Ben: Which comes from Matthew, chapter 5, verses 1 through 16, this is the beginning of what's famously called Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.
Ben: Hear now the word of the Lord.
Ben: Seeing the crowds, he went up on a mountain and when he sat down, his disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and he taught them, saying blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Ben: Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Ben: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Ben: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Ben: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Ben: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Ben: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Ben: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Ben: Blessed are you, when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Ben: Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Ben: You are the salt of the earth, but if salt is lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?
Ben: It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.
Ben: You are the light of the world.
Ben: A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house In the same way.
Ben: Let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father, who is in heaven.
Ben: This is God's word.
Ben: Thanks be to God.
Ben: You may be seated.
Ben: Jesus' day was politically fraught and socially fractured.
Ben: That's important to know.
Ben: When he spoke, when he lived, it was politically fraught and socially fractured In some ways, just like we experienced today.
Ben: You see, the Jewish people lived under Roman occupation, and so their way of life was tolerable to some but contemptible to others.
Ben: And so a question in Jesus' day was how should a faithful Jew respond to being a cultural and religious minority?
Ben: What does that look like?
Ben: What does it look like to be faithful when you are in the minority or being marginalized.
Ben: That was a question of the day.
Ben: In many ways, this question is relevant to us today as Christians, as we are increasingly tolerable to some and contemptible to others for various reasons.
Ben: The reality is that the church in America has moved from the majority to a minority, from the center to the margins.
Ben: The church in America increasingly has become moved from being honorable to being dishonorable in the sight of our neighbors.
Ben: So to identify as a follower of Jesus has no social capital anymore, in fact, can actually cost you something socially in our day and age, this is relevant.
Ben: Many of you experienced this in your workplaces, in your schools, in your friend groups, even among your own families.
Ben: You experience what this is like.
Ben: And let's just be honest, 2024 is an election year, and so we know that it's just going to get more crazy in America and it's going to be even in the church.
Ben: We're not exempt from the craziness of an election year.
Ben: And so this question what does a faithful response look like when you are a cultural or religious minority?
Ben: What does that look like?
Ben: Well, in Jesus' day, there were four different groups that had four different responses or four different ways of answering this question what does faithfulness look like when you are marginalized or a minority?
Ben: And these were the different groups.
Ben: The first was the Sadducees.
Ben: In the Sadducees, their response was essentially we need to go forward, even if that means we need to leave some of the outdated, outmoded parts of our religion behind.
Ben: It's worth it, because a little compromise is a small price to pay for some political power.
Ben: You could call this religious pragmatism of the Sadducees.
Ben: The second group was the Pharisees.
Ben: There was this sense of if we could just go back, if we could go back to the glory days when people were serious about obedience and they took their faith really seriously, then God would bring the kingdom and conquer our enemies.
Ben: You could call this a form of religious fundamentalism.
Ben: That was the Pharisees.
Ben: The third option was the Essians and the Essians.
Ben: If the Sadducees were go forward and the Pharisees were go back, the Essians were get out, get out.
Ben: They were separatists, and so they really believed if we're going to stay pure, we have to leave the corrupt culture that we're in, and so they just dipped out to the wilderness.
Ben: You could call them religious separatism.
Ben: Today, this often looks like adjective Christianity.
Ben: What I mean by that is we have Christian coffee shops and Christian dentists and Christian dog bakeries and Christian I mean on and on and on.
Ben: There's this adjective Christianity, and this is our own version of separatism.
Ben: We do this to this day.
Ben: Not all of that is bad, but there's a temptation there.
Ben: The fourth and final group was the zealots, and they were get them back, get them back.
Ben: There was this violent resistance.
Ben: You could hear them say words like this quote if you don't fight, like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
Ben: That's a zealot thing to say, and you could call this religious nationalism.
Ben: Does that sound familiar to anybody?
Ben: You see, these four are still archetypes for how people who feel like they are minorities or marginalized.
Ben: These are archetypes for how they relate to culture, these four different ways.
Ben: So under this scene steps Jesus of Nazareth, as he walks up a very large hill and says a few words that have been reverberating throughout history for the past 2000 years.
