople who bother Rhonda trying to get to me so they can sell the latest thing that’s been working wonders in Dallas, Texas, they for certain don’t know how to grow our congregation. I don’t know how to grow our congregation.
That sounds like it should be bad news, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s news that can set us free. That’s because Jesus didn’t talk about growing churches. That wasn’t what his message was about.
After all, the point of salt is to flavor food, not to take over our cuisine. A little salt goes a long way. Too much, and salt stops being a seasoning and starts trying to be food. The point of a lamp is to illuminate a house, not set fire to it.
Jesus talks about salt and firelight on the way to talking about something else. We are salt, he says, and we are firelight. We can’t help being salty and we can’t help shedding light. It’s who we are. It’s not something we have to learn or strive to do. We really can’t help acting according to our nature.
On the other hand, he is also telling us that we need to act in certain ways and live in a certain direction. Our “righteousness” must be greater than that of the Pharisees and scribes. Or at least that’s what our translation says. The trouble is that we could get the idea that being “righteous” means being “better” than other people. We have this terribly small idea of what righteousness is. A righteous person we imagine refrains from doing certain things, like using coarse language for example. In an earlier day we would have said that a righteous person doesn’t play cards, dance or drink alcoholic beverages. A righteous person does certain things, like going to church every Sunday and reading the Bible all the time.
But this is a small notion of what the word means. Really, the word that is translated as “righteousness” would much better be translated as “justice” because it contains the idea of settings things right. So Jesus told his disciples that “their justice must exceed the justice of the Pharisees and scribes.” And when Jesus told them that he was appealing to a long tradition.
They didn’t have to guess what he meant. They didn’t have to make up stuff about being lights so that other people would want to be lights, too, and then they could report a net gain in membership to the bishop.
Jesus was appealing to the prophetic tradition that is as well represented in today’s text from Isaiah. Isaiah had some very strong words about “setting things right,” about justice in other words. The people of his day were careful in their religious observance. They participated in ritual life. They kept the rules. They even prayed and fasted. They were righteous in that small sense of the word. They were respectable. But God was not listening to them.
That’s because God was not looking for respectability. God was looking for justice. God wanted to see them loose the bonds of injustice. God want to see them undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. God wanted them to share their bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into their houses. God want them to clothe the naked when they saw them, and not to hide themselves from their own needy family members.
God didn’t have a plan for their growth. God had a plan for their faithfulness and it was built around justice. This is the tradition that Jesus evoked in this part of his sermon. Jesus calls us not to growth but to faithfulness.
Jesus calls us to loosen the bonds of injustice. Jesus calls us to let the oppressed go free. Jesus calls us to share our bread with the hungry. Jesus calls us to make sure that the poor have shelter from the weather and a place to call home. Jesus wants to make sure that every child is protected against the brutal Decorah winter. Jesus wants us to care for the sick and visit the imprisoned. Jesus wants us to welcome strangers even when they look like strangers.
If we will do these things, we will season the life of this community. If we will do these things we will shed light into the shadows. In Isaiah’s words, “Then [our] light shall break forth like the dawn...[our] light shall rise in the darkness and [our] gloom be like the noonday.”1
There are people who aren’t a part of our congregation who would like to being doing justice. If we don’t shut the door in their faces, if we don’t put too many barriers in their way, they’ll join us. I don’t know if there will be enough of them to yield net growth, but I guarantee that there will be some who want to be part of a congregation that does justice and loves mercy. But even if it weren’t so, I would still urge us to be faithful and let bishops and God worry about the numbers.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
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