2023.02.05 | Salt & Light
“Salt & Light”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
February 5, 2023
Matt. 5:13−20 (NRSV) and en espanol LBLA
Today’s scripture is taken from a section of Matthew’s gospel known as the Sermon on the Mount. The Matthean community was primarily comprised of Jewish-Christians and Gentiles who were familiar with the Jewish religion, so Matthew explained who Jesus was and what his ministry was about, in reference to Judaism and the Hebrew scriptures.
Jesus was, in the eyes of Matthew, “the New Moses.” Like Moses who received and delivered the Ten Commandments to the Jews, Jesus received and delivered the eight Beatitudes to the disciples.
At the time when Jesus walked the earth, Israel had been under foreign occupation for almost 600 years. Imagine trying to figure out what it meant to be a Jew in your homeland when it had been ruled by foreign occupiers for almost 600 years. How does one show up faithfully in that context?
The Pharisees were divided in their views about that question. One faction, the Zionists, favored taking up arms and trying to drive the Romans out, even though they would have probably been crushed by their opponents.
Another faction, the larger of the two, favored hyper-vigilance toward the law and religious practice. I call them Pharisaic fundamentalists. This group taught that if all Jews adhered to the priestly laws and practices, then God would liberate Israel from Rome, and all would be well. (Edwin Chr van Driel, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A, Vol. 1. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 2010, p. 335.)
Jesus offered a third option by declaring that his followers were already the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
Jesus didn’t say, if you want to be my disciple, then you have to become salt and light. No, he simply said, you are salt and light.
It is our being, and not our doing that makes us who we are, Jesus said. We don’t earn our identity as salt or light, nor do we earn God’s grace or our salvation. God has already done this work for us and given us these gifts.
So the challenge for us is to receive this good news, so that we may enjoy and live more whole and holy lives.
II
What did Jesus mean by saying: you are the salt of the earth?
The answer has to do with the significance and versatility of salt.
Few substances have been more valued over the eons than salt. Egyptians used salt to season their food and embalm their dead. There are 30 references to salt in the Bible. There are at least 14,000 known uses of the substance. Nobody can live without salt.
The procurement of salt has been formative for the San Francisco Bay Area. The Native Americans who inhabited this area long before the Spanish arrived learned to harvest salt from the marshes. Tribes from as far away as the Sierra Nevada and tribes from the interior valleys came to our shoreline for the sole reason of collecting “solar salt” from natural reservoirs along the Bay front.
When the mineral frontier opened in the late 1840s and silver was discovered in 1859 in the Comstock Lode of Nevada, the value of salt grew exponentially from $2 per ton to $162 per ton. This happened because salt was required to extract metal from ore.
The commercial production of salt in the Bay Area began in earnest in the 1890s and continues to this day. Most of the salt works were located in San Mateo, Redwood City, Newark, and Hayward. Back in the day all of the salt works were owned and operated by family farmers. Today, what’s left of the salt works are owned and operated by Cargil.
The Hayward salt works were founded by a Swedish immigrant named Andrew August Ohleson, who changed his name to Oliver after he immigrated to the U.S. Andrew Oliver was among the countless “Gold Rushers” who migrated to California to seek his fortune in the Gold Country, and later migrated to Santa Cruz and then to the Bay Area when the rush turned to a bust.
Andrew bought property in the Eden Landing are in 1868, and farmed along the Mt. Eden shoreline for nearly a century, where he and his descendants farmed the salt flats until 1982, when Alden Oliver officially closed the Oliver Brothers Salt Company.
The Olivers, and other salt farmers like them, used farm equipment to dam up the shoreline in the spring, and then waited for nature to evaporate the trapped water during the summer months. The salt deposits left behind were shoveled into wheelbarrows by family members and day laborers of Chinese and Japanese descent, and transported to the salt barn where the raw salt was purified and prepared for shipping to commercial buyers.
At their peak in the 1920s, the Oliver family owned 1400 acres along the Eden shoreline and produced over 30,000 tons of salt annually, which they supplied to tanneries, food processors, and packing companies throughout Northern California.
Remnants of the salt ponds and barn are still evident at Eden Landing, and the Oliver mansion is now part of the HARD parks system. So it’s possible to take a walk around Eden Landing or scroll through the Oliver Salt Company website this afternoon, and learn more about the salt farming practices that the Olivers and other local families were engaged in for more than a century.