Ben: And these are the words you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.
Ben: This is Jesus' answer to that question.
Ben: It's important to notice, though, that the you here is plural.
Ben: The KJV said it like this ye are the salt of the earth, which before that was Kanye West's name.
Ben: It meant you all.
Ben: That's what that meant.
Ben: Ye are the salt of the earth.
Ben: You all, or in the South, y'all are the salt of the earth, y'all are the light of the world.
Ben: This is really important that you see, this is plural.
Ben: Why?
Ben: Because Jesus is not just trying to create a bunch of individual disciples.
Ben: Jesus is creating a contrast community for the common good.
Ben: That's fundamentally what he's after.
Ben: Jesus is creating a contrast community for the common good, a community whose benefit to the world only comes from being unlike the world.
Ben: You see that that's important.
Ben: A community of disciples that would embody the Beatitudes which would make them totally unlike and very foreign to the world.
Ben: Yet they would do that not to be simply foreign to the world, but to do that for the world.
Ben: That makes sense.
Ben: Jesus risked his reputation and staked the credibility of his message on the quality of our life together as a contrast community for the common good.
Ben: Everything rides on this according to Jesus.
Ben: That's significant.
Ben: So the first two sermons in this series on community we've been in were about kind of the inward nature of the community, the necessity of community for ourselves, for one another.
Ben: This sermon and next week's will be about the outward nature of community, the necessity of community for the sake of others, especially those not within that community, and so I have one point, and one point only, which is we are a contrast community for the common good.
Ben: We are a contrast community for the common good.
Ben: I want to look at the first part of that together.
Ben: If you have a Bible, go ahead and get Matthew 5 open in front of you.
Ben: We're going to look at verses 1 and 2.
Ben: Matthew 5, verse 1, says this Seeing the crowds, jesus went up on the mountain and when he sat down, his disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying Now, this is significant.
Ben: What is the difference between the disciples and the crowds, the church and the world?
Ben: According to the couple of verses I just read, the only difference is this Verse 1, his disciples came to him.
Ben: The only difference here is we are those who come and keep coming to Jesus.
Ben: That's what it means to be his disciples, that's what it means to be the church.
Ben: And how does Jesus respond to that?
Ben: Well, verse 2 says you see, we come to Jesus to learn from Jesus.
Ben: It is true, Christians, it's essential that we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, he's the God in human flesh, he's the Savior of the world, he's the Lord of the universe.
Ben: All those things are really important, but there's a subtlety that we often miss here, which is we also believe that he lived the only truly human life, that he's the only brilliant mind in the history of humanity that was untainted by bias and selfishness, that Jesus actually is a genius in the art of living and we ought to apprentice ourselves to him, to learn from him how to live properly in this world.
Ben: So you might say Jesus is my Lord and Jesus is my Savior.
Ben: But is he your rabbi?
Ben: Is he your teacher?
Ben: Do you actually learn from him daily living in such a way that your life becomes conformed, slowly but surely, to become more like his?
Ben: That's really essential.
Ben: You see, jesus calls his disciples to himself out of the crowds in order to send them back into the crowds.
Ben: That's a really significant piece.
Ben: So his contrast community is not us versus them, but us for them.
Ben: Yet unlike them, and it's a little bit more wordy than us versus them, but it's a big difference.
Ben: And so consider Jesus' metaphor in verse 14, when he says this you are the light of the world.
Ben: This implies that the world is a dark place.
Ben: Let me be more clear.
Ben: This implies that our neighbors and our coworkers, those who are without Jesus, that they are in darkness.
Ben: Now that sounds like the epitome of arrogance in our culture, but it's more like this Hurricane season is coming.
Ben: I'm so sorry, everybody.
Ben: You knew this, but it's coming, and this often happens.
Ben: If we actually do get hit by a hurricane, something like this, some people have power and some people do not have power, and it's inexplicable what the difference is.
Ben: We have above-ground power.
Ben: You'd think it would get knocked out.
Ben: We've not lost power for any duration of time ever.
Ben: Old neighborhood.
Ben: I mean, it's crazy.
