Epiphany 5A

February 9, 2014 The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany Dn. Rodney Conn As Rick mentioned last week, I was ordained right hear on these steps six years ago. I gave my first sermon as an ordained minister the following Sunday. During that sermon I quoted from a Grateful Dead song – “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” I some ways I naively thought that the trip was over. Boy was I wrong. At Grace Allentown I was involved in the food bank that operated out of the basement of the church feeding nearly 1000 people a month. By June of that year I had been assigned as Bp. Jack’s chaplain that started a travelogue around the diocese for the next four years. I had the opportunity to see parishes large and small. From St. Stephen’s Pro-Cathedral and this Cathedral packed to a chapel sized church where those vested nearly outnumbered those in the pews. All the time trying to live out the ministry of a deacon by example in the liturgy – proclaiming the Gospel; attending at the Altar; sending people out into the world to do God’s will. And all this time, I was trying to determine what God was telling the deacons of this diocese to do for this ministry. It was during that time that I thought that the Cathedral was the most obvious place to have a deacon. If the diocese wanted more deacons, why wasn’t there one there? When Fr. Malloy decided he could no longer be a Rector at Grace and a Professor of Liturgy at General Seminary, the transition time allowed me the time to examine my own ministry and where or what I should do. And the rest, as they say, is history. So now I’m here. Each deacon is different, some will say quite different but in another context, and each ministry is different. Who the deacon is; what their background is; what they do to support themselves and family influence that difference. In the secular world I have been in the chemical industry for 27 years as a quality control technician, a research chemist and now as director of environmental, health and safety at a small chemical company in Easton, soon to be Lower Macungie. Anyone who has a scientist in the life knows there’s an element of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It comes with the territory being able to conduct experiments in orderly manner, to arrange and analyze the data, to draw conclusions about what you are trying to discover. I’m no different, though our household problem is that Sarabel and I are both chemists. My OCD is not her OCD – thus the fun. So I sat down with the Scripture readings, pencil and paper ready to analyze, quantify, and place in an orderly fashion thank you very much. To continue my long, strange trip. I always say that God has a great sense of humor. And She showed that in today’s Gospel reading. Salt becoming not-salt; cities that can’t be hid on top of the hill; people hiding lamps under bushel baskets; and Jesus telling us he’s not here to change anything but to fulfill something that seems to be broken when reading the Gospels. That’s when I started praying for lots of snow today. But I suspect I’m not alone in trying to line all this up and make sense of it. These verses are taken out of the larger Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has a crowd and he’s beginning his ministry of teaching to as many people as he can reach. In Matthew we have just heard the Beatitudes – blessed are the poor, those who mourn, the meek, those that hunger and thirst, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. Jesus goes on and so do we… Salt – well that’s in my proverbial wheelhouse. As a chemist I know that salt is made up of one atom of sodium and one of chlorine. Each is dangerous on its own. Sodium metal will react with water with enough violence to cause a fire and possibly an explosion. Chlorine gas was used in the First World War in the trenches causes death and suffering for those that survived. Yet combined together they make salt vital to human life. The bond between the two is called a covalent bond in chemistry and is the strongest bond in nature. But place salt in water and it readily dissolves and the atoms separate from each other readily to allow it to support life. In the context of Jesus’ time, salt sustained life and was even used to pay Roman troops. The root of salary comes from salt. The people of this time would not have appreciated the deeper mystery of the chemical nature of salt, but we can with further knowledge gained over the centuries. This encourages me that God continues to speak to us through these Words written so long ago. Salt could lose its saltiness if broken into its individual components becoming violent and dangerous. So if we lose our saltiness, we degrade to the violent and dangerous and become a danger to the goodness of God. And light – important to light the way, to show where safety lies, to light the good things of life. Jesus tells us not to be afraid of showing the light, not bragging, but showing what the life of a Christian is truly like. Jesus tells us to not lose our life-giving nature, to the hard things of caring for the poor, those who mourn, the meek, those that hunger and thirst, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. And we shouldn’t hide it. It has struck me the number of people that I have come into contact with that has commented on our ministries, our steadfastness to the community past and present. We keep at it whether it is in partnership with New Bethany, housing homeless during the coldest months of the year, providing space for ShareCare Faith in Action, the Thrift Shop, Homework Club and others. We have not lost our saltiness and we don’t hide our light. But then the Lectionary adds on this bit about Jesus and the Law. Jesus says that he didn’t come to cause change, but rather to complete; not to abolish, but to fulfill; not to destroy but to build up, build on to. And what is the root of the Law according to Jesus? That answer doesn’t come until Matthew Chapter 22. So be here on October 26 to find out. But Jesus is simply setting the stage at this point. Early in his ministry he is planting seeds in the hearts and minds of the faithful to come and the hard-hearted that will conspire against him. In all this Jesus has set himself up to challenge the authority of the day. It has always been dangerous to do so. Repressive authoritarian regimes will take deadly action to silence those challengers. Even in free democracies, a challenge, a question can result in great discomfort. Congress recently passed a trimmed down 5-year Farm Bill that has an average budgetary figure of $191 billion compared to the Department of Defense budget of $673 billion, about 3 ½ times larger. When the Pentagon decided to mothball the aircraft carrier USS George Washington to reduce spending as was asked of it by Congress, the same Congress pressured the White House to cancel the plan and proceed with the mid-life refurbishment needed for a nuclear vessel. This was because several Congressional districts had the navy yards used for refurbishment and not building. You see the plan was to get rid of older ships and simply replace them with the newer Ford-class vessels for $13 billion a ship. So we’re going to build three more and refurbish the older ones now. The current argument over the Affordable Care Act is the recent report of the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO estimates that 2.3 million fewer workers will be in the labor force in 2021 as a result of the benefits of the ACA. The interpretation of the who/what/why will spill you into a massive argument concerning socialism versus free market societies; big versus small government; the 1% versus the 99. But I think Jesus is calling us to consider the hard questions. What does it mean to be a Christian today? How do we not lose our saltiness? Shed light in the darkness? To help Jesus fulfill the Law?