Salty Christians

Scriptures: I Corinthians 2:1-13, Matthew 5:13-20

In 1963, when I was in seminary, Hans-Ruedi Weber, who was on the staff of the World Council of Churches at the time, wrote a little book (it wasn’t much more than 60 pages) called Salty Christians – which, obviously, I’ve cribbed as my sermon title. Despite its brevity it had quite an impact on the church community at the time; I even remember using it as the basis for an adult study class during my first parish. Here’s a paragraph that captures the essence of what Weber was wanting to convey:

“It has been said that every Christian needs a double conversion: conversion from the world to Christ, and conversion to service with Christ in the world — to ‘holy worldliness.’ This understanding of the Christian life can lead us to become ‘the salt of the earth’ — salty Christians, who share in Christ’s ministry to the world, with all the people of God. . . .”

But becoming “salty Christians” – those with a real taste for justice and for service in the nitty-gritty of the world’s problems – wasn’t easy – not in the 1960s, with all the civil rights turmoil, efforts to eradicate poverty, and the war in Vietnam – and not today either. We still need Christian involvement in combating the evil “isms” of our own time: racism, sexism, classism, homophobia; the poor we still have with us, and anti-poverty efforts are just as needed now as in the 60s; wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have some of the same moral questions about them as did our involvement in Vietnam. For those of us who have been around for awhile sometimes it just seems that the more things change the more they stay the same.

Hans-Ruedi Weber in his little booklet wasn’t about to let Christians off the hook. He had some pretty strong words about what it means to become involved, to get fired up, to be “salty Christians”. That’s probably why the book was so popular with study groups, because they could feel the intensity of his argument. He challenged us with arguments like these:

“In churches all over the world… the majority of those who have made the sacramentum [baptismal vows] do not actually join Christ’s struggle for the world. After taking ‘the military oath’, many of them become deserters, conforming themselves to the world, and not being transformed by the renewal of their minds (Rom 12:2). Others go on permanent leave, only returning occasionally for a military inspection. They lead a double life, following two different sets of ethics – one for their private, Sunday life, and one for their life in the workaday world. Still others always remain recruits in the barracks, becoming more and more refined in the use of the spiritual armor of God, but never leaving their Christian camp in order to fight for the reconciliation for the world. Under these circumstances, no wonder the battle soon begins in the barracks! ” (Although he’s using military metaphors here, he’s really talking about the local church.)

I know, these kind of challenging words are not easy to hear, and perhaps you do not feel that they apply to your own situation. But the key to what Weber was hoping we would hear is in that line about “their life in the workaday world”. Becoming “salty Christians” means that what happens to us – how we think and behave and pray and act on a Sunday – should be no different than how we think and behave and pray and act during the rest of the week. Now, many of us are no longer part of what you would call “the workaday world” – but living as Christians in retirement is no different from a gospel standpoint than when we did go to work every Monday morning.

Let’s backtrack for a moment and think about this metaphor that Christ has given us in his Sermon on the Mount. “You are the salt of the earth.” Note that verb tense, by the way – “You are…”, not “You will become”. We’ll come back to that. What a strange thing to call his disciples and potential disciples. Salt was about the most common thing you could think of – then as now. It was even more common than this bread and juice we use for our communion elements. Salt was, and is, used to make food more savory – although today with what we know about the effect of salt on high blood pressure, it’s lost some of its allure as a symbol for savoriness. Salt was, and is, used as a preservative, especially in curing meat – although the quality of preserving may not have been uppermost in Christ’s mind. Salt keeps things from going bad and in healing.

However, salt was probably even more important in Jesus’ day than the condiment we use today. In ancient times, salt was considered so valuable that it was used as currency — that’s where we get the word “salary”, which originally meant “soldier’s salt-money.” Salt was a necessity of life in biblical times. Used as a condiment and a preservative, it was also part of the sacrificial rituals of the Temple. Salt was used with cereal offerings, burnt offerings and incense in the prayers offered to God. Because salt has always been important to eating, it became a symbol of hospitality. To “eat salt” or “share the salt” with a person was to enjoy table companionship and to forge an unbreakable bond with that person, giving rise in the books of Numbers and Second Chronicles to the expression a “covenant of salt.” Clearly, Christ understood its importance in that culture, and thus he knew that his hearers would appreciate how it was that he was describing them – to be salt for the earth.