Ben: But then people that I know who are below-ground power, and so in those moments, what do you do?
Ben: If you have power and you have some friends or family that don't?
Ben: Do you look down on them with a sense of superiority, like, how crazy would that be?
Ben: Well, I'm the light of the world.
Ben: You know, sorry for you, you're in darkness.
Ben: No, there's an insanity to that.
Ben: Right, we actually move towards them with compassion.
Ben: We feel something for them.
Ben: We're like oh, I'm so sorry, you have to deal with no AC and no light and no refrigeration.
Ben: It's the exact same way.
Ben: It's the exact same way with Jesus calling us the light of the world.
Ben: There is no sense of superiority.
Ben: We'd have no self-righteous enlightenment about us.
Ben: Instead, we are like the moon that has no light within itself but only derives its light from reflecting the light of the sun.
Ben: Jesus says it like this in John 8.12.
Ben: He says I am the light of the world.
Ben: Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.
Ben: We're like sunflowers that track with the sun as he makes his circuit across the sky.
Ben: That's all that we are.
Ben: That's all that's different between us and our neighbors in that sense.
Ben: And so we are the light of the world.
Ben: Because Jesus is the light of the world.
Ben: You cannot miss that.
Ben: Otherwise it would be true to accuse us of some of this arrogance that, yeah, you are all in darkness.
Ben: We are the enlightened ones.
Ben: But Jesus has a warning for his contrast community.
Ben: Look with me at verse 13.
Ben: He says this you are the salt of the earth.
Ben: But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?
Ben: It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.
Ben: Did you catch?
Ben: There's a phrase in there that you just don't think.
Ben: Jesus, meek and mild, would say no longer good for anything.
Ben: Ouch, jesus, those are hard words, but Jesus does everything with the utmost love, and so these words have to be a loving warning.
Ben: Better are the wounds of a friend than the kisses of an enemy, the Proverbs say.
Ben: And so Jesus is loving us right now because he knows that there is a strong temptation towards cultural compromise.
Ben: That's what I believe he's speaking to here.
Ben: And who hasn't been tempted to find other things besides righteousness, to hunger and thirst for Like?
Ben: Who among us doesn't know the temptation to stop showing mercy when it really becomes costly?
Ben: It's so easy for us to clutter our hearts with the things of this world rather than having a purity of heart of undying devotion to Jesus.
Ben: For many of us, it's easy to stand aside or step away during conflict rather than to enter in and to get involved in order to try to bring peace there.
Ben: You know it's interesting.
Ben: Jesus says this about the salt of the earth.
Ben: But people will argue salt cannot lose its saltiness.
Ben: It's actually not possible.
Ben: Saline chloride is a really stable compound.
Ben: This doesn't happen unless when I was in first couple years of school I was a marine biology major and we studied the desalination process of ocean water, of salt water, and there's really expensive, costly ways to do it.
Ben: And then there's another way to do it, which is if you want to get potable drinkable water but you only have salt water, one way to do it is you just take enough fresh water to dilute.
Ben: You just dilute that salt water that it becomes drinkable without it having any harmful consequences to you.
Ben: That's the warning of Jesus here Beware of becoming so diluted by cultural compromise that you are no longer good for anything because you've lost all saltiness.
Ben: That's the danger.
Ben: That's the warning that we would be so contaminated through mixture with the impurities of our culture that we would actually become basically just like our culture and no longer have a way to be salt or light to our culture.
Ben: Cultural Christianity in America is known for its tastelessness, its compromise, its dilution.
Ben: In America, christians are considered to be more than two times as likely to have racist attitudes than non-Christians.
Ben: Divorce rates between Christians and non-Christians are about the same.
Ben: The percentage of men who view pornography is roughly the same.
Ben: One in four people living together outside of marriage call themselves evangelicals.
Ben: 20% of evangelicals give away no money whatsoever.
Ben: Domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse are just as prevalent among Christians as non-Christians.
Ben: Now, if you know anything about what's called the great de-churching that's happening right now friends of ours have written a book on this and they said cultural Christians represent the largest group.
Ben: 52% of people that are leaving Christianity behind in our generation are what could be called cultural Christianity.
