Fifth Sunday of Epiphany
By Marty Martinage MDiv II
Seminarian, the Memorial Church of Harvard University
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Feb. 8, 2026)
Will you pray with me? Holy God who opens our eyes to your infinite mercy, may we receive the gift of your word with gratitude, and may the words of my heart bring your mercy and truth into the hearts of these your gathered people. Amen.
This sermon has had several dozen opening lines over the past few weeks. There was a version of it that opened with a rendition of “Light of the World” from the musical Godspell. A musical that in my childhood home was the soundtrack for the Lenten season we're about to enter into. There was a version that opened with an overly involved history of salt mining practices in ancient Palestine, and a version about that salt melts ice line that the more lectionary-aware marchers among us have been putting on protest signs. And a version that never quite made it past Elizabeth's excellent title pitch of salt, light, acid, heat.
But now I meet you with this opening, which I think can be best described as a confession. I tried to outrun this sermon. Back during the fall term, I thought I was incredibly clever, and I checked the lectionary for this Sunday, knowing I'd be preaching. And I wrote an entire exegetical paper on the first line of today's gospel lesson for my intro to the New Testament class. You are the salt of the Earth. But if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.
I got 14 pages out of that because I was once an English major. And in those 14 pages, I tried to pull off a series of complicated arguments to show that because of the way the water cycle works, when Jesus says, to put it in “Godspell” terms, that salt that's lost its flavor hasn't got much in its favor, he doesn't actually mean that. Because that would imply that God has expectations for us, and that there might be consequences for failing to live up to those expectations. And I grew up on nice, patient Jesus, and frustrating, demanding Jesus still kind of freaked me out.
And then I shelved that paper until earlier this week, thinking that I'd just cut some academic jargon and add some jokes, and I'd have a lovely little sermon. I'd done the thing we were supposed to do at Div School, or at least I thought I had. I thought the discomfort of this verse was the trampling bit, that the part of Jesus' words that was challenging was the implication that we could mess up so bad that we lose our saltiness and never get it back.
So I wrote about that, and I tried to blaze a shortcut through the confusing forest of salt metaphors and get back to the comfort of God is love. Don't worry about it. There's still a sermon in that paper somewhere, and maybe someday I'll preach it, but my cleverly argued assurances feel empty now. I worry that I was trying to impress God, or if I'm honest, I was trying to impress you all with my ability to wriggle out of a theological bind.
But as that same New Testament professor reminded me earlier this week, that's not my job, at least not when I'm up here in these robes. When I step into this pulpit, my job is to be a trustworthy driver through all the complications of our shared sacred texts, but importantly, that does not mean getting us to our location as quickly as possible. It means getting us there safely. Put another way, we're going to get to a place with this lesson where God is love and where following Christ means loving your neighbor because I truly believe that those ideas are at the core of every single lesson we share in this church, including today's.
But we got to take the long way because the ignore the fact that Jesus' ministry started with the word of repent shortcut, as appealing as it can seem, isn't theologically or spiritually safe or satisfying. The problem I think wasn't that Jesus's words suggest an absence of God's grace. I think these words are almost overwhelmingly challenging to me because of how grace-filled they are. It's not you are like salt or you could be salt, but it's the same language from the Beatitudes, the beautiful, weird, comforting, unsettling assurances that we heard last week. Blessed are. You are. You are. You are.
And I look at us, and I can't help but think, are you sure? Are you sure we aren't salt that has lost its flavor and is no longer good for anything and must be trampled underfoot? I look at myself, and I say, are you sure? But to take Jesus at his word, we are salt. The purpose of salt is to be salty. We are human. If the purpose of salt is to be salty, I guess the point of being human is to be human.
And what is it to be human? If we use the Beatitudes, which flow directly into today's lesson as our guidepost, I think it's fair to say that to be human, or at least to be a blessed human, which I think is kind of the goal with this whole Sunday morning thing, is to love. To love this world enough to mourn its losses, to love the least among you enough that your desire for righteousness and justice burns like thirst. To love those who have hurt you enough to offer mercy. To love God and neighbor enough that when we uphold the least of God's commandments, we do it even when it challenges us. To love loving enough to be reviled and persecuted for its sake.
We are salt. Being salt means loving one another. I fear that we might be salt that is losing its flavor because I fear that we, that I, haven't pushed up against the brutal edge of what it means to love my neighbor. I look to Minneapolis, where a woman, a woman who won the same undergraduate poetry prize my friends and I applied for, a woman whose marriage looked like my mom's marriage, she saw children being torn from their families by the forces in power, and she fought back against those forces until it literally killed her. You are the salt. I look to the protests where Renee and Alex's faces have been lovingly stenciled onto posters demanding justice. You are the salt. And then I notice how few of our posters mention Keith Porter Jr., a Black man shot by an off-duty DHS officer on New Year's Eve or the 32 named people who died in ICE detention in 2025. Are we the salt?
