What is the economic value of a church? We might not be accustomed to thinking of a church in terms of its economic value to its surrounding community. But University of Pennsylvania professor of social policy Ram Cnaan decided to measure the economic impact of a dozen Philadelphia churches. This required him to ask questions like: what is the value of a marriage saved? ($18,000) An addiction conquered? A suicide averted? ($19,600) A teenager taught right from wrong? His researchers counted up the value of weddings, funerals, social services, festivals, counseling services, preschools, charity work, and so on; they added up staff salaries and maintenance work; they calculated things like help finding jobs and training for leadership; they put values on more intangible benefits like a safer corner of a tough neighborhood, and added it all up for these 12 churches. They called the value of a church its “halo effect.” When they totaled it all, these 12 churches added up to $50,577,098 a year – an average halo effect of $4.2 million per church per year, for churches with expense budgets much, much less than that.
You bring the Body of Christ together, put us to work making change in our world, and we can do some amazing things. And all this happens in a society where church is less and less respected or valued as a contributing part of society. Fifty years ago, it was taken for granted that churches were positive influences in the community, and everyone was expected to belong to one. Now, it’s more usual NOT to belong to a church, and if the unchurched population that surrounds us thinks about churches at all, studies show that they are likely to think of us as intolerant, judgmental, narrow, old-fashioned, fundamentalist. Yet quietly, without fanfare, churches make a huge difference in people’s lives.
Which I think would make Jesus very happy, judging from the gospel today. Recall where we are in Matthew’s story: Jesus’ first act is to be baptized, where he hears a voice that says “You are my Son, Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” It is his own belovedness that becomes the foundation for everything he does. And now, in his first sermon (the Sermon on the Mount) he begins to pass that belovedness on to us, because he knows a great truth of human life: the experience of being loved changes us – it changes how we view ourselves and how we relate to other people.
If our gospel last week was Jesus beginning his ministry by blessing us, telling us that God’s love would be with us even in the darkest corners of our lives, so that we could work in partnership with God to bring God’s kingdom to earth, then today’s gospel is where he begins to tell us how to do this, how to be kingdom people, how to share God’s love with others so they also know they are beloved. But his instructions are unexpected – he doesn’t say, march out into the world and overwhelm those who disagree with sheer force of numbers, like a worldly king. He doesn’t say, frighten people into believing in him, he doesn’t say, put on great demonstrations of power and miracles; he talks about ordinary everyday things.
You are the salt of the earth, he tells us, you are the light of the world. They are curious metaphors, quiet things – a teaspoon of salt, a lamp on lampstand. So it helps us to unpack these metaphors a bit. If you are a chef, you know that salt has a very interesting quality. Jesus didn’t say “you are Sugar” or “you are Pepper.” If you add sugar to a dish, its predominant quality becomes sweetness. If you add pepper to a dish, the pepper calls attention to itself with spiciness. Salt is different: if you add salt to, say, chocolate chip cookies, they don’t taste salty – salt brings out the sweet flavor of the sugar and the round, full flavor of the butter – but if you leave out the salt, the whole cookie tastes flat and lifeless. If you add salt to meat, it makes the meat juicier, more tender. If you add it to vegetables, the flavor of the vegetables becomes crisper, more defined. We Americans eat too much salt (because we can afford to), but at its heart, in moderation, salt’s main contribution to a dish is not to overwhelm, but to support and enhance: it brings out the flavor that is already there, makes it richer, livelier.
A lamp lit and set on a lampstand is similar in some ways. You don’t light a lamp to look at the lamp – you light it so you can see everything around it – it lights up a whole house, as Jesus says, and makes it possible for us to carry on normal human activities even on a dark night. The light turns the grays and blacks, the shadows you can see on a dark night, into the colors of your home, words on a page, smiles on the faces of your family. It’s not the light we look at, it’s the things the light allows us to see.
Both salt and light simply create an environment so everything else can shine. So it is with us followers of Christ, says Jesus, we don’t exist for ourselves – we exist for the world around us – we are gifts given by God for the sake of the world. And if we are truly being who we are called to be – salt and light – we bring out the best in those around us.
Do we believe we can really do these things? Be salt and light for our communities? Let me tell you an amazing story that happened just this week in an Episcopal church. (This story is paraphrased from a story that appeared online at the Episcopal News Service.) Tuesday night, after warnings of overnight temperatures of 30 below zero, St. Mark's Church in Casper, Wyoming, decided to keep its doors open all night as an Emergency Warming Shelter for the community's homeless. The shelter, organized entirely through alerts on Facebook, spurred generous donors into action and volunteers into service, transforming St. Mark's parish hall into a well-stocked and welcoming venue within hours of the first Facebook alert. All day, a steady stream of families and volunteers poured through the church's back door, laden with sleeping bags, bedding, coats, gloves, hats and boxes of food. By mid-afternoon, a local small business owner commandeered the large commercial kitchen and began preparing vats of soup, along with hundreds of cookies & muffins. Throughout the evening mobile crews with carloads of coffee, cookies, coats and bedding scoured the city's underpasses, parking lots and out-of-the-way places in search of homeless people still outdoors, bringing people into the church so severely under-dressed for the weather that they never would have survived the night. (One interesting note: it was a semi-homeless man who came to volunteer who served as the best consultant for where and how to find this often invisible segment of the community.) Someone at the local radio and TV stations read about the emergency shelter on Facebook and reported it on the 10 pm news, and a homeless person came to the shelter and guided the volunteers to 18 freezing people huddled in an abandoned apartment without heat or food. The outpouring of community generosity was so vast that there was enough food, clothing, bedding left over to stock the neighborhood Safe House and Salvation Army. A tremendous gift to the people of St. Mark's was the crew of 20- and 30-something dedicated and passionate young adults who volunteered most of the night at the shelter -- none of whom presently attend a church. One volunteer was heard to say, "I am not a churchy-kind of person, but something about this place really resonates with me."
Something about this place really resonates with me – yes, that’s the feeling you get when Christ is alive in a place, when Christians are living with the joy of being beloved by God. Being beloved by God doesn’t mean that we are happy all the time, it’s not a matter of living a sugary-sweet life; it’s a matter of being salt and light for the world. Being beloved by God means that we give that love away: we give ourselves for others, come out into the cold when we could be safe and warm at home; take the time to pray for those who are sick or bring meals to those stuck at home; spend hours helping others find jobs to support their families or write anonymous checks to help out those who have nothing left. It means that we find where the world is suffering and enter into that suffering – not because we enjoy suffering, but because that’s what our Savior did. He inaugurated the kingdom of God by entering into the world’s darkness and bringing light. And when you shine even one small light into the darkness, the darkness is gone.
If we are the light of the world, we will know that the light we are shining is merely a reflection of the true light, which is Jesus Christ – we will be the window that lets his light pour through. And if we are a community that lets God’s light pour through, that means people will sense something about the power of God’s love when they see us in action. They will know the things that can’t be measured by any money, any halo effect: what’s the value of a prayer? A meal for a family when someone is sick? A smiling person saying welcome when you walk in on Sunday morning? The bread and wine of the Eucharist? A group of friends? The love of Christ? Everlasting life?
It’s by the things we cannot count that we know the true economic value of the kingdom of God: priceless, incalculable, a treasure beyond compare.
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