Perspective: Salt and Light

 

Today I am not so much preaching, as I am inviting you into a moment of teaching. This teaching is to have us actively participate in honouring Black History Month and in anti-racism action. With open hearts and minds we will wrestle with North American Christian theological and biblical perspective and interpretation. 

Consider this morning’s Gospel reading:

You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.

Solid statements. Understandable. Packed full of meaning.  

These phrases are not so simple because of our history, our times, our understanding of scripture; other words, theology, and liturgy the church has used alongside them.

 

If I asked you to describe salt, my guess is that you would tell me that salt is white. When you hear the phrase, you are the salt of the earth, is it white salt you think about? White salt is people’s default. The most used is table salt, kosher salt, pickling salt – all white. Salt coming from the earth is rich with minerals, making salt pink, red, black, blue, and grey.

 

When people are asked to describe light, it doesn’t take long before the description mentions dark. When you think of light, how do you interpret its relationship to dark? Day first followed by night? Night and day, where night is scary and day is safe? As a candle or lamp dispelling darkness?

Western Christianity has a history of interpreting light, brightness, and white as good, equating light with purity and goodness, with all that is holy. Wedding dresses are white, baptismal gowns – white; the colour of high holy days is white. Western Christian history has equated darkness with dirt, sin, and evil. The only festival associated with black is Good Friday – a day of crucifixion. Concepts of washing away sin, making hearts and robes as white as snow, references to being cast into darkness (referring to hell), light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it; in him (God) there is no darkness at all. These are few examples that cast darkness in a negative way.

You can tell me all you want that images and theology using light and dark has nothing to do with race --- philosophically perhaps not, but on the ground in real time it most certainly does!

 

A non-church example might help. In a 1971 interview the great boxer Muhammed-Ali pointed out, “What if we had vanilla devil’s food cake, and dark-chocolate angel cake?”

Right – white devils, black angels.

 

At church assemblies over the past decade, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and our sister church the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have committed to working on issues of race: apologies, reconciliation, inclusion, and education; and being anti-racist through action. African American Lutheran Pastor Lamont Wells, president of African Descent Lutheran Assoc.; a ministry of ELCA, said in an interview:

“For us, liberation theology includes the eradication of anti-Blackness in the church’s liturgy, the church’s teaching and the church’s hermeneutic and interpretation of Scripture.”

 

You have experienced what Pastor Lamont is talking about. An example is the confession we used during Advent – where the liturgy painted darkness as good; there was evening and morning, God saw that it was good. We stated that darkness holds the light, the depths of the sea embrace luminescent creatures, and so on.

You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.

Some of you are likely about to tell me, “Pastor that’s biblical, are you about to tell us it is wrong?” No I am not, BUT, I want you to wrestle with how we use and interpret scripture; not all of scripture is edifying for every time and place.

When we read and hear scripture -most of us here- come to it from a Western Christian, North American perspective. This colours how we hear it, picture it, interpret it, and use it; and how others around us do the same.

 

When you hear a Bible Story of David, Hagar, Moses, the Pharaoh’s daughter, Daniel, the disciples – how do you picture them? If you are not a visualizer, when you hear a story do you consider the characters to look like you? Similar hair, eyes, skin.

The shocking news for today is that Bible does not specifically identify any person’s skin colour. Isn’t that interesting? Race was mentioned, tribes and peoples were set against each other – but it was not about the colour of one’s skin. And to note – there were few white people in the Bible.

In the beginning, Adam was made from reddish-brown soil. The Garden of Eden was described by the rivers of Eastern Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Hagar, Abraham’s wife; Zipporah, Moses’ wife; Simon of Cyrene who carried Jesus’ cross, the Ethiopian Eunich; all consider Black because of their places of origin. Ethiopia is mentioned 45 times, Egypt countless times – Africa is mentioned more than any other landmass. Until 1859, when the Suez Canal completed, the Holy Land was connected to Africa (known as North East Africa). Besides Black, Bible characters were Middle Eastern, Arab, and Asian – with a few Romans and Greeks thrown into the final books.

I read that, “if we can’t accept the Bible as a multi-cultural book, how can we accept multicultural churches?” To be an anti-racist church there is a need to correct defaults that colour the word only one colour, that interpret the text to look like a Western Christian European church.

 

And the climax of the teaching for today -getting is on the right track, focusing on anti-racism- is expanding our understanding of the first centuries of Christianity.

The Church Fathers – these are the writers and theologians of the early church. These men set down theology that is the framework and foundation of all Christian theology since. It is theology the church still uses and interprets. The Church Fathers were native to Africa: Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Cyril of Alexandria, Cyprian, Augustine of Hippo

These Africans shaped Christian theology and protected the early church from heresy.

Immanuel Church in Burmingham, Alabama has on their website this sentence:

“Christianity has a rich, African heritage that led to the conversion of Europe to Christianity, not the other way around. The African Church Fathers remind us that we need to study black history because it is a part of our common history as God’s people.”

This is something to sit with and ponder through Black History Month.

The blackness of the Bible and the blackness of the early church.