Stay Salty, Shine Bright (Isaiah 58 ✦ Matthew 5)

"30 years of light” ©2023 Adrienn Krahl

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on February 8 2026. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here (sermon begins at 46:30). The sermon with captions may be viewed here or below . Scripture texts:  Isaiah 58:1-12, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16,  Matthew 5:13-20

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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you my God. Amen.

Good morning, Beloved of God. As we begin, I want us to hold this truth that adrienne maree brown articulated which has been rolling around in my body all week, all these past few weeks, for months, for the past 10 years: “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight as we continue to pull back the veil.” 

It’s hard to sit with all the alls and believe that things aren’t getting worse, right? And yet we know it’s true: the longer humanity perseveres, the more iterations of the cycle we have to witness and learn from: from hard fought revolutions and the periods of reconstruction and world-building that follow, to seasons of relative peace and progress when the ripe fruits of labor are sweetest and juiciest, to the momentary ease of napping in the expectation that it will always be this good, even as powers and principalities reorganize against us, until the time comes when we’re once again shaken from our slumber by the violence of unrelenting forces which demand from us an even more relentless hope. 

There is nothing new under the sun, nor is any of it especially surprising to our Maker, Mother God, nor even to students and survivors of history. Nothing that is secret will not be made known. Let us hold each other tight as we pull back the veil, because the things we have seen and have yet to see need all of our witness, all our prophetic and parental and personal presence and action. 

And let us be thankful and attend to God’s word, which remains both living and active across the ages, especially today. For in both Isaiah and Matthew, we are given clear permission and decisive instruction on what precisely is required of us in these moments of revelation and revolution.

What are we to do when we learn that one of ICE’s field directors -- a man who spends his weekdays overseeing the rampant violations of person and property, the detentions and deaths, the taking of babies and the terrorizing of neighborhoods -- steps into the pulpit each Sunday to declare, as a pastor, his nearness to God? 

How are we to respond to a farcical prayer breakfast where the president to whom so many of our christian siblings now pray, spent 77 minutes extolling not the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, nor any other god other than himself, with occasional offerings of praise to his personally army of federal agents who are “beating the crap” out of our neighbors?

What is required of us after taking in all we can stomach of the newly released files, whose pages are filled with unspeakable horrors committed by so many people with so much power that they cannot all be prosecuted without the whole system collapsing -- as if immediate and total collapse is not precisely what any such system deserves and demands? 

And what about all the people of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Venezuela, Ukraine and other bombed and genocided places that’ve simply vanished from headlines under the weight of all of this?  When so much is so rapidly uncovered, what are we to do?   

We are to “Shout it out, and not hold back!” To do as Isaiah proclaimed, and barge into their services, like Nekima Levy-Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen did in St Paul, whistles ringing and voices raised, to Name the open rebellion of God’s people, the vacuity of their piety, and expose the sin of those who claim to seek God day in and day out while utterly forsaking God’s justice!” 

And we are to remember and remind ourselves and each other, over and over, that “the worship God wants, the worship God requires, isn’t our performance of rituals in Sunday worship or our self-righteous prayers for everyone else — but our resolute determination to “loose the chains of injustice that agents of hate tighten around the bloody ankles and wrists of those they disappear. To break the yoke of the oppressor who’s busy breaking the backs of the oppressed; to set people free from concentration camps and trafficking rings, and never resign ourselves to their reality or their replication.

The sort of Diabolical evil we are uncovering requires the direct engagement of our whole selves: Body, mind, spirit and imagination. It is not enough to simply want it to stop; it must be stopped. 
 
But and also. But and also, Beloved, there is always an also: There are myriad ways to break the machinery and arrest the motility of evil’s many permutations, not just with words that cast blessings and curses (though those are important), words that liberate and bind up, but with things like salt and light. 

So let me tell you a story: Back in 2002 when I bought my first car -- a real clunker from a lemon shop I paid $1200 for in $20-a-month installments -- I had no idea the destructive power of salt. I knew it had some rust around the frame, but my dad, who famously fancies himself a car aficionado but notoriously is not one, said it was fine, normal, no big deal and I drove it off the lot. Well I learned the truth real fast the very next winter when, in the middle of literally nowhere Nebraska, 60 miles from any whisper of a town and before the ubiquity of the personal cell phone, one of my wheels started wobbling side to side on the highway. Not a tire! A wheel. And, well, the long story short is I was rescued by some very suspicious but thankfully harmless truckers and their gal pals who drove me to the next town where I called my dad who picked me up in the next-next town and got me home. A couple days later, after my dad and a neighbor who owns a tow truck went to pick up my car from where I’d abandoned it, another neighbor who ran the only auto shop in town found that the entire undercarriage was rusted from years of driving on salted roads without regular car washes. And that wheel -- bearing, and bore, and bolts oh my! -- was rust, disappearing. 

A couple weeks later I drove back to school in the boatlike Ford Taurus another neighbor -- the third, if you’re counting -- simply gifted to me, across the long, winding back roads and county highways that mapped the bulk of my straight-shot 12 hour drive between north central Nebraska and Northern Minnesota where street lamps are nonexistent and you find your way by the strength of your high beams and the brightness of the stars and moon across the ink-black sky. It took my breath away — still does, in fact — to make my way out of the light pollution of big cities and feel like I’m in the darkest darkness imaginable, until my eyes adjust and I realize there is more light, unquenchable light, than you can conceive when turn off your brights and look to the sky. When the moon is full, it’s bright enough to light the road half a mile ahead or more. 

