Sermons from
Mission Hills UCC
San Diego, California
Rev. Dr. David Bahr
david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org
February 8, 2026
“Preserving and Ensuring”
Matthew 5: 13-20 – Common English Bible
“You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its saltiness, how will it become salty again? It’s good for nothing except to be thrown away and trampled under people’s feet. 14 You are the light of the world. A city on top of a hill can’t be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a basket. Instead, they put it on top of a lampstand, and it shines on all who are in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before people, so they can see the good things you do and praise our God who is in heaven.
17 “Don’t even begin to think that I have come to do away with the Law and the Prophets. I haven’t come to do away with them but to fulfill them. 18 I say to you very seriously that as long as heaven and earth exist, neither the smallest letter nor even the smallest stroke of a pen will be erased from the Law until everything there becomes a reality. 19 Therefore, whoever ignores one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do the same will be called the lowest in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever keeps these commands and teaches people to keep them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 I say to you that unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the legal experts and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Imagine standing on the corner outside the church in 1910 – before there was a church here. Before there was even much of a neighborhood.
Only twenty years earlier, there was almost nothing here. Shortly after the Civil War, a sea captain first spotted this land from his ship up on a lonely hill and purchased it for twenty-five cents an acre. Of course, within that lore of the settlers lies the truth that this wasn’t anyone’s land to sell. This is the ancestral homeland of the Kumeyaay people – their land for thousands of years before Spanish colonization and American settlement.
In the late 1880s, the sea captain’s daughter built what was the first house in what would become Mission Hills. By 1910, not much had changed. The area was still half rural. Dust rose from unpaved roads that wandered through orange groves and olive trees and small farms scattered across open land.
In part that’s because it wasn’t easy to get up here. The slopes were steep. The roads were rough. Only as the trolley line began pushing closer did this hill begin to feel connected to the city below.
Mission Hills was a place people were just beginning to reach when civic leaders laid out a grid of streets in 1908. Before there was a church, even before there was a congregation, members of First Congregational Church downtown formed a Sunday School held in a living room over on Ibis Street – on the edge of the neighborhood becoming. But to become a community, it would need places for people to gather.
One of the members of First Congregational, George Marston, purchased this corner for $1,000 and a simple redwood chapel was constructed – built “between two Sundays” by people who showed up with hammers and saws.
Sixty-seven charter members formed Mission Hills Congregational Church in 1911. A few years later, the Methodists organized a congregation and opened their new church in 1915. These buildings were to serve the people whose lives were taking shape here.
It’s also important to remember that as this neighborhood was taking shape, not everyone was welcome to live here. Like many neighborhoods across the country, parts of Mission Hills were shaped by racially restrictive covenants. Homes in some areas were legally restricted to white residents all the way into the 1940s. That history is part of this place too and shapes who God calls us to be in response.
Within just a few years, our church outgrew the original chapel and built this sanctuary – these beams are meant to resemble the old log chapel.
Notably, the church wasn’t built to dominate the hill or be seen from below. It was built to belong right in the middle of the community – at street level, accessible from the sidewalks that connect homes to one another. With a simple structure of Prairie School design, thick stucco walls, and mission-style arches, this church was not built to stand apart from the community but to reside within it. That matters.
Among all the details, these distinctive wrinkled glass windows were designed not just to let light in. They catch the light and bend it and soften it, spreading the light dancing throughout the room. These windows hold the light so that what enters this space becomes something sacred that we live inside.
For more than a century, this light has fallen across people praying and children playing and choirs singing, creating an environment designed for a living faith that can see the world outside but offers a moment of respite from it.
The light has grown more colorful than the original. Stained-glass windows from First Congregational Church downtown were installed when the very people who in 1911 started the Sunday School and built the original log chapel returned 60 years later to unite the two congregations.
The founders didn’t build the church to look like a monument. Stand on the corner and you’ll see a church that’s always meant to belong as much to this neighborhood as to the congregation that worships here.
On any day of the week, people gather in recovery groups and tell the truth about their lives. Children sing and perform on stage. Seniors meet and share meals. Community groups of all kinds. Nonprofit organizations have offices here that plan affordable housing and work toward equitable food systems. And of course, church activities of every kind abound. People walk through these doors every day carrying grief and loneliness as well as hope and solutions for the world. Each one, we pray, leaves reminded that they are not alone.
A church can be beautiful and make no real difference on the streets around it. A building can stand for decades and yet give very little back to the people who pass by it.
That’s the image I hear from Jesus when he tells his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth.”
Salt exists to change what it touches. To bring flavor and depth and vitality where otherwise something would remain flat or lifeless. Jesus is not asking his followers to sit on a shelf and be impressive.
He is asking them to live in such a way that the world around them becomes more alive because they are there.
Of course, a place like this requires preservation. Salt is also a preservative. But we do not preserve a church to freeze the past in time. We care for it so that what happens here can continue to bring life to the people around it.
Preservation only matters if it serves life. Otherwise we are simply protecting structures that no longer give anything back to the world.
We know how easily that can happen. Neighborhoods can be preserved in ways that quietly exclude. Preservation can also protect inequity, where only some can afford to live and others can only visit. Racial covenants that ended decades ago still have effects on generational wealth gaps.
This is where the history matters. Not as trivia, but as calling.
The salt of Jesus does not preserve the world exactly as it is. He calls his followers to help create the conditions for a vibrant life.
Our history shapes who God calls us to be in response. A church that uses what it has so that others may have a future here too. A church that understands that caring for this place is not about preserving privilege, but about making room for everyone here.
Every generation has cared for this building and adapted it. They expanded it when more space was needed. They renovated it when needs changed and when time and use took its toll. It’s that time again.
Today we launch a capital campaign called Preserving Our Legacy, Ensuring Our Future. We are leaving the next generation an extraordinary legacy. But we also want to address how the many young people who cannot afford to buy a home in San Diego are going to struggle to carry the weight of this building. How do we leave them a sustainable future?
This is not my sales pitch. This is our reality. Many of us have been able to build our lives in ways that do not feel as possible for those coming after us.
But what we get to do is make sure that as the continuing generations receive this church, it’s an inheritance, not a burden. That they don’t receive a list of deferred maintenance but a place cared for and ready for their ministry and their imagination.
And to those of you who are younger, or newer, or just visiting: this is not some distant future of the church but a building placed into your hands, ready for whatever ministry you will bring to it today and whatever you imagine for what comes next. Resting on a shared understanding that what has been entrusted to us is not simply a structure to admire. This is to be a place that continues to hold purpose for the community around it and down the hill and across the city.
Just as Paul once wrote, faith does not rest on impressive words or persuasive arguments. This capital campaign is not about becoming something grander or more imposing. Faith trusts in God. And trust in God loosens our grip frees us to care for what has been entrusted to us, so that this place can continue to give life long after we are gone.
A century ago, this sanctuary rose on a hill where a neighborhood was just beginning to take shape. We do not care for this building so it can sit like a postcard of Mission Hills. We care for this place now to ensure that the life nurtured here continues to flow outward into the entire city we are called to love.
So that long after some of us are gone, and long after some of you still feel new, this corner will still be a place where people belong. Where the light held inside these walls does not stay here, but becomes the light we live beyond them.