It’s also possible to volunteer with organizations like Save the Bay, and be part of local efforts to preserve and protect this part of our treasured environment. Over the years, Eden Church has sent several intergenerational groups to pick up trash, remove non-native plants, and learn more about the preservation of the Bay for generations to come.
III
Salt is central to the history and identity of Eden Church in that our major benefactor, Alden Oliver, one of two founders of the Oliver Brothers Salt Company, died in 1992 and left the majority of his estate to his nephew, Gordon, who upon his death, left 40 percent of his uncle’s legacy to Eden Church.
Most of the assets that were held in the Oliver Trust were commercial real estate holdings. Since Eden Church wasn’t in the commercial real estate business and didn’t want to get into it, the congregation decided to sell the properties over a period of 25½ years. Sixteen of those years were on my watch.
The Congregation spent an enormous amount of time during that 25½ year period discerning how best to steward the Oliver Gift. Some favored using 100 percent of the proceeds to improve the church property and endow the campus. Others favored putting 100 percent of the proceeds into a foundation, and sharing a fraction of the annual proceeds with local charities.
In the end, the Congregation decided to spend about half of the proceeds ($6.5M) renovating the campus and constructing Oliver Hall. The other half was split between the Eden Area Foundation ($5M) for charitable grant purposes, and; the rest ($1.5M) was invested in the Church’s building reserve, once the Oliver salt plant and ponds were sold in 2017.
Although the discernment process around the stewardship of the Oliver gift resembled the production of sausage, overall, I think the Congregation handled the Oliver legacy quite well. The campus was preserved and has since served another generation of Eden members and the community, and we are well-poised to continue to do so. The Foundation that we established in 1999 with $5M has since provided $5.265M in grants and scholarships, and is presently valued at a little over $5M today. And, the Congregation is about half-way to achieving our goal of endowing the Eden campus.
IV
Now let’s talk about light. Consider the life and witness of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and its founder, Fannie Lou Hamer. These folks were a true light to the nations.
In 1964, Fannie Lou Hammer and other Freedom Democrats challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention to admit persons of color to their delegation.
Mrs. Hamer was invited, with the group’s officers, to address the Convention's Credentials Committee. She accepted the invitation and then recounted the problems that she had experienced trying to register herself and others to vote, and said that if the Freedom Democrats were not seated for the convention, she questioned whether America was truly the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Later, Mrs. Hamer was invited to address the entire Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. As she stood before a vast convention room and millions of TV viewers, Mrs. Hamer described the countless ways that African-Americans in many US states were being prevented from voting on account of illegal testing, poll taxes, and intimidation tactics.
At the end of her speech, Hamer began singing “This Little Light of Mine,” a number that became her “signature song” in the civil rights movement. Many were moved to join in the singing, and were encouraged in the struggle by her faith, her witness, and her singing. (See Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: the Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Penguin, 1993.)
As a result of Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech, two delegates from the MFDP were given speaking rights at the Democratic Convention that year, and other members of the MFDP were seated as honorable guests. This decision unleashed a wave of change within the Democratic party, so that by 1968, the party adopted a clause in their rules demanding equality of representation from their states’ convention delegations.
Champions for justice like Fannie Lou Hamer have been a source of inspiration and encouragement to Eden Church over the years. Like her, our members and friends have always had a deep appreciation for the democratic process, the necessity of registering to vote, and the importance of being an educated voter. This is why we and partners, including Padres Unidos de Cherryland and My Eden Voice, have spent so much time over the years organizing voter registration and hosting voter education campaigns, especially among underrepresented demographic groups.
V
As we continue to reflect on Jesus’ declaration that his disciples ARE salt and light, we are reminded today of several ways that we who are part of Eden Church show up as salt and light, including the following:
1) as stewards of creation, who care for the environment and the wellbeing of all;
2) as trustees of a gift intended to strengthen the church and the wellbeing of children, youth and families in the Eden Area, and
3) as agents of change who dismantle the social structures that have kept people of color and other marginalized groups from the voting booths, the seats of power, and the more abundant life that God envisioned for all.
Let us remember as we confront the challenges that lay before us that Jesus didn’t say, you must become salt and light. No. He simply said, you are salt and light. We are salt and light. Let us receive this good news, and keep spicing up and lighting up the Eden Area! Amen.