Ben: Their discipleship to Jesus is utterly lacking.
Ben: Their Christian in name only.
Ben: Dietrich Bonhoeffer said Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.
Ben: Now, this is relevant because Bonhoeffer said that in the midst of Nazi Germany, when he watched the German church capitulate to Hitler under the guise of grace what Bonhoeffer became famously known as cheap grace.
Ben: He said it like this the Christian is no different from the world.
Ben: In fact, the Christian is prohibited from being different from the world, all for the sake of grace.
Ben: The upshot of all this is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for about an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven.
Ben: I need no longer to follow Christ, for cheap grace is the bitterest foe of discipleship.
Ben: America is a wash in cheap grace.
Ben: This was the state of Christianity in Germany in 1940.
Ben: This is the state of Christianity in America today.
Ben: We've lost our saltiness, we've become diluted by cheap grace.
Ben: This is why many of our neighbors look at us and they hear that you're a Christian and they think your life is not sufficiently transformed for me to believe not only the message that you're saying, but that you even believe the message that you're saying.
Ben: That's the critique of our surrounding culture.
Ben: So, listen, the answer is not so try to be better, get after it, try harder.
Ben: The answer, according to Jesus, is followers of Jesus, be who you are.
Ben: You are the salt of the earth.
Ben: You are the light of the world.
Ben: Be who you are.
Ben: Embrace all that is yours in Jesus.
Ben: That's the answer, that's the way forward.
Ben: And so Jesus is still, even now, in this moment, calling disciples out of the crowds to come and follow him for the sake of the world.
Ben: It's still happening in this moment, and so one misciologist named Michael Goheen lists what a contrast community responding to the call of Jesus might actually look like.
Ben: There's a lot of these, so I'm going to go quick but lean in.
Ben: This is what a contrast community might look like, a community that knows God's presence moment by moment in a secular world that doesn't believe that God exists or locates God somewhere outside the universe.
Ben: A community of self-control and marital fidelity in a world that is saturated by sex.
Ben: A community of truth that holds that truth humbly and boldly in a world of uncertainty and suspicion.
Ben: A community of generosity and quote I have enough in a world gone mad by consumption.
Ben: A community of forgiveness in a world of canceling competition and revenge.
Ben: A community of self-giving love in a world of selfishness and self-gratification.
Ben: A community of wisdom in a world proliferating knowledge and technology.
Ben: A community of humility in a world of arrogant self-interest.
Ben: A community of patience in a world of immediate gratification.
Ben: A community of compassion in a world that has been numbed by overexposure to violence and tragedy.
Ben: A community of depth in a culture of superficiality.
Ben: A community of cheerful seriousness in a culture of triviality.
Ben: A community committed to issues of importance in a world of apathy and indifference.
Ben: A community of joyful purpose in a world that is amusing itself to death.
Ben: A community of thankfulness in a world of entitlement.
Ben: A community of praise in a world of narcissism.
Ben: A community that uses language positively in a world of destructive communication.
Ben: And, finally, a community of joy in a world dominated by a frenetic, hedonistic pursuit of pleasure.
Ben: Imagine if New City, orlando, became known as that kind of a community in our city.
Ben: What would happen.
Ben: Imagine, let your biblical imagination be stirred up with longing for what that might be like, what Jesus calls a hunger and a thirst for us to be set right.
Ben: And so listen, our benefit to the world comes only from our being unlike the world.
Ben: Don't lose your saltiness.
Ben: If you lose your saltiness, how can it be restored?
Ben: And so you can see why there is no comment that would be more hurtful and offensive to a disciple of Jesus than the words.
Ben: You're no different from anyone else.
Ben: You're just like me.
Ben: But there are two dangers that Jesus warns against here.
Ben: The first one is what I called cultural compromise, that's, losing our saltiness.
Ben: But the second one is what he calls basically names as concealment, which would be a form of hiding our light.
Ben: You see, salt is invisible.
Ben: It's powerful without being seen or heard, but light is visible.
Ben: It's powerful only by being seen and shining forth.
Ben: Salt must not be diluted, but light must not be hidden.
