Matthew 5:13-20
Epiphany 5 / Year A
Jesus
said, “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can
its saltiness be restored?”
Something amazing is unfolding right before our
eyes. It began a little over three
months ago as a small symbolic undertaking which attracted minor attention but
has exploded on the national scene over time, altering people’s lives and
perspectives. Several of you asked me
about it on those Sundays way back when we used to gather for public
worship. I told you then I was aware of
it. To be honest, I had not quite caught on to the
impact it was having nor did I anticipate what it was becoming. I am, of course, speaking about the 19
Buddhist monks and their loyal dog Aloka who now are near the completion of
their 2,300 hundred mile, 120-day Peace Walk from their home center in Dallas, Texas
to Washington, DC.
The reception they received as they walked through
Richmond left me speechless and nearly brought me to tears: thousands upon
thousands of people lining the streets to see them, more thousands walking with
them, if only for a few miles, so many the Interstate 95 bridge over the James
River was completely shut down to accommodate them all. It was the 100th day of the Walk
through 10 states and all manner of weather conditions. But, as the monks posted, “We do not walk
alone. We walk together with every
person whose heart has opened to peace, whose spirit has chosen kindness, whose
daily life has become a garden where understanding grows.”
As the monks walk, they rely of the kindness of others
to support them. People hand them
flowers, wave and smile, sit in silent prayer, bring the sick and infirmed to
be in their presence. Local fire and
police representatives greet them and offer them their department badges, and mayors
and governors welcome them with official proclamations. This is how one Richmond reporter described
it:
Hundreds became thousands. A river of peace flowed through the streets –
people of all ages, all backgrounds, all walks of life, united in the spirit of
compassion, mindfulness, and hope.
The monk’s Facebook page now has nearly 3 million
followers as it grows in size daily. It
was a mere 400,000 just a few weeks ago when the group passed through South
Carolina. Alok’s page has nearly a
million followers, making him just slightly less popular than our very own
Tillie the Therapy Dog. If you want to
gauge what the Walk means to people, just read some of the comments on any of
their posts. Here is just one:
This is a most beautiful gesture in a time when our
country is so full of hatred, anger, strife, desperation, and
hopelessness! We need more kindness,
compassion, and love, as so many here seem to have forgotten those simple
concepts of humanity.
My colleague Sam Sheridan, who is the Rector of St.
Paul’s Church in Petersburg, posted this:
We drove all over
Petersburg, Colonial Heights, and Chester so our children could see the… monks
pass by. They don’t know what it is,
they don’t know what it means. But
that’s the same as anything in their lives right now. Our parenting philosophy is a lot of let’s
show them what we care about and as they’re able we’ll tell them why.
Here is how Sam
describes what he found standing with others in the freezing cold outside a
Target store in Chester:
I saw longing in
literally thousands of faces… People
want peace. They want someone willing to
call for it without naming an enemy.
Because violence is the enemy.
Our neighbors are not our problem.
Our problems are our problem… I
think most of us ache and yearn and long for someone to do something that isn’t
cruel or mean or hostile. We want
something other than what we see on TV.
We want to disagree without needing an enemy. We’re willing to stand freezing with
strangers for just a glimpse of someone walking by so that we can believe, even
for a moment, that another way is possible…
Jesus walked like that. No
army. No throne. No clever rhetoric designed to destroy his
opponents. Just a man on foot, teaching
about the Kingdom of God, healing the sick, eating with sinners, washing
feet. And people lined the roads to see
him too.
From the
first-hand accounts I have read and in listening to folks I know, the same word
seems to come up again and again as people describe what they glean from the
Walk for Peace: hope. It is hopeful to
see that just one person – or in this case, one small group – doing something seemingly
so ordinary – walking in silence – can have such an extraordinary impact. It is amazing (to use Jesus’ image) to see
what being the salt of the earth can do.
I can’t tell you
how many people over the last few months have asked me what we can do in response
to the ugliness we see in our country and throughout our world. We feel so helpless. We feel like salt that has lost its taste,
that we no longer can make a difference, like we are in what the prophet Isaiah
in today’s first reading called a “parched place.”
As the Walk for
Peace nears its destination I am in awe of what it has accomplished, how it has
touched so many lives, and drawn out something in us numbed, if not long
dormant. For me, at least, it suggests I
too can be a little salty by setting myself at simple tasks which make the
world a slightly better place, a place more like what I imagine to be God’s
dream for the human family. Neither you
nor I can stem the tide of all that is amiss all by ourselves. But we can take one step and then another and
then another, trusting… hoping… believing… our little part… our little dash of
salt… serves a purpose; that in the end it contributes to a better end.
Allow me to end
with the words we heard from Isaiah which serve both as a pleading prayer and a
source of hope:
The Lord will guide you continually,
and
satisfy your needs in parched places,
and
make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail. Isa. 58:11
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