Like Salt, Like Light, Like Watered Gardens - WADE IN THE WATER

"It’s a Delicate Balance" by Christi Belcourt (Métis - apihtâwikosisâniskwêw / mânitow sâkahikanihk), 2021.

This past week, I traveled to Fort Collins to attend an event called “Everything Done in a Good Way,” a collaboration between the Native Memory Project—an organization dedicated to preserving stories and traditions for future generations—and Council Tree Covenant Church. Over two days, members of a delegation from the Wind River Indian Reservation led us in ceremony, storytelling, and wisdom sharing. 

On the second day, after a shared lunch of dry meat stew, fry bread, and chokecherry gravy, we stepped outside into the church’s garden.

For the last ten years, Council Tree Covenant Church has been cultivating an impressive garden shaped by Native wisdom. Its design follows the pattern of a medicine wheel—circular, with entrances aligned to the four cardinal directions. This past year, the garden’s caretaker has been intentionally adding native perennials to support biodiversity, nourish pollinators, and make traditional edible and medicinal plants more accessible.

There, in the garden, hand drummers led us in song, offering a ceremonial blessing for the garden. One person asked if we might sing the chokecherry song she’d heard them talk about.

The circle leader gently declined, explaining that, rather than sing for one plant, it was more fitting to honor water—because every living thing in the garden depends on it.

That moment stuck with me. With irrigation systems and city water at the turn of a valve, it’s easy to forget how dependent we still are on snowpack and rainfall—on gifts we cannot manufacture or control. We cannot simply plant it where we wish. Our water infrastructure makes gardening in our dry climate a lot easier, but that ease can cause us to forget this essential gift. 

Especially in a dry winter like this one, the water song felt like a needed reminder: the whole of life on this earth depends on water. 

No wonder so many Native communities speak this truth so simply and so powerfully: Water is Life. 

This moment also reflects a deep wisdom found in many Indigenous traditions: that the earth itself is a source of teaching. As the Aboriginal Christian theologian, Wali Fejo, once wrote, “The earth is the first and most primary medium of God’s self-revelation.” In other words, creation itself teaches us who God is and how to live.

Similarly, Jesus frequently draws from the wisdom of creation in his teaching.  

In Matthew 5, rather than give an abstract lecture on discipleship, he draws from the ordinary elements of daily life—salt and light. He is saying: If you pay attention to the world around you, God is already preaching. The water that sustains the garden, the salt that preserves and flavors, the light that helps us see—each becomes a living parable about who we are called to be in the world.

So what does it mean that as followers of Jesus, we are to be like “salt of the earth” and “light of the world”?  

Salt had many purposes in Jesus’ time, just as it does today, which gives this image a rich meaning for discipleship. 

Salt brings out flavor—helping what might otherwise be bland come to life. To be the “salt of the earth,” then, is to draw out the goodness already present in the world, to help love, joy, courage, and justice come forward in our relationships and communities. 

Salt also has a bit of an edge to it. Today, to describe someone as “salty”—a phrase with roots in African American Vernacular English—refers to someone who is frustrated or speaking hard truth. 

This meaning feels especially relevant now. Faithful discipleship isn’t always smooth or polite; sometimes it has a bite. Often, love and justice require us to speak up when it would be easier to blend in or stay quiet.

Finally, in Jesus time, salt was also crucial for preserving food safely. When he speaks of salt that has lost its saltiness and being thrown out, he’s naming a real danger: in his time, “salt” from the Dead Sea region was often mixed with other toxic compounds, such as bromide. When the true salt content leached away, what remained looked like salt but had lost its power—and could even be unsafe to use. In other words, appearances could be deceiving. Having the appearance of discipleship, of religiousity, does not always mean you are acting as such—bringing out and preserving the goodness around you. 

Jesus pairs the image of salt with another: “You are the light of the world.” Light is what makes seeing possible—it reveals truth, in all its brokenness and beauty. Light brings color to the world and brings plants to life. Light doesn’t exist for itself; it exists to give itself away. It illuminates. It warms. It energizes. It makes growth possible. 

To be light is not to draw attention to ourselves, but to help others see more clearly. It means paying attention to the places in our history and community where there is injustice, hidden pain, or confusion. It also means daring to shine light on what is good and life-giving. To make room for new life. To make room for growth.  

When Jesus tells his disciples not to hide their light, he is calling us out into the world. Our faith is not meant to be kept private or contained within our own community; it is meant to be lived publicly in service to Love and Truth —brightening the world and helping it become more alive, more honest, and more whole. 

Our other reading for today also offers an object lesson drawn from creation—Isaiah’s image of the well-watered garden. Like Jesus’ use of salt and light, this is poetry that teaches with creation.

Before we dive into a small portion of this long and complex book of prophetic poetry, it helps to have a little background. 

Biblical scholars often think of Isaiah in three parts. Each with its own author and context. 

Chapters 1–39 are associated with the original Isaiah of Jerusalem, who prophesied in the same period as Micah, whose most famous words we heard last week. “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God?”

Chapters 40–54 come from a later prophet writing in the tradition of Isaiah during the Babylonian exile, speaking a message of hope to a people who were living in despair and disarray. 

Chapters 55–66 reflect yet another voice, writing to the people who have returned to Jerusalem from exile. Today’s reading comes from that third section of Isaiah, which speaks to a community that has come home and is learning to live with the trauma of exile, when old patterns of injustice and unfaithfulness were quietly creeping back in.

