You can't eat salt

Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12)
1 Corinthians 2:1-12, (13-16)
Matthew 5:13-20
Psalm 112:1-9, (10)

My science teacher in middle school used to take Wednesday off.  He would sit at his desk with his feet up and let us students use the class period to read, any book we wished, and one of us would bring in popcorn for the rest to snack on.  When my turn came to provide the snack, I spent some time on Tuesday night popping corn on the top of the stove, and as each batch was finished, I’d empty it into a large paper grocery bag.  Then I would add a little melted butter and some salt.  And I would close the bag and shake it a few times, to mix everything thoroughly, and add a little more butter, and a little more salt.

I’d never made such a large quantity of popcorn before, and I guess I misjudged how much salt it would take to properly season it.  Because the next day, after I’d passed my big bag around the science room and everyone had scooped out a pile onto a paper towel, I served some out for myself.  And when I put that first handful into my mouth, it was so salty I could hardly keep myself from spitting it out again.  I thought maybe it was just because mine came from the bottom of the bag, but a quick glance around the room showed that no one was eating it, and there were still a lot of popcorn on the paper towels.    My pride wouldn’t let me admit that I’d brought inedible popcorn to science class, so I kept munching away until I couldn’t force myself to take another kernel, and I still carry in my body the memory of the strange, headache-y, queasy feeling of eating far too much salt.

Salt is not food.  It enhances the flavors of food.  It keeps it from spoiling.  It is absolutely necessary for life, but by itself it is useless.  You can’t eat salt.   We ought to bear this in mind when we hear Jesus say to his disciples, “you are the salt of the earth.”  It is the same message in that other saying, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.”  It is the message that William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War, summarized when he said, “The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.”

Sometimes the church has acted as if the world existed for its benefit, and has bent worldly wealth and power to service of church leaders and institutions.  At other times we have tried to sever the connection entirely, and create a self-enclosed society, only concerned with its own other-worldly purposes, disinterested and unperturbed by the tensions and upheavals outside her sanctuaries.   But these sayings of Jesus make it plain that if we are going to be the renewed people of God that he sought to give birth to, then the rest of the world has to be at the very heart of who we are.  We are to dissolve into it, to transform it into something truly nourishing and delicious.  We are to light it up, so that its own true beauty and color and full dimensions can be seen. 

The paradox that we have to live with is that the world doesn’t necessarily want the salt or the light of the Gospel.  Remember that these sayings in Matthew come right after the part where Jesus says “Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and utter all manner of evil against you on my account.”  And living for the sake of people who don’t see any benefit in what you have to offer is an uncomfortable position to be in.  So sometimes we make a case for ourselves in human terms.  We’ll justify our existence by claiming that we “transform lives,” and point to our members who have kicked the bottle, or worked out their marital problems, or gotten good jobs since they started coming to church.   Or we’ll talk about how we inspire social action that improves our communities, and point out our involvement in distributing food to the poor, or housing the homeless. 

But as important as these things are, trying to justify ourselves in these terms can obscure the heart of what we are about.  It conceals the truth that we have been given a vision of personal transformation that goes far beyond helping people get back to “normal” as social convention defines it.  It is to be silent about the deeper kind of social action, a new solidarity that heals the root structures of rivalry, indifference, and suspicion in human relations.       

We’re running up against this problem now as we organize for an event that we’re calling the Big Night Out.  This effort involves reaching out in a way that we haven’t before to people around Petaluma--friends, and friends of friends, and even complete strangers.  And we are inviting them to a charity event to raise funds for a good cause called St. John’s Episcopal Church.  As we do this, we are appealing to them by describing the benefits we provide, in terms we think they can understand.  We are talking to them about the restoration of this beautiful building, with its architectural distinction that lends so much character and value to the historic downtown area.  We are talking about our long relationship with COTS, which provides services to those who have lost their homes, or are in danger of losing them, and how we are sharing a quarter of the funds that we raise to support that work. 

And I think that this is a sensible approach to take.  But it is also important for us to be conscious of what it is we’re not saying.  It’s not that we’re inviting people to this event under false pretenses.  Its just that we don’t really expect them to understand.  We don’t know how to talk to them about what really makes St. John’s tick, or what value it really has to the community, because there is no way to do it without using the language of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  And that very thing that we are reticent about is the taste of the salt, without which it is not good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.  But we’re afraid that if we try to explain ourselves to people on those terms they will immediately stop listening, because they’ll think that we are “religious,” that outmoded and incomprehensible thing, and some hidden agenda to brainwash them and entice them into joining our cult.

It’s a quandary, and I have no better response to it than one I found last week in a little pamphlet put out by the Taizé community in France, which is the inspiration for our monthly service of chant and silence here at St. John’s: 

“But if the salt were to lose its saltiness…

It must be recognized that we Christians often obscure [the] message of Christ…

We are at a point in history when we need to revitalize this message of love and peace.  Will we do all we can so that, freed of misunderstandings, it can shine out in its original simplicity?  Can we, without imposing anything, journey alongside those who do not share our faith but who are searching for the truth with all their heart?

In our attempt to create new forms of solidarity and open up new ways of trust, there are, and there always will be trials.  At times they may seem to be overwhelming.  So what then should we do?  Is not our response to personal trials, and to those which other people endure, to love still more?”

We are reaching the point in the renewal of this congregation where we are starting to understand that we have been called together to do something for our neighbors.  But to find what that is, we have no choice but to meet them where they are.  And we are looking not so much for people we can help, as for conversation partners.  We are seeking not so much an effective rhetoric of persuasion, as a common language in which to begin to understand each other, and share our wonder and anguish about the things that matter most.  And we are waiting on the power of the Spirit to do what we can never accomplish by ourselves, to open minds, to soften hearts, to take down walls, to heal, and salt, and light our world.

