Jesus called us to be salt AND light not salt OR light

Matthew 5

Salt AND Light

    ¹³“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

   ¹⁴ “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. ¹⁵ Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. ¹⁶ In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how to be in the world but not of it. How to shine the light of Christ without compromising in obeying his commands.  Jesus commanded his followers to be salt – a preservative element of society. He warned against losing the saltiness.  He also commanded us to be light, to be different and visible and engaging. He made the statements in proximity, making it clear that one or the other will not do.  

Not Salt OR Light

The American Mega Church is great at “shining the light”. We proclaim God’s love on TV, radio, internet.  We give to missions, we go on short term mission trips and send missionaries. But we are not so good at being the salt of the earth. We have lost our saltiness and in our quest to be in the world, we have become very much like the world. Our track record of keeping our kids in the faith is not good. Our track record on divorce is abysmal. Our pulpits are mostly silent on many of the critical moral issues of our day. The church’s working class supports many evil deeds with their tax dollars including forced sterilization, offensive wars to secure cheap oil to extend our prosperity, and even abortion. Our light is shining but our salt has lost its savor.  

On the other extreme are the isolated and often pacifist Christian groups like the Amish, the quakers, the Mennonites, etc. They take their responsibility to obey his commands very seriously. In varying measure, they refuse to be complicit in the evil perpetrated by our national government as they refuse military service. Many produce what they eat and wear so as to reduce the taxes they pay which might be used to do evil.  They read books together as families instead of watching television. They educate their children instead of allowing the government run schools to indoctrinate their kids in an opposing worldview. But their outreach efforts are not impressive.  They do not leverage technology to spread the gospel. They do not travel much. With few exceptions,  they do not make much impact outside of their communities.  Their salt is salty, but their light is obscured from the view of most of the world.

Is there something uniquely powerful about the combination of salt and light?

I can only say that I suspect that there is a unique power in the combination because candidly I have not seen salt and light combined on a frequent basis or on a large scale. We can consider the history of revivals and what conditions were present before they broke out. We can consider the Moravians, the celtic christians, the puritans, and even the early church. We can observer the material impact that these movements had on world history. We can consider the track record of Jesus himself in purging the temple (salt) and in healing the sick and raising the dead (light). We can contemplate his expectations that we would do greater works than he did and we can wonder  if our lack of power and results have anything to do with our partial obedience to his two part command.

Or we can simply consider what efforts have been mounted by our enemies to ensure that we do not put the salt and the light together. Hitler for example found the church to be a useful crowd-control tool.  A complicit, silent church is no trouble at all to the devil or to would-be tyrants. 

Consider the strategy employed by Hitler to neutralize the German Church.

“Meanwhile Hitler pursued his course. His hope was evidently to use the German Protestant Church as a specialised propaganda agency, but his intentions for the Catholic Church in Germany were different. He seems to have regarded the Roman Catholic Church as something more nearly analogous to a rival state, whose neutrality must be secured if he was to pursue his political policy unmolested. It was with this in mind that he made overtures to the Vatican to secure a Concordat, which guaranteed the independence of the Catholics in religious matters, in exchange for non-interference in national affairs.”  
The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mary Bosanquet, Harper and Row, 1968

Many Protestants who were not persuaded by argument were arrested and their property and funds confiscated. Hitler said of the Protestants “you can do anything you want with them, they will submit…”^[41]  ^Shirer 1960, pp. 234–36

Hitler created an environment where if a pastor wanted to keep his congregation, his right to shine the light, his freedom, and perhaps his life,  all he had to do was to lay off of the salt. They were not to preach on topics that criticize the actions of the state. I have read about the struggles of young, up-and-coming preachers in nazi era Germany. If they chose to speak out against the state (salt) they would lose their right to minister (light). There were those who chose to speak out and even those who chose to act and we study them today and admire their bravery. Those who decided to compromise, to hold their tongue while atrocities were committed so they could continue to be the light, we don’t know their names. But we know the outcome, the church in Germany has been in decline ever since and church attendance is less than 10% compared to 44 percent in the united states.

The tragic history of World War II looms over the decline of the church in Germany. Across college campuses in the 1960s, militantly secular and often atheistic student movements blamed the German establishment — political and religious — for Nazism and sought to tear it down to build a new, modern Germany. The decades of secularization following the upheaval battered the church. http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2005/05/02/catholic_church_withers_in_europe/

It is indeed tragic when we choose light over salt. In turns out to be a short-sighted strategy with a horrible track record in terms of human suffering and in terms of church statistics. We may find that if we count the cost and do what is right regardless of consequences that we will discover that mysterious power that overcomes the world and our greatest enemies.

Revelation 12:11
They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by (1) the word of their testimony (light); (2) they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death (salt)