February 8 - “Repairers of the Breach”
Repairers of the Breach
Isaiah 58:1-12
Matthew 5:13-20
February 8, 2026
Rev. Mary W. Nelson
Have you ever stopped to wonder what could make salt lose its saltiness? What we know as good ol’ table salt, sea salt, sidewalk salt. has a molecular makeup we know as NaCl: sodium chloride. There are other salts (baking soda is NaHC03, sodium bicarbonate), but the salt that would have been extracted from the Dead Sea or the Mediterranean back in Jesus’s day is also that same NaCl that we know. The chemical composition of salt isn’t going to change. NaCl is NaCl. Dissolve it in water, you have salty water: it doesn’t stop being NaCl, and you could evaporate the water and restore the salt into crystal form.
It would have to become something else chemically if it’s going to stop being salt. But chemically, NaCl can’t “lose its saltiness” and still be sodium chloride. Even if Jesus had had the periodic table of elements back in his day, he couldn’t talk about “salt losing its saltiness” as a chemical change. Salt that is not salty cannot exist. Saltiness is the essence of salt.
As far as the science of salt goes, the only way to make salt be less salty is to mix it with other non-salt materials. If you think about the salt we put on our driveways and steps in the winter… sometimes we’ll mix it with sand, right? in order to achieve a higher level of grittiness on the ground without using so much actual salt. It’s not that the salt is less salty, on a chemical level, but it’s no longer pure salt. Salt loses its saltiness by impurity. You could put so much sand into your sidewalk mix that the salt’s efficacy becomes negligible.
And forget about trying to separate the salt out from the sand once they’re mixed. You can’t do it. Once salt has lost its saltiness, Jesus says, it’s good for nothing, and must be thrown away, trampled underfoot. There’s no going back. Salt that has become impure cannot be restored.
Much of this part of the sermon on the mount is written by Matthew for his community, and doesn’t appear in any other gospels or first-century sources. Matthew was writing for a congregation probably in Antioch, in Syria. This congregation was made up of Jews who were struggling with their Jewish identity: This was a time of significant cultural upheaval in many religious traditions, and Jesus wasn’t the only street preacher around. Jesus, the early formation of what became Christianity, was a symptom of this cultural upheaval, not a cause. There was a shift happening in Judaism that had nothing to do with Jesus, and Matthew’s community was feeling it. Who are we, as a diasporic people, an ethnic AND religious minority, when we’re having doubts about how we live out our faith and teach it to our children in this multiethnic, multireligious, cosmopolitan environment? How can we be faithful to our heritage and traditions, our community, our GOD… and also live with authenticity and integrity and truth? Matthew pulls together snippets of things Jesus has said, but also adds interpretive elements that help his congregation relate to Jesus’s words. All four of our gospels do this, to varying extents.
In fact, what we know as “The Sermon on the Mount” is not a sermon at all, it’s a bunch of random sayings of Jesus that Matthew strung together in whatever order he thought his congregation needed to hear them. Plus a little extra, to make it make sense. Matthew’s community is experiencing a multi-layered existential crisis. And to that crisis, Matthew brings this saying about salt’s saltiness. And a lamp on a lampstand. And a city on a hill. And the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. The gist is simple—be true to your purpose. Don’t let your purpose be diluted, impure. Don’t let your light be hidden, dimmed. Don’t hold to some of the law but not all of the law, don’t expect Jesus to fulfill some prophetic teaching but not all prophetic teaching. The law and the prophets were guides to staying true to the purpose of righteousness—that is, being in right relationship with God and with each other. And either we’re in relationship with God, or we aren’t. Either we’re working on it, or we aren’t.
If you’re salt, be salt. If you’re light, be light. Let everyone see you and know who you are and what you do. The purpose of a community of faith is, in part, to live out our faith together. How we live out our faith is about how we are in relationship with God and with one another, but being in relationship with God or with anyone is not a static activity—there’s no checklist, no formula, no finish line. It’s an ongoing process. A process that depends on God being who God is, and us being who we are in response to who God is. As we learn more, that relationship shifts.