Ben: So if the warning for salt is do not compromise, then the warning for light is do not become ingrown.
Ben: We're salty by living as a contrast community, but we shine brilliantly when we live for the common good.
Ben: And so Jesus yes, he creates a contrast community for the common good.
Ben: So let's look at that together.
Ben: Look with me at verse 14 of Matthew 5.
Ben: You are the light of the world.
Ben: A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house In the same way.
Ben: Let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father, who's in heaven.
Ben: I grew up just outside of Detroit, michigan, and I moved to the Sunshine State in 2005.
Ben: In 2005, december 2005, in Michigan, where I'm from, there were only five hours of direct sunlight in the entire month.
Ben: I got married in Orlando in December of 2013, and it was like 15 hours of direct sunlight the day I got married, and so I tell you this story.
Ben: I tell you this background because there's this disorder, a diagnosis really in Michigan, called seasonal effective disorder.
Ben: My aunt had it actually.
Ben: Now, across the United States, about 3% of the population struggle with seasonal depression, but in Michigan it's 20 to 40% of the population have some degree of aptly named, sad seasonal effective disorder.
Ben: Why?
Ben: Why is that the case?
Ben: One reason Lack of light.
Ben: There's a lack of light.
Ben: Residents include exhaustion, depression, hopelessness, worthlessness, social withdrawal.
Ben: Brothers and sisters, our culture suffers from a spiritual seasonal effective disorder.
Ben: Sad, there's an S in the front end.
Ben: Like this is a reality.
Ben: And so if seasonal effective disorder has one cure light.
Ben: In the same way, according to Jesus, our culture has one cure light.
Ben: My aunt used to have to sit and eat her breakfast in front of a UV lamp in order to get enough light so that she could stave off the depression that would come.
Ben: Jesus says it like this in the same way, let your light shine before others.
Ben: William Temple said it like this the church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.
Ben: Let that sink in what that means for us.
Ben: The church's well-being is inextricably linked to how it seeks the well-being of the world around it.
Ben: John Stott says it like this in the best commentary in the Sermon on the Mount.
Ben: John Stott wrote it.
Ben: Surprise, surprise.
Ben: He said this salt and light have one thing in common they give and expend themselves and thus are the opposite of any and every kind of self-centered religiosity.
Ben: So here's the call to be salt and light, and according to Stott, the thing that those two have in common is that they give of themselves, they expend themselves.
Ben: So when Jesus says you are the light of the world, a city set on a hill cannot be hidden.
Ben: Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, so that it gives light to all in the house.
Ben: You have to ask the question why would people hide a lamp?
Ben: Why would they put it under a basket?
Ben: We have to imagine in 1st century AD, when Jesus is telling the story.
Ben: Lamps back then were essentially candles, and so you would hide the candle under a basket until you needed it, lest the wind should blow and extinguish the flame.
Ben: And so the reality here is that putting a lamp under a basket will prevent it from getting blown out, but the price for such protection is darkness.
Ben: That's what Jesus is getting at.
Ben: And so why do Christians avoid spending themselves for the world self-protection?
Ben: It's the same reason.
Ben: We find ourselves wanting to hoard our energies, because we're all tired, we're all exhausted.
Ben: We find ourselves wanting to just be with the people that are actually life-giving and energizing for us, lest we should have one more situation or person in our life that actually draws from our energy.
Ben: The key of salt and the key of light is that you expend yourselves for the sake of others.
Ben: That's the way that it works.
Ben: How many of you you don't have to show hands have holiday salt shakers?
Ben: I grew up with these, okay, so Christmas time you get a little Santa Claus salt and pepper shaker, maybe.
Ben: Thanksgiving, you got cute little turkeys, right, maybe, if you're like varsity level, you got like little chubby cupids for Valentine's Day and things like that, right, and you bring them out for a season days, weeks, months, maybe.
Ben: You put them away and the salt stays in those salt shakers until you bring them out next season.
Ben: Brothers and sisters, many of us live like that.
Ben: We will give ourselves seasonally, we'll show up for our neighbors, maybe once in a while, but by and large, the salt remains in the salt shaker.