What I’m telling you is this: If you pour a pound of salt into a gas tank, you’ll destroy the car in record time, but it doesn’t take all that to turn a vehicle into inoperable rust. It just takes sustained saltiness: Year after year, winter after winter, new salt continuing the work of last year’s salt, until the whole machine erodes into an orange-brown dust of nothing. Salt melts ICE and also rusts their trucks. 

What I’m also telling you is what the sages and survivors have been telling us for eons: that “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness” because just one single flame can both defy and define the darkness. Beloved, no darkness, not even all the darkness in the world, can ever extinguish the light of a distant star or our very own sun; of a raging fire or its very last ember: Darkness can neither contain nor consume it. Light is light, and it always lights.

What does this mean here and now, on the ground? Well, as a lifelong champion of the underdog, as a still-and-always Minnesotan who is now also an outside interloper who only gets to visit and bear witness to the burden my friends are bearing under siege, here is what I know to be true of salt and light and prophetic witness; This is the mystery of Gospel revealed to me through years of organizing plus one short visit to Minneapolis, mystery that once flickered like stars but now blinds me like the sun:

Gospel is not just the truth we speak to power or the preachers we interrupt at the pulpit. Gospel is a kingless and leaderful organism that shapes itself by and for and around the needs of each cell in it. It is an unquenchable, uncontainable network of lights as decentralized and defined as constellations in the night sky; It is as debilitating to empire as calcified salt is to cars, and it is always evolving and rapidly adapting to empire’s slower machinations. Gospel is creators creating.

In Luke 10 it looked like Jesus sending out 72 disciples in pairs of two, each to a different town with its own particular needs and unique relationship to occupying forces, but all with the same mandate to feed and clothe and heal and liberate people into communities that feed and heal and liberate more people. 

In Minneapolis it is a loosely connected network of dozens of hyper-local mutual aid hubs operating under that very same gospel mandate, in ways and means as unique as each block of neighbors who are co-organizing to get it done. 

In 1 Kings, it was Elijah and the Widow Zeraphath whose jar of flour never ran out, and in Matthew 14 it will be Jesus feeding 5,000 people from seven loaves of bread and a few small fishes. 

But in Minneapolis it is Somali and Latine and Indigenous elders showing up 24/7 to nourish the thousands who keep vigil day and night at multiple memorial sites, with endless trays of fry bread and samosas and tamales, and bottomless cups of wild rice soup and spiced chai; And it is restaurants closing for business but staying open on a donation-only basis to feed a hungry community without paying the taxes that fund their occupation.

In Isaiah 58 it is God’s declaration that worship is feeding the hungry, opening our houses to the homeless, clothing the naked, and refusing to hide from the least of these as if they are not ours; and in Acts 2 such worship will shape itself into the sale of all property and the pooling of all wealth, so that any and all who come may be baptised into Christ, and into the reciprocity and mutuality of beloved community.

But in Minneapolis it is thousands and thousands of regular people like you and me, across dozens of neighborhoods collecting handwarmers and mittens and gas masks and goggles to hand out anywhere people gather; it is their constant delivery of groceries, the patrolling of schools, the ferrying of families to and from legal hearings and medical appointments; it is networks of volunteer doctors and nurses taking medicine to the sick who cannot safely leave their homes; it is midwives and doulas delivering babies by facetime with people in labor who cannot even open their doors lest they be taken. 

All of is radical and miraculous and as beautiful to behold as the terror is to witness. But friends, it is also utterly practical and entirely replicable. This is what organizers asked us clergy who came from all over the country to take back to our congregations: Everything they’re doing is replicable. 

Which is not an invitation to copy and paste all the thousands of ways Minnesotans are showing up with and for each other like colonies of bees or ants, like murmurations of birds in flight and formation. Rather, it is a call to replicate the movement, to gather into our own colonies, to get in formation, not just to create a thousand more threads of connection, but because we are Creators, connected. 

In both Isaiah and Matthew, from both the Prophet and Christ, the language in today’s texts is clear: Neither commands us to do something, but declare to us who and what we already are and have eternally been. 

In Isaiah 58, when we break the chains of injustice and liberate the captives and the oppressed, we do not shine the light that breaks the dawn, we are the light that breaks the dawn. When we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless, we don’t just flip on the porch light that pierces the darkness; we are that light. 

In Matthew 5, Jesus does not ask us to scatter the salt of preservation or corrosion; he says we are the salt that preserves and erodes! Neither does he tell us to shine the light of the world on this or that, he declares that we are the Light of the World, a City on a Hill no darkness can hide. 

Which is to say my friends, we are not called to carry the gospel, to preach the gospel, to spread the gospel here or there: Beloved of God, hear me when I say: We are Gospel. We are Good News.

Which is why empire hates and hunts us down, and also why it will never win.

Every thread of connection woven, every channel carved underground by mutual aid, every constellation of care created corrodes the gears of the imperial apparatus and forces the powers to try something else which will also and inevitably fail. Every mouth fed, every family protected, every foe turned friend welcomed to the fold, not only defies empire and all its depravities, but defines it as anything and everything but Gospel. 

And when Gospel spreads, no fear, no threat, no promise of power over others can compete with the belovedness of reciprocity, mutual care, and belonging that everyone deserves, and which I know —  because I’ve read it on these pages and have seen it with my own eyes — I know everyone can have. Another world is possible; we are already watching it become! Praise God!

And my prayer for us, Beloved, is that we will — wherever, however, and in all the ways we can — do the same: stay salty and shine bright, that life may keep becoming on earth as it is Heaven. 

Amen, Aṣẹ, Aho: Let this be so. Thanks be to God!