It is here that Isaiah offers this image of a well-watered garden to describe what a society rooted in justice and care for one another will look like. 

In this section of Isaiah, the main speaker is God. Earlier in the poem, Isaiah names the problem—and it should sound familiar to what Micah described in our reading from last week. 

There is a kind of religious revival happening. The people are doing all the outward things that look faithful: they keep the Sabbath, they fast, they pray. They are enthusiastic about spirituality, eager to appear devoted to God. 

But at the very same time, their lives are out of alignment with God’s justice. 

Here, the prophet’s concern comes into focus: he is speaking particularly to those who are well-off, whose actions carry weight and whose choices shape the lives of others. They exploit workers. They ignore suffering in their midst. They act out of self-interest. And they get caught up in conflict and arguments. Their faith is full of spiritual activity, but thin on compassion and justice.

God interrupts their performance of piety with a question: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free?” In other words, God is not impressed by spiritual displays that leave unjust systems intact. What God desires is a faith that changes how we treat one another—a faith that loosens chains, frees the oppressed, and reshapes our common life.

Fasting is a common religious practice across many cultures. In the ancient Near East—the world in which Israel lived—fasting was meant to influence a deity to act. People fasted in hopes that the gods might send rain in a drought, to subdue a military threat, or intervene in an economic or political crisis. 

In many Indigenous traditions in North America, fasting is practiced as a way of seeking clarity and wisdom—often as part of vision quests. Indigenous Christian leader John S. Haskell describes fasting as a way “to create harmony in the world and within ourselves.” He continues saying that, “we learn the value of water when we fast three or four days.” 

In other words, fasting is meant to reorient the human heart towards humility. Towards awareness of our limitations and dependence. Towards living in harmonious, right relationship with all members of our community. 

But Isaiah is clear that this is not the kind of fasting happening in his community. 

The only fast commanded in the law was for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, yet the people have taken on additional fasts marked by religious intensity and public display. Their zeal looks spiritual, but it is tangled up with self-serving interests. 

This tension doesn’t belong only to the ancient world. We, too, live in a moment of religious revival—one that often sounds strikingly similar to the fervor Isaiah critiques. There are many examples, but a recent one is Turning Point’s alternative Super Bowl halftime show, the “All-American Halftime Show,” framed around faith, family, and freedom, featuring such emblems of the faith as Kid Rock. 

The question Isaiah poses is not whether devotion to God exists, but whether that devotion is actually bearing good fruit in the world God loves. 

So God offers a different vision of fasting—not as spiritual performance, but as a practice aimed at right relationship. This fast doesn’t begin with abstaining from food and drink, but with reaching out to those in need: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the vulnerable. 

Today, Isaiah’s message also challenges us to go deeper still—not only caring for individuals, but confronting the attitudes and structures that produce injustice structures, in the first place. True fasting, Isaiah says, means engaging the conditions that corrupt human relationships and distort the common good. 

This true fasting which reuqire the people (especially with privilege) to completely reorient their lives, but this is what it will produce. 

The Lord will guide you continually

and satisfy your needs in parched places

and make your bones strong,

and you shall be like a watered garden,

like a spring of water

whose waters never fail.

The people will become like a well-watered garden, rooted, nourished, able to bear life for others. They will rebuild their wartown city, repairing the historic breach between the peoples of this land. 

He is helping this community, still recovering from exile, to look forward to a future of healing, blessing, and new life. 

The people themselves will become like a well-watered garden—rooted in God’s care, nourished by justice, and able to offer life and refreshment to others. At the same time, their broken city will be restored: ancient ruins rebuilt, deep fractures repaired, streets made livable again. Isaiah is inviting a community still carrying the wounds of exile to imagine a future not defined by what was lost, but by what God is growing among them—a future of healing, repair, and shared flourishing.

This vision of a well-watered garden reminds me of yet another garden. 

The Elder Healing Garden is a project of love of the Wind River Indigenous Food Sovereignty Project. This past fall, they opened the garden at Trout Creek Farm, just a few weeks before a group of us had the chance to visit.

Like the garden at Council Tree Covenant Church, this garden is circular, with entrances facing each of the cardinal directions. Throughout the space are small perennial plants, their tender roots reaching deep into the soil as they establish themselves for years to come.

The project was conceived as a place of care for the whole community of creation—human and more-than-human alike. First and foremost, it is a place of honor and healing for tribal elders, many of whom have lived through the trauma of boarding schools, treaty violations, entrenched poverty, and racism. The garden is also a place where memory is being restored—memory of history, food, medicine, and relationships—so that healing can take root not only in the land, but in the people who gather there.

It strikes me that this is what Isaiah points us toward. When people commit themselves to justice, to repair, to right relationship with one another and with the land, something like a watered garden begins to grow in the midst of dry and weary places.

For those of us who are settlers to this land, whether by choice or by force, we can all learn from the wisdom of the elder garden and our indigenous neighbors generally. And we must listen and learn about our own obligations to participate in this truth-telling, reparations, and healing. 

To be salt and light is to do just this—to tell the truth, to shine light where there is harm or hidden pain, to highlight what is good, and to help create the conditions where life can flourish. 

So may our lives, shaped by love and justice, become like a well-watered garden: rooted in God, sustained for the long journey, and offering refreshment to a weary, weary world.

This sermon was originally preached by Rev. Delaney Piper on 2/8/25.