Ben: It's useless, therefore, to those around us, because the Christian who refuses to give of themselves for the good of their neighbor is, to quote Jesus, no longer good for anything.
Ben: Don't shoot the messenger, I'm quoting Jesus.
Ben: He said it, and so we cannot remain in our cozy little salt shakers while the world around us is dying of social decay.
Ben: What kind of a preservative would we be?
Ben: And so all of life to Jesus is a discipleship.
Ben: To Jesus for the sake of others.
Ben: But what happens is that Christians get on a high horse and they critique the culture around them.
Ben: But John Stott says it like this when society goes bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world.
Ben: But should we not rather reproach ourselves?
Ben: No one blames unsalted meat for going bad.
Ben: It cannot do anything else.
Ben: The real question to ask is where is the salt?
Ben: This is why our new city communities have an increasingly mission or outward orientation to them.
Ben: Now, I don't want to stand before Jesus one day and have Him evaluate my life which will happen and Him look at me and say, hey, you did a great job of building community at New City, orlando, but it was no longer good for anything because it existed for itself.
Ben: I don't want to hear that one day.
Ben: You don't want to hear that one day.
Ben: And so at New City, we have circles which are the space that encourage and challenge us to be a contrast community, not to compromise, but we have communities as the space to encourage and to challenge one another, to be for the common good, not to become ingrown, and so our communities exist for the sake of others.
Ben: And this is a significant piece, because, you have to hear me, though, I believe Jesus is patient with us as we're learning to do this.
Ben: We really are learning to do this together.
Ben: He leans in with a patience towards us because it brings joy to his heart when we turn ourselves from inward towards outward and say, oh, we don't need to circle the wagons, there are other people who actually matter besides me, and my family and my tribe Brings Jesus great joy.
Ben: And so how do we live as a contrast?
Ben: Community for the common good.
Ben: This is where I want to close.
Ben: With salt, we arrest social decay.
Ben: As light, we dispel darkness.
Ben: That's the two things, right there, and so what this looks like is negatively, we oppose the spread of evil wherever we are.
Ben: Positively, we bear goodness and truth and beauty wherever we are.
Ben: That's what it looks like for us to be salt and light, and so some of you feel more comfortable with one of these over the other.
Ben: You love calling out our culture for its problems, usually from behind your smartphone.
Ben: Others of you love to just put a positive spin on everything and would never speak anything negative about what's going on around you.
Ben: Whichever one is more comfortable for you, lean the other way, lean into the discomfort.
Ben: That's the way forward.
Ben: The first thing I want to point out is that we must oppose evil.
Ben: There's a German theologian named Helmut Tiliki.
Ben: If anybody's looking for boy names, helmut, try it.
Ben: He was a professor in Germany.
Ben: He was removed from that position because he colluded with and consorted with the Confessing Church, which was the underground church resistant to the Nazi regime under Hitler.
Ben: And so Helmut Tiliki said this.
Ben: He said to look at some Christians, one would think that their ambition is to be the honeypot of the world.
Ben: They sweeten and sugar the bitterness of life with an all too easy conception of a loving God.
Ben: But Jesus, of course, did not say you are the honey of the world.
Ben: He said you are the salt of the earth.
Ben: Salt bites, and the unadulterated message of the judgment and grace of God has always been a biting thing.
Ben: I want you to reflect right now when is the word and spirit leading you to have the biting of salt rather than the sweetness of honey in your life.
Ben: What might that look like for you?
Ben: What issue, what topic, what person, what relative?
Ben: What would that look like for you?
Ben: We live in a day where people are outspoken about injustice and evil in all of its forms.
Ben: This is a good thing, but the problem is that there's a way to speak against evil that in and of itself is evil, because it's filled with self-righteousness and hatred.
Ben: We've experienced this, we've witnessed this.
Ben: You see, only the cross of Jesus Christ can free us to call out evil without ourselves becoming evil.
Ben: And this is how it does it.
Ben: The cross first condemns before it comforts.
Ben: In other words, it calls you a sinner before it calls you forgiven.
Ben: In other words, the cross of Jesus Christ says that it took the death of the perfect Son of God in order to rescue me from my own propensity toward selfishness.