I look to the way teachers and lawyers and social workers have stepped in to care for children whose parents have been arrested or killed. I see the salt. And then I remember these fragments of poems that I read earlier this week, written in code by a young girl in her diary. "Why won't anyone make it stop?" she wrote. "Why can no one help me? I need them, everyone, all to see." Next to this last line, she pasted in a clipping from a magazine interview with Princess Diana, where she said, "I still think the biggest disease this world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved."
I remember how many familiar names are in the Department of Justice database, where I found that diary. I remember how in our first lesson today, the prophet gives the instruction to lift up your voice like a trumpet and announce to the people their sins. I remember how James Baldwin said that the children are always ours, every single one of them all over the globe. And that in the second off-omitted clause of that sentence, he concluded that he was beginning to suspect that anyone who is incapable of recognizing this is incapable of morality. I have begun to suspect that if we have failed to protect all this world's children, if we have failed to listen to this announcement of our sins, we must surely be like salt that has lost its flavor and has no use and is trampled underfoot.
But beloved people, there's a reason Christ didn't stop at the salt. I see now that to continue down this path is to hurl ourselves headlong under a bushel. And no one, after lighting a lamp, puts it under the bushel basket. God made us to love, and we have not always loved our neighbors as ourselves. God made us to love, and God did not make us to be perfect, which is not to say that we do not owe one another repentance or that it doesn't matter that we have done things we ought not to have done and have left undone things which we ought to have done. We must account for these things.
But God made us to love. God did not make us to be perfect. And if sitting in the shame of our imperfections and our failings keeps us from getting up and trying again, they are keeping us from loving. The only way our failures could make us like salt that has lost its flavor is if we allow our shame about them to keep us from doing the only thing we were made to do, to love.
This idea I think was explained pretty well a couple hundred years ago by Julian of Norwich. And the first time I read this parable that she accounts in Revelations of Divine Love, I started crying in lecture. But she recounts a parable that was shown to her spiritually and bodily likeness, whatever that means. In this vision, she saw a Lord and a servant. And the Lord looks at his servant lovingly and kindly and sends him to a certain place to do his will. And the servant does not just walk, but leaps forward and runs in great haste in loving anxiety to do his Lord's will. And then in Julian's words, "He falleth into a slade and taketh full great hurt. And then he moaneth and groaneth and wailth and struggleth." But he is unable to get up and cannot help himself in any way.
And the greatest trouble here, Julian suggests, is that the lack of help is kind of in the servant's head. His loving Lord is right there, close to him, ready to be the source of all help, but the servant doesn't realize this. He has turned his mind to feeling and must endure in woe. Or if medieval mystics aren't quite your bag, we can turn to the late great Andrea Gibson, I think of as the patron saint of queer Mainers. In their poem, What Love is, they tell the story of the first reading that their girlfriend's parents ever attended. Moments after their partner has burst into the green room, beaming at the fact that her parents, two years after she'd first come out to them, had actually shown up to her partner's show, a pair of activists asked Gibson to announce a protest against fracking in the state where they were performing.
Gibson immediately agrees and then watches their girlfriend's face drop. "What's wrong?" I asked, writes Gibson. "Honey, fracking is why my dad has a job," she said. "What? I can't not announce the protest," I told her. "I know," she said. "It would be a crime against my conscience." She said, "I know." Heart as big as the Titanic sinking to the bottom of the sea. And they get on stage, and they recount this, saying, "For 75 minutes, I spoke about nothing but love, how everything but I love you is small talk."
And at the end of that show, Gibson didn't announce the protest. They walked up to the green room a hypocrite, a failed activist, with my face in my hands on the couch. When her father burst through the door, tears like a giant's tears covering his face. "I'm 76 years old," he said, "and I just tonight figured out what love is."
The poem closes like this. "There is no moral of this story. There is only light and sadness. There is no moral of this story. It is just a moment in my life where I did something wrong. And the Earth, who had never not known what love is, held me anyway." "You are the salt of the Earth," Jesus says. "You were made to love one another, and there is nothing you can do and nothing you can say that will change that or take away your ability to do that."
Our lives are full of moments where we have done something wrong, and God, who has never not known what love is, holds us anyway. Not because that wrongdoing doesn't matter, it does, and we must repent of that wrongdoing and try to repair the harm we have done. God holds us anyway because we are of no use if we spend our lives moaning in pits or fading under bushels or lying on the ground waiting to be trampled underfoot. We are of no use if we let our shame at our human failings keep us from doing what God made us to do. I don't know why we're given this grace. I am nearly overwhelmed by the feeling of how little we deserve it, and yet you are the salt of the Earth. You are made to love one another and you must. Amen.