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from the Gospel of Matthew, this wonderful and familiar text about salt and light. These words, a city built on a hill cannot be hit on other occasions and in other places, other things about this

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text have hooked me. But on this occasion and in this place there's something captivating I think about this simple little proverb that's almost lost amid all the other images in this text, it captures my attention as

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I look at this text this time around a city built on a hill, cannot be here. You're going to think that I've made this up, that I'm telling you one of those preacher stories that aren't

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true but should be. But this is the gospel truth. Last week, across the three days of our annual midwinter lectures, which probably broke some sort of attendance record and were followed immediately by a festive

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groundbreaking service for our New Learning and Information Center. A donor who was here from Oklahoma came up to me and said, this place is so special. She talked about the stimulating lecturers luke powdery Beverly Derventa

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bishop robert sneezy and she talked about the preacher, the reverend Keaton king and she reflected on conversations with students and staff and faculty and the splendid worship and the fellowship and she said it again, this place

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is so special, so kind and I'm not making this up like a city on a hill. I think she's right, you may be here because you feel the same way or you may be here because

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like me, you love this city and in fact , there is so much to love about Austin on a sunny saturday. Take a power walk around Lady Bird Lake, look up across the lake at the

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looming skyline. Those shiny glass towers, those residential towers, those business towers or walk to the Capital and Saver, the architecture all around or see the shows and the concerts and the bat bridge and the

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segue tours and the food trucks and the live music . It's also wonderfully weird and human in so many ways it's a city to take seriously a city, as that visitor put it. That is kind like

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a city built on a hill. We've been preoccupied in these days with our nation's capital city. It's a place that just brims with memorials to the nobility of human character, the Lincoln memorial, the Washington

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monument, the martin Luther King Jr Memorial. You just go there and feel like you're surrounded by sermons . It's a city on a hill, or at least it should be. We've been through a season

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when in my judgment, it is not at the moment what it should be in that city right now . There's a quarrel going on that is litigating the question of what our nation shall be, what it

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shall remember about itself, what it shall strive for and stand for. And it troubles me when Republican Senator mitt Romney can stand up in the Senate as one man against the will of his whole party and

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be vilified by them even to the point of death threats, because he dared to state his own convictions that are grounded in his understanding of the will of a benevolent God, which begs the question, what

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should fairness and kindness and a generous memory and an active hope look like in a city built on a hill. A city built on a hill cannot be here, says Jesus and Matthew's gospel. That statement

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comes right after this one, You are the light of the world. And that statement comes right after this one, You are the salt of the earth In Matthew. With these three metaphors of salt and

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light and city, jesus is striking the death blow to all religion that is purely personal and private. Instead, disciples are charged by Matthew with letting their salt be salty and letting their light shine and living

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in the world. Therefore, as a city built on a hill, who's authentic life cannot be concealed . The church in Matthew's Gospel is composed of having been lit. People recipients of a light from which

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God is the source. They have not been lit for their own sakes, but for the sake of the world. And tightly wound within this little proverb is the sense that the city that Matthew is talking

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about, the city that dwells as the Apple of God's Eye is not a city which is for sale to the highest ideological bidder. Nor is it a city which is destructively selective of the memories that it

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perpetuates of itself. It is rather a city that is seen for miles around because of the high ground upon which it sits as a beacon of light for the world. Has anyone ever set before? The

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church higher vision of itself? A city built on a hill cannot be hid, jesus says to us . And in part at least he means, I think for that to be an aspiration, he means

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, I think for us to hear these words as a description, believe it or not, of what we already are for before. It's an imperative statement . It's an indicative state. I love the way

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Richard lecture, former home politics professor at Duke once put it. The Church he has said, is an incubator of the promise and demand of the Gospel . The Church is an incubator of the promise and

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demand of the Gospel. And what I think he means by that is that the task of the Church is not always a matter of figuring out how to be a city on the hill, how to do

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something that will make us a city on the hill . But it's often nothing more complicated than realizing that we already are what we wish we were. Yeah . So there are already moments in which if we

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are attentive, we see how aspiration becomes reality whenever we notice the discrepancy between our own abundance and the profound need that exists elsewhere in the world, to the point that some new awareness dawns upon us and

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we begin doing something about it. Then in that moment, we are already in the present, fleshing out what it means to be a city built on a hill whenever in response to some flash of moral

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outrage or some act of kindness or some thing of beauty, you discover that regardless how inappropriate the time or place tears are welling up in your eyes and there's a frog in your throat so that it hurts