Ben: Only when you have a posture like that can you appropriately speak about the evils around you, when you're acquainted with the evil within you.
Ben: In 1900s, early 1900s, in London, the Times of London posed this question what's wrong with the world today?
Ben: To which the well-known author GK Chesterton responded with a one-sentence essay which read this Dear Sir, I am Yours, gk Chesterton, that's the posture I'm talking about.
Ben: That's good, old-fashioned Christianity right there, which says the fault line between good and evil is not drawn between us versus them, it's not drawn between the oppressor and the oppressed, it's not drawn between black and white, or the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or the on and on and on.
Ben: The fault line between good and evil runs down the middle of all of us, which means we all stand in utter need of redemption and rescue from outside of ourselves, and so it's only the cross that can break us and make us whole again, and only the cross that can set us free to actually oppose evil wherever we find it, without ourselves becoming evil through self-righteousness and hatred of the other.
Ben: This is essential, and the reason why it's essential is because, then, the gratitude of the guilty who have been forgiven, the joy of the slave who's been set free, the purity of the shameful made clean, the peace of orphans who now call God Father, all of that actually enables us to bear goodness, beauty and truth wherever we go, which is the second part of being salt and light.
Ben: We must bear goodness, beauty and truth for the common good.
Ben: I wish I had time, but time fails me to tell you stories of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Christians in South Africa after apartheid.
Ben: Or the pastor Andre Trocme, who led Les Chambones, which was a place of hospitality for Jewish refugees during World War II.
Ben: Or the American Civil Rights Movement, led predominantly by Christians, martin Luther King Jr being the preeminent one among them.
Ben: Or the overthrow of communism in East Germany.
Ben: When the Berlin Wall came down, little do many of us know it was actually started by a prayer movement called Prayers and Candles.
Ben: That happened in Leipzig before it actually fell.
Ben: You see, christians have always been able to be a form of arresting societal decay and dispelling the darkness through just a faithful obedience to Jesus.
Ben: And so I just want to end with a call to ordinary faithfulness, of embodying the Beatitudes wherever you are in all of life, to being the kind of people who live with an open-handed trust that God will fill our emptiness so we don't have to grasp and grab for it ourselves.
Ben: To be the kind of people who grieve and lament for the brokenness within us and around us.
Ben: To be the kind of people who know that we have influence, but use that influence with authority and vulnerability.
Ben: To be the kind of people who ache for God to set things right, starting with ourselves and then moving out from here to the world around us.
Ben: To be the kind of people who move with a tender heart, with an unshockable mercy to those who are near with need.
Ben: To be the kind of people who refuse distraction from an undivided desire for God.
Ben: To be the kind of people who reach past differences wherever they might find them in order to make peace, rather than being those who just keep peace.
Ben: And to be the kind of people who embrace suffering as the joyful outcome of truly identifying with Jesus wherever we are.
Ben: If we became that kind of a people, if in our good work and in our witness and in our good works, if in all of those areas of our life, if we became that kind of people, it would become true of us that what William Willamon says.
Ben: He says that the most eloquent testimony to the reality of the resurrection is not an empty tomb or a well orchestrated pageant on Easter Sunday.
Ben: The most eloquent testimony to the reality of the resurrection is a group of people whose life together is so radically different, so completely changed from the way the world builds a community, that there can be no explanation other than that something decisive has happened in history, new City.
Ben: Let us be that kind of a community.
Ben: Let's pray, father.
Ben: We need mercy.
Ben: The only motive to be zealous about good work, so that our neighbors would see them and give glory to you, our Father in heaven, is if we cared less about our own glory and more about your glory.
Ben: Set us free from self preoccupation.
Ben: Set us free from self idolization.
Ben: Set us free from the idols of comfort and individualism and consumerism, so we can be a contrast community for the common good.
Ben: Help us, father.
Ben: We cannot do this alone.
Ben: In fact, trying to do this alone would be prohibitive in and of itself.
Ben: So, jesus, we follow you, we get in behind you and we go wherever you lead.
Ben: It's for your sake.
Ben: We pray, amen.