Why are you here?
Why do you come to this place?
Some of us are here for the weekend. Some of us are here every Sunday. And some of us are here every day, several times a day. Some of us - some of you - may be wondering if you might become one of the people who comes every day.
Whether we come once, or regularly, or every day, we need to stop and ask ourselves why we come. Our motives shape our experience, and they shape our relation to God in this place and every other place we go.
When I entered religious life, I told a friend that it was the first totally selfish thing I had ever done. I meant by that that I was no longer trying to please my parents, or measure up to others’ hopes or expectations. I wanted to pray, and to help others pray. I had no sense of ministry or mission beyond that. As Isaiah would have it, I sought God and wanted to know her ways. And I thought that meant days in prayer, serving the community however I was asked, living a quiet simple life.
I wasn’t thinking about serving the poor. I wasn’t thinking about spreading the Gospel. I was thinking about soaking up God’s love, and loving God in return, in the comfortable confines of the convent.
And, I must confess, I was like the people Isaiah is castigating. I wanted to fast, to be silent and austere, but in the meantime I quarreled and judged. I no longer had an income, so I no longer gave to others. I was treated as holy, wearing my habit, but I was a scribe, a Pharisee. I knew about purity, but not about charity.
Soon enough, however, my horizons started to expand. I experienced it as restlessness, as needing to get out of the enclosed life I was living, but as soon as I began to go out I encountered the world I had left in all its need. I began working with teenage drug addicts, and later serving in a parish. I realized that my intensive prayer had borne fruit, and that now I was becoming salt and light.
Now here’s the thing about salt and light: they do not exist for themselves. No one sits down to a dinner of salt. They use the salt to bring out the taste of the food. And no one just sits and stares at a light. They use the light to see what is around them.
Being salt, being light, means being the background that makes other things shine. It means that my work, my ministry, is not about me. It is about letting other people encounter Jesus, helping them to see God at work. God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, is the point. If I shine, when I shine, my light exists so that others may see God at work around them.
Even when we do good works, as Jesus prescribes, the point is not to show how wonderful we are. It is not to earn points with God, or with our neighbors. The point of good works, Jesus tells us, is to give glory to God.
Now, if you think of God as distant and other, this sounds cold. Shouldn’t good works spring from compassion, from love of our neighbors? Yes. But this is not separate from giving glory to God, for the God we seek is incarnate in Jesus, and in us, and in those around us. We give glory to God by treating others as Christ.
But being salt and light is not just about good works. It also changes why I worship, and how I worship.
For many people, their only connection with church is on Sunday. They come into the spiritual filling station, they “seek God and delight to know God’s ways,” but their worship is for them. They may do good things during the week, or they may not, but the time of proclamation of the Gospel is only in church, and it belongs to the clergy.
Now, we need that refueling. I need it so much I’m here every day! And neither Isaiah nor Jesus are condemning that.
The question is: why are you here? Are you here for yourself alone, or is worship part of your mission in the world?
We can worship for ourselves alone, but we can also worship as salt and light.
Sometimes I don’t want to come to worship, but others need me there. They don’t need me just when I’m presiding or preaching or serving; they need me in a seat so they aren’t alone in the congregation, so that my prayers resound with theirs, so they know they have companions on the road.
Wherever we go and whatever we do, we are either living for ourselves or for God. No wisdom, no eloquence, no disciplines, and no service, set the standard for our relation with God. Devotion to God, in all spheres of our lives, makes God visible and audible and tactile among us. Then indeed we shall be like gardens, like deep springs whose waters never fail.
John Henry Newman wrote a prayer that expresses this truth beautifully. I leave you with his words.
Dear Jesus, help me to spread Your fragrance everywhere I go.
Flood my soul with Your spirit and life.
Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly,
that my life may only be a radiance of Yours.
Shine through me, and be so in me
that every soul I come in contact with
may feel Your presence in my soul.
Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!
Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as You shine,
so to shine as to be a light to others;
the light, O Jesus will be all from You; none of it will be mine;
it will be you, shining on others through me.
Let me thus praise You the way You love best, by shining on those around me.
Let me preach You without preaching, not by words but by my example,
by the catching force of the sympathetic influence of what I do,
the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to You.
Amen.
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