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to talk because something has sneaked up on you from behind that bears the imprint of God than in that moment you already are in the present. A citizen in good standing in that city built upon a hill

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. Whenever we approach the Lord's table, aware of some new flaring up of the conviction that the feast that is served here is tangible evidence of God's forgiving , redeeming, transforming empowering presence in our midst to

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the end, that as we partake of its nourishment and mystery, we get some new glimpse of how to convey that nourishment and mystery to somebody else. Then we already are in the present, nothing less

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. Then a city built on a hill in all kinds of ways like these, these words of jesus are indicative words describing a reality about us but is already here in the present. But mind you,

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these words are not just written in the indicative voice . They also bear in themselves the weight of an imperative they express not just the business of who we are, of the things that are already true about

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us, but also the oddness that is not yet true about us. There's something about this matter of being salt and light and a city on the hill that has an element of becoming about it for years

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. The reverend C. D. Weaver you, many of you know him, retired presbyterian minister here in Austin has been fashioning art almost obsessively and often he has graced this place with his creations. He

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works in metal, he works with wood, he fashions things out of Cyprus knees. He picks up out of a ditch a piece of alabaster. While he's walking around in New Mexico and he carves it

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into a Madonna and child. He he didn't do any of this until he retired. But now his art is his ministry and he is possessed. He is a madman with respect to his art. Maybe

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my favorite piece of his is that large crucifix, that Grace is a wall in this western transept. Cd weaver was walking in a forest one day, somewhere else in the world and he saw this twisted

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piece of wood and he saw how with a little imagination it had the shape of a human figure. And so he took it home and he took out a knife and he carved on it a little bit

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and soon fingers and toes and facial features emerged. And then he attached it to a couple of larger pieces of wood that he shaped into across, and he brought it here, and he hung it up

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there, and I asked him, how did you know that jesus was in that piece of wood? There's a parable, I think of how Jesus lives within something as broken and often featureless as the church

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, until we gradually assume more and more of his features and his shape, jesus looks at rough and unseemly and shapeless us and sees within us the possibility of magnificently useful and faithful beings. He sees that

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we carry within us the great potential to be salt and light, and a city on a hill, enchanting the world and brightening the darkness until we find ourselves serving as responsible co laborers with him in taking

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the fallen creation as it is, and fashioning out of it's something new and magnificent. And when we believe this vision about ourselves, we can in turn see the rest of the world. With that same

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vision, we can see the imperative that lurks within those words, a city built on a hill cannot be hit. It's an imperative that makes it impossible for us to be satisfied with things as they are

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. It pulls us from the sidelines into the middle of things and changes us from being observers into being participants in the re creation of the world, William sloane coffin who was a hero of mine. Once

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put it this way. With rare exceptions, secret discipleship is a contradiction in terms either the secrecy destroys the discipleship or the discipleship destroys the secrecy. When I was a pasture in new york on Long Island

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, I got used to seeing in worship on almost every sunday morning. A fellow pastor, an Episcopal priest who served a nearby church on Long Island. He generally would discharge his duties at his 9 30

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service and come to my church for our 11 o'clock service. Used to tease him about coming in for a second opinion. We became friends and when my family and I moved to Atlanta, he and his

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wife were two of the people who are most regretted to leave on the week that we left town. He gave me a gift and I still treasure it . It hangs in my studies face my sermon cave

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in my office over in troll and I walked past it 100 times a week and it overlooks my left shoulder when I'm sitting at my computer, it keeps me focused on something very important about who we are

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and what our mission is in the world. And do you know what it is? It's an antique photograph taken sometime in the 19th century of Jerusalem. Looking at it from across the Kidron Valley, there's

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Jerusalem, the place which in the mind's eye of our tradition is the holy City. The city which , in our apocalyptic imagination will someday be prepared for God as a bride adorned for her husband, the

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city to which all rivers will flow, and in which all things will be new and the only appropriate emotion will be praised. The city, built on a hill which in its fullness embodies our fondest hopes

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of what every other city at its very best might strive to be hangs over my left shoulder, reminding me that our job as people of faith is to see beneath the shapeless mass of what this city or

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any city is, and to grasp the hidden reality of what this city and any city might be, and to carve away toward the shape of that hiding vision until the poor have comfort and the week have

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shelter and Children can sleep safely at night, and men and women relate to one another and to the planet, has subjects and not objects, and everyone bears a name, not a price tag. Then

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there emerges in the clear review amid shouts of praise and glory, a city built on a hill which cannot be hid, whose builder and maker is God , in the name of God creator, christ and