Matthew’s community was struggling with knowing who they were in the midst of enormous cultural change. They were changing, and the world around them was changing, and the old ways of being weren’t really serving them or serving God anymore. They had to figure out who they were becoming, so they could understand and claim their new purpose. How can we be a community of faith when our faith is challenged, and may be changing? How do we live in right relationship with our neighbors when we don’t know who we are, or who our neighbors are, and how to share our gifts with them, and receive what they have to offer as well?
We have more in common with Matthew’s congregation than we really think we do. Like those first-century Jews in Antioch, the culture around us is changing, and our faith community is changing, too—and we don’t really understand all of those changes, or what they mean for us, but we know that the ways we’ve always done things aren’t working anymore. We know there’s some kind of disconnect between us and our neighbors. We know there are challenges within, disagreements or miscommunications or incorrect assumptions that expose the ways we are not always on the same page. We need a renewed sense of purpose, a shared vision. If we’re salt, we need to be salt, and stop adding a bunch of extra stuff that just pollutes our saltiness. If we’re light, we need to be light, and make sure we’re up on a lampstand rather than under a bushel basket, so that we can offer our light to the whole house.
This is where Isaiah’s words today can help us. Last week, I talked about Isaiah a little bit—how he was probably an aristocrat serving in the king’s household, how he tended to emphasize God’s favor for Jerusalem in a way that was probably biased by Isaiah’s love for Jerusalem. What I didn’t need to explain then, but now I do, is that the book of Isaiah is actually thought to have been written by multiple authors, probably three different people, And the author of the first 39 chapters, related to last week’s Micah passage, is not the author of Isaiah 58, what we’re reading today. The book of Isaiah spans about 150 years of history, and Isaiah 58 is part of what scholars consider “Third Isaiah,” at the end of that 150 years. Third Isaiah is much more direct about the ways the king of Judah has been a bad leader, and the ways that God wants the people to be more faithful.
Isaiah says, the people want to know God, they want to be in right relationship with God, but they’re going about it all wrong. They fast and pray and make a big display of their sacrifice and humility—but it’s a self-serving show, more about propaganda and image-making than about living faithfully. And then they use their fasting as an excuse for bad behavior—classic “hangry” meanness, picking fights and punching down on those who are weaker, being harsh with their employees, indulging in anger and defensiveness instead of taking responsibility for the harm they cause. That, Isaiah says, is not going to win them any attention or favor from God.
No, God says through Isaiah, the fasting that I want to see, the fasting that will satisfy my desires, is a fast, a discipline, a practice, that brings about justice. The fast that God chooses is a breaking of yokes—the farming device that harnesses two oxen together to pull a plow or a wagon. When the oxen are tied together that way, they can more than double their strength, equipping them to work effectively as a team—but when humans are tied together that way, they are more likely to be oppressed, abused, forced to injure themselves or each other in the course of their labor. A yoke is a tool, and a symbol of injustice, God wants them broken. The fast God wants us to follow, the discipline God wants us to adopt, results in the liberation of the oppressed, the feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the naked, the breaking of tools and systems of injustice.
If we follow that fast, Isaiah says, then God will take care of our needs and be present and attentive to us when we ask for God’s help. “The LORD will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places and make your bones strong… Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”
It was as true 2600 years ago as it is today: God wants God’s people, God’s followers, God’s children, to pursue justice and work to end injustice. If we do that, we will be called “Repairers of the Breach, Restorer of Streets to live in.” That is, we will be known as people who have a purpose (ending injustice), and who actually met that purpose. We will be salt, pure and untrammeled, sparkling with the essence of saltiness. We will be light, set on a lampstand and shining throughout the house. If we work to end injustice, we will be part of the healing of the world, the repair of what has been broken.
THAT is a purpose worthy to pursue. Not so that we may be glorified, but so that God may be known and glorified. Let’s be salt. Let’s be light. Let’s be repairers of the breach. Let’s be a people of purpose, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
