Blanket with Sleeves

OK, this is Little Blog Post B for this Thursday morning, February 6, 2014. 2014? Holy smoke. As I sit up here in bed with my MacBook open on a pillow in my lap, and the door open on a cool but not cold morning, wearing this “blanket with sleeves” and sipping coffee with creamer from a cup on which is written for me, "Frohe Weihnachten! Kristen was here" -- and looking out across St. Andrews Bay at Tyndall Field straight across and hear jets revving up, and Shell Island farther across -- and if I stretch and look over the pine and cedar trees that have gotten too tall I can see out to the Pass into the Gulf of Mexico -- what comes to mind for no accountable reason -- is that day many long years ago, it was on the playground at Cove School, out back between the school building and the scrub oaks where the bike rack with my bike was, over on Linda Avenue, someone, maybe Parker, said something about the long far distant Year 2000, and I thought, “2000? 2000 minus 1935 = in the year 2000 I’ll be 65 years old. I will never live so long.” That’s a clear memory. Seems like I was ten, so it must have been 1945 or early 1946.

That afternoon I rode my bike from Cove School down Linda Avenue to Massalina Drive, rutty dirt roads, and home. If I was ten, my grandfather Gentry was sixty, and my grandfather Weller (who would have turned 142 a week from today) was 73 or 74. And my beloved grandmother Mom was 68 with another year to live, and I had no thought or worry or fear of ever losing her. Here I am this morning, older by far than any of those now-long-dead-folks were that afternoon just after WW2 ended, still happy as a clam and with only one worry in the world, but having lit a candle against that worry at church last evening.

Coming up is my Sunday to give the sermon. What to preach about? Actually, I’m eager to pick the gospel apart but not the least interested in preaching about it. Rather, this, at 78, is what intrigues me:

From the Sermon on the Mount, this Sunday’s gospel (Matthew 5:13-20) begins, “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.” (Matthew 5:13). WTH is that all about? Research time.

Here’s what research discloses. There’s a core saying,”if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” a rhetorical sentence that can absolutely be attributed to Jesus. That’s all the gospel writer, in this case Matthew, has on his little yellow post-it note, a dominical saying to use as he sees fit. He has no idea how, or when, or why, or in what context Jesus said "if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?", only that He said it. So the evangelist, he the gospel writer, can use it however he can best fit it into his agenda. But because he knows that Jesus said it fifty years ago, Matthew must use it:

“if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”

He looks at Mark to see how Mark used the saying in his gospel fifteen or so years earlier, but Mark just uses it unrelatedly, unimaginatively and almost off-the-wall, to conclude a teaching in Capernaum. “For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you restore its saltiness? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” (Mark 9:49-50)

However, what Mark wrote doesn’t fit Matthew’s agenda, and he thinks he can do better anyway. What else does he, Matthew (whoever Matthew was), have for sources? Well, he looks at Sayings Gospel Q and comes across this saying about flavorless salt, “It is fit neither for the soil nor for fertilizer; they throw it away.” Yep, that’s good.

So Matthew makes the Q saying, “it is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot” and uses it in his version of Jesus’ Sermon from Q (which, as Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, is different from the way Luke has it as the Sermon on the Plain a few years later). Then, along with a saying about hiding a lamp under a bushel basket, Matthew ingeniously -- under the guidance of the Holy Spirit one might concede -- makes a parallel saying, the memorable and immortal “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? (adding from Q) It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. (and then) You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:13-16).

Matthew does indeed do better than either of his synoptic competitors. A few years after Matthew, Luke -- no more imaginative than Mark maybe twenty years earlier -- Luke places Jesus on his journey from Galilee down to Jerusalem, and quotes Jesus, like Mark off the wall, tucked unrelatedly between a teaching about discipleship and a collection of parables,“Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? (and Luke also adds from Sayings Gospel Q) It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; they throw it away. (And concludes) Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” (Luke 14:34-35)

That mental exercise in a verse or two of Matthew’s gospel for the upcoming Sunday, in beginning thought toward sermon preparation, is enlightening; shows me yet one more time again that each gospel is different, with different agenda and different brightness of imagination, and that Matthew shines perhaps brightest of all in this Epiphany Season. But I’m no closer to sermon thought than when I started.

Maybe because my mind is on that candle I lit last night for traveling mercies as Kristen drives home this afternoon.