What Jesus is doing in these verses following the “blessings” of the Beatitudes and before the hard sayings that will come in the remainder of the Sermon on the Mount is to prepare his listeners for what it means to be a disciple in the Kingdom of God. Let’s go back to that verb tense. You are salt; you are light; you are a city on a hill. As Nancy Topolewski puts it, “It is not a question of what we should become. It is a matter of what we already are. And more importantly still, when Jesus speaks to his disciples in this way, he speaks in the plural. It is not just a matter of who I am; it is a matter of who we are….. As individuals, we cannot be a town or city on our own. We can only be a town or a city – or, for that matter, a church – when we are together, working and praying and singing. Goodness and righteousness are not just qualities to which we aspire, a kind of moral state that we may attain, way off in the future. Goodness and righteousness are our response together, right here, right now, to the unmeasured grace of God.”

Salt is never complete in itself. It is an ingredient in a greater whole. Its job is to be mingled with, to be lost in, to affect other things. To be the salt of the earth, right here, right now, is to flavor the world with God-like values: justice, love, peace, compassion. It is to preserve human life and prevent decay in society. It is to embody the companionship and hospitality that salt represents. It is to seek to bring out the best in humanity.

“You are the light of the world.” Can’t you just hear that rollicking lyric from Godspell when this line is read: “You are the light of the world.” What a powerful affirmation…if we truly believe it. During his 1994 inaugural address Nelson Mandela offered this quote from the poet Maryanne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

We are a community of liberated people, ready to show others what freedom in Christ can mean. We are that city on a hill. If you’ve been to Israel, you know that the city of Jerusalem sits some 3000 feet above sea level, a commanding presence for the entire countryside – it cannot be hid. That’s why, regardless of where one comes from, one always “goes up to Jerusalem.” And that’s why Jesus knew his listeners could identify with what it would mean for them to be part of a “city on a hill”. Jerusalem can be seen from a long ways off; it “cannot be hid”.

All three of Jesus’ statements here about salt and light and a city on a hill point us to the community that he wishes his disciples to become. We do not flavor and preserve, we do not shine, we do not serve as a beacon to others by ourselves but as that “peaceable kingdom” which becomes a society bound together by service.

Paul’s rather dense words about God’s wisdom and what has been revealed to us through the Spirit, which we read from I Corinthians, take on life when read through the filter of what Jesus wants his disciples to be and to do. Paul is telling us that God’s wisdom, which seems such a secret and mysterious thing to some, is really right there for those who accept the Spirit of God into themselves. God’s wisdom? It’s nothing more – no, it’s nothing less – than what we talked about last week: to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Doing these things – being these things – will lead us to take our saltiness and our light into the “workaday world” that Weber is talking about. One of the other lectionary scriptures that we did not read is from the prophet usually referred to as Second Isaiah, from the 58th chapter. He says in words that oddly mirror what Jesus will tell his disciples in Matthew 25: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the 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? . . . If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”

“True Christians are contagiously human,” Hans-Ruedi Weber writes in Salty Christians. “To be contagiously human, to share the truly human life that Christ exemplifies and lifts up, is to leave behind pride, exclusiveness, jealousy, self-righteousness. It is to give up blandness and boredom and longing for the good old days. It is to take risks, to move forward with excitement following where the Risen Christ leads, to see others with compassion and welcome them in love, to share hope, ‘to loose the bonds of injustice’ (Isa. 58:6), to share bread with the hungry (Isa. 58:7), to be ‘worth our salt,’ ‘salty Christians, ‘salt of the earth,’ permeating the world with the love and hope of Christ.”

 

Amen

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ

Las Vegas, NV

February 6, 2011