Stay Salty

2-5-17 (Epiphany 5A)

Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 5:13-20

Stay Salty

Salt is an incredible mineral - it’s essential for life.  It gives additional flavor to our foods and can be used to help preserve them for long periods of time.  We use it to melt ice on the roads, as part of the process by which we chlorinate our water and help keep it clean and safe to drink, and in a number of different manufacturing processes that bring us various plastics and paper.  Throughout human history, salt has been used as a precious commodity - people used it as currency, traded for other goods with it, and considered their proximity to salt sources when building communities.  Salt is such an important piece of life that countries have even gone to war over it.

So when Jesus tells his audience in the sermon on the mount that they are the “salt of the earth,” it’s an important statement for him to be making.  While we often say someone is a real “salt of the earth” kind of individual to indicate that they’re trustworthy, decent, ordinary or dependable, this idiom doesn’t really capture quite what Jesus seems to be imparting to the people in his time.  Jesus uses these images of salt, light, and cities on hills to help underscore the importance and the immensity of the kind of radical lifestyle into which he is inviting these people.  These verses come right after Jesus gives the Beatitudes to the crowds - Jesus tells the crowds what kind of people his ministry is for, what kind of people are blessed in the Kingdom of Heaven; now he builds on that concept to explore how that reality of being blessed should be lived out in a visible and clear way: “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in Heaven.”

I’ve always found it interesting that Jesus uses some of these images - they’re incredibly apt, particularly when you think about the city on the hill and the lamp on the stand.  In fact, they’re really pretty self explanatory, when you think about it.  Of course you wouldn’t light a lamp and then put it under a bushel.  It doesn’t do any good if it’s covered up and hidden!  And of course a city on a hill is going to be impossible to hide - people will see it for miles around and be drawn to it for its secure position, its shelter and opportunity.

But salt is perhaps the most interesting image that Jesus uses in the whole passage, and the one I couldn’t get away from as I reflected on the readings for this week.  Because while salt is a valuable and essential part of our lives, it’s also complex in its own way.  Jesus uses the imagery of salt to evoke a sense of giving flavor and adding value to life, and yet our own culture over the years has developed something of an ambivalent relationship with salt.  Sure, we love salty snacks and foods like chips, pretzels, and fries… but at the same time if you’ve ever accidentally put too much salt on something, you know that the experience can be a pretty poor one.  I made dinner a couple weeks ago, for example, and I didn’t pay close enough attention to the amount of salt that the recipe I was following ended up calling for.  The recipe for the meal I was trying to make must have had a miscalculation in it, because it called for a total of about seven teaspoons of salt all told.  We took the first bite into the meal and immediately went running for water to try to get the sheer volume of salt out of our mouths because we were so overwhelmed.  And, of course, when it comes to salt in particular, there’s no way to fix it unless you go and double the amount of all the other things in the recipe until they balance out the amount of salt that’s already present.  The meal I made ended up in the garbage that night because there was, unfortunately, no way to salvage it.

There’s something genuinely powerful about salt - it has the power to give extra flavor and richness to our foods, but it can also become so overpowering that it renders food inedible.  It can be incredibly dangerous to us if we take in too much of it, and yet we nevertheless need it for our very survival.  Even the concept of saltiness in itself has taken on connotations in our society and the way we describe things - a common phrase that gets tossed around lately is that salty is a way that people act if they’re upset about something or irritated.  When someone makes a salty remark or is acting salty, it’s almost as if you can see the mouthful of salt in their mouth and the look on their face as they deal with that overpowering sensation.

It’s this sense of saltiness, in fact, that makes the Isaiah passage such an interesting pairing to the Matthew text.  Isaiah’s people are a people who have lost their saltiness, so to speak - they go through the motions and “practice righteousness,” but they’ve lost the things that gave savor to their covenant relationship with God.  God speaks through Isaiah to help them find that flavor once again - “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice?”  God tells the people that God doesn’t want their expressions of devotion and righteousness unless they’re accompanied by the actual flavor of devotion and righteousness as lived out and demonstrated in acts of justice, compassion, and mercy to the downtrodden and oppressed.  The religious practices of the people of Israel may have been meeting the surface expectations of the law, but the fast that God says God chooses is the complete fulfillment of God’s law instead of the simple checking off of a to-do list.

Jesus carries that message as well as he tells the gathered people that their righteousness needs to exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees.  It’s not enough to just talk the talk - it’s not even enough to just walk the walk.  Jesus wants the people to stay salty in their walk, to keep the flavor in what they do and to be genuine in pursuing righteousness.  And Jesus demonstrates that throughout the entirety of the gospels - he doesn’t just preach a message of righteousness; he gets downright salty at times in making sure his message of the kingdom is clear.  He gets salty as he overturns the tables of the moneychangers.  He gets salty as he calls the Jewish officials broods of vipers and whitewashed tombs.  He gets salty even later in the sermon on the mount as he builds on his expectation that his followers become even more righteous than the Jewish authorities.  And he gets salty because it’s this truly radical view of the Kingdom that continues to drive him forward every step of the way to Jerusalem and the cross.

And it’s this same kind of saltiness that we are still encouraged to embody today.  We need to be salty for the Gospel, salty in our pursuit of justice and compassion in our world.  We need to get salty as we speak out against fear and oppression in our world, to be salty as we proclaim the message of the Gospel that “this is what the world looks like when we live in the light of God.”  We need to let the grace we’ve received from Christ make us salty to the point that we give flavor to the world around us, that we enrich the lives of others in our community as we journey together.  And as we choose the fast that God chooses, as we let that pursuit of justice season us into people of true justice and righteousness, we can’t help but let our light so shine that others might be invited to come in out of darkness themselves.

May God continue to inspire us, to keep us salty together - may we always be seeking for ways to add flavor and substance to this world.  May we be confident in our worth and be worthy of our calling together that we might truly be the salt of the earth.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.