February 8, 2026
Epiphany 5
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 112:1-10; 1 Corinthians 2:1-6; Matthew 5:13-20
I was not a great chemistry student in high school. Actually, that’s not true. I got “As” in science, including chemistry, but what I wanted to do was to understand it, and that was just beyond my capacity, it seems. What little I remember about chemistry and elements and compounds is pretty useless, like the chemical makeup of sugar (C12H22O11), but what comes in handy this morning is that, if you add more things to a chemical compound, they are no longer what they were originally. They become something else. Take salt, for instance. If you add water to salt and electrolyze it, you’re going to get bleach (NaOCl – sodium hypochlorite). Don’t worry, for those trying this at home, salt in water is just going to give you salt water because sodium chloride, which is what salt is, is a pretty stable compound. Most salt that you buy is mixed with a compound (calcium silicate) to keep it from clumping, but it doesn’t alter the salt formula at all.
The point being that salt is salt. It has a certain flavor. You can enhance that flavor or mute it a bit with other ingredients, but it is still salt. It has the same taste. But if you change that sodium chloride formula, it isn’t salt anymore. Similarly, if you have a container of Morton Salt on your shelf that’s been there for ten years, it’s still going to taste like salt. Which brings me to my question: what is Jesus talking about?
Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?
Maybe I need to cut Jesus some slack here. He was not a chemist, either, so maybe he doesn’t know about sodium chloride. But the real problem is not Jesus. It’s the translation. The Greek does not say that the salt loses its taste. It says, “if the salt becomes μωρανθῇ,” from which we get the word moron. Stupid. The salt becomes stupid, foolish. Which makes no sense at all if you think Jesus is talking about salt. He isn’t. He’s talking about the disciples.
Salt and light. Both have a purpose, but their purpose is not just to sit there doing nothing. Salt adds flavor and richness and heightens the enjoyment of other things. Light brightens the world, casts away shadows, makes our pathway clear. If you hide that light away, it can’t do what it was created to do. If you hide who you are, who God has created you to be, you become tasteless, foolish. Just as salt can transform the flavor of a dish, so we are salt for the transformation of this world into something a little closer to God’s reign. We bear the Light of Christ within us. It is not to be hidden away but shined into the shadows where people are suffering.
As I wrote in my e-news essay on Friday, I will be sharing some stories of African American Episcopalians whose lives and ministries have been salt and light to their communities and to the Church. This coming Friday, February 13, is the commemoration day for the Rev. Absalom Jones, the first African American to be ordained a deacon and priest in the Episcopal Church. Jones was born into slavery in 1746 in Delaware. His intellect was noticed early on by the owner of the plantation, Abraham Wynkoop, so Jones received some instruction in reading and writing. The property in Delaware passed to Wynkoop’s son, Benjamin, upon his death, and when Jones was about 16, the plantation was sold along with Jones’s mother, sister, and five brothers, and Absalom was taken to Philadelphia, still enslaved. Benjamin Wynkoop permitted Absalom to continue his studies at a Quaker school, to get married to Mary Thomas and buy her freedom, and, ultimately, Absalom was also freed, although he continued to work in Benjamin Wynkoop’s store.
Absalom and Mary met attending St. Peter’s Church while they were still enslaved, but upon gaining his freedom, they started attending St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church where Absalom Jones met Richard Allen who was to become a lifelong friend and colleague. They founded the Free African Society together, which was a benevolence organization to provide assistance to Black folk in Philadelphia. Richard Allen had been licensed to preach at St. George’s and was so successful at it that attendance boomed and funds were raised to build a gallery for the additional people to sit. However, white leadership at the church grew more and more concerned about the number of Black people coming to the church, and one day, while in prayer, an usher tried to remove Absalom Jones and his friends and family and put them in the balcony. Jones and Allen walked out of St. George’s and did not look back.
They had started informal worship with the Free African Society, and Jones gained permission to establish it as an Episcopal congregation. Allen preferred to stay with the Methodist Church and opened the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, spawning a global denomination of about 2.5 million members that continues to this day, as does Mother Bethel AME Church.
Jones, opting to remain with the Episcopal Church, was ordained a deacon in 1795 and a priest in 1802, a seven-year process that normally takes no more than one year. I don’t believe it was because he was not qualified. Jones started the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in 1794 and was its first deacon and priest until his death in 1816.
The 14th-century mystic, Catherine of Siena, is quoted as having said, “Be who God meant for you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”
Be salt and light.
Absalom Jones was salt and light to a community of free and enslaved Blacks in the city of Philadelphia. When the yellow fever epidemic hit the city in 1793, around 5,000 people died in a 3-month period in a city that only had 50,000 residents. All of the government officials and civic leaders and anyone who could afford to fled to the fresh air of the country. Jones and Allen and the Free African Society stayed to care for the sick and the dying, the newly widowed and orphaned. It was assumed that dark-skinned people had some kind of immunity to the epidemic, but in fact, they died at about the same rate as whites.
Absalom Jones, born enslaved, separated from his family as a teenager, understood early on that God was on the side of the oppressed. The biography of him on the page that commemorates him at St. Thomas – a still thriving congregation in West Philadelphia – says
Jones was an earnest preacher. He denounced slavery and warned the oppressors to “clean their hands of slaves.” To him, God was the Father, who always acted on “behalf of the oppressed and distressed.” But it was his constant visiting and mild manner that made him beloved by his congregation and by the community. St Thomas Church grew to over 500 members during its first year. The congregants formed a day school and were active in moral uplift, self-empowerment, and anti-slavery activities. Known as “the Black Bishop of the Episcopal Church,” Jones was an example of persistent faith in God and in the Church as God’s instrument. Jones died on this day (February 13) in 1818.[1]
Absalom Jones was salt and light, seasoning and brightening the world around him with the transforming love of God for all God’s people.
Maybe we aren’t called to start a church or battle a pandemic (although many of us have done so in recent memory), but we are called to be who we are meant to be as salt and light in our own time.
…to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
(to) be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in. (Isaiah 58:6-8b, 12b)
[1] https://www.aecst.org/ajones.htm