The true history of the world

Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 17:20-26

Because today is Mother’s Day, I have to begin with a story about my Mother.  When I was a 8^th-grader in Charlotte, Vermont, the principal of the Charlotte Central School was a man named Larned Ketcham.  He was a horse breeder in his off hours, and his manner with children reflected that.  A tall, solidly-built, square-jawed man with a proud bearing, he used to appear without warning in the school yard during recess and walk around, watching keenly everything that happened, and when he saw something amiss he would put his fingers in his mouth and let out a whistle that made 300 laughing, yelling children freeze in an instant.  One morning Mr. Ketcham must have decided that there was a general drift toward unruliness going on, and that it was no longer sufficient merely to intervene in individual cases; because when the final bus had arrived, and before the bell rang to mark the beginning of classes, he herded us all into the cafeteria. 

When we were all indoors and seated he whistled, and the din was instantly replaced with a dead silence.  He announced that the talking-to that he was about to give us was so important that the next child who spoke would spend an hour after school with him in his office that evening, which was Monday, and every evening for the rest of the week.  So nobody talked.  Nobody, that is, except me.  In the illusory safety of the far corner of the cafeteria I whispered some wisecrack to my friend Jim Mack, and from across the large and crowded room I heard the voice of Mr. Ketcham like the trumpet of doom—“Mr. Green!”  I stammered out a feeble denial, but my fate was sealed.  I, who had made it through seven-and-a-half years of compulsory public education without ever once being sent to the Principal’s Office, was sentenced to go there for the next five days.

That afternoon, filled with dread, I walked down to the lobby, and as I watched the other children happily bursting out of the doors toward the line of buses waiting to take them home, I took the left turn of the condemned man, and entered the school office.  There I was surprised to find Mr. Ketcham in a relaxed, if not outright friendly, mood.  He let me use his phone to call home and explain to my mother why I wouldn’t be on the bus, and what time she would have to pick me up.  He then made small talk with me for a couple minutes, after which we spent the rest of the hour in silence, him working at his desk and me doing my homework in a chair in the corner. 

The peace was shattered at 5 o’clock by the arrival of my mother.  I don’t know how much of her outrage was due to the harshness of my punishment, and how much was because of her inconvenience at having to fetch me home from school, but she went into battle with all guns blazing, while I sat to one side, feeling a mixture of relief and embarrassment.  Mr. Ketcham offered valiant resistance, but after manfully weathering a couple of salvos of Katie Green’s fury, he gave me a look that betrayed the slightest hint of a smile, and then we all knew he was beaten.  I packed my books into my bag, nodded soberly at the principal’s warning about learning my lesson, and followed my mother out to the car, my debt to society paid in full.

When somebody tells us that right now Jesus is with the Father in heaven, interceding on our behalf, this is often the kind of thing that comes to mind.  But the image of the redeemer pleading with a wrathful God, who must be talked out of inflicting on us the full punishment we deserve, doesn’t really fit the one example we have of Jesus’ intercessory prayer.

In John’s Gospel Jesus speaks and acts as one who is fully conscious of having come from God, and fully confident that he is returning to God.  This is especially true in the so-called “farewell discourse,” the long speech that he gives his disciples after supper on the night before his death.  In these three chapters, Jesus speaks of his impending death as if it is just a part—an important and indispensible part, but just one part—of a whole process of transformation that he calls being “glorified.”   And he speaks of this process that is about to take place as if it were already accomplished.  In the 17^th chapter, which is where today’s gospel lesson comes from, Jesus completes his farewell discourse with a prayer, a prayer in which he speaks as one who has already left the world, who even now is standing face to face with God.

I don’t think that this is an accident.  John tells the story this way on purpose.  He wants his community to understand that the way that they  think and talk about Jesus, the relationship they have with him at the end of the 1^st century, or whenever it was that the Gospel was written, is a relationship that Jesus himself anticipated and initiated.  The story of Jesus that John tells his church is not an invention after the fact, but flows directly out of Jesus’ own words, his own works, his own purpose.  And these words, these works, this purpose do not exist only in the church’s memorial, but they live in the present, hidden from sight, in God.

To the ones who reject him, the story of Jesus is only lies and broken promises—a man who claimed to be the Messiah but who failed and died.   But to those who believe in him, the rejection and the death are only the beginning of a journey that takes Jesus from life to death, to resurrection, to ascension to the glory of the heavenly throne, from which he sends the gift of the Holy Spirit.   And these events are the key that unlocks the meaning of a much greater story.  They retell the great story of the creation of human beings in the divine image, of our misuse of our freedom, and of God’s undying love for us, of God’s desire to restore us to our place as partners with him in the creation of a sacred universe.  The journey of Jesus into glory is what proves that this is no myth, no mirage, no human fabrication of any kind, but the true history of the world. 

John’s Gospel says that Jesus knew from the beginning that he was the person in whom God’s age-old story would be renewed and fulfilled.  He also knew that his rejection and murder would be the fork in the road.  Those who took his death as proof that Jesus was wrong and his story was over, would go on as before.  The world’s story of itself would continue, repeating its cycles of violence, its conquests and revolutions, its booms and busts, its spectacular achievements and just as spectacular catastrophes.  But on the night before his death Jesus tells his disciples that along with all of that something new would be happening, a new turn in God’s story of the world, that was beginning right at that very moment in that very room.

He told them that from the vantage point of one who had already renewed and fulfilled the story.  He told it to them as one who was already reconciled to the Father, as co-creator of a sacred universe.  He told it to them as one who had already entered paradise and stood face-to-face with God.  And standing there he had already begun his ongoing work, the work that he was doing when John wrote his Gospel, the work he still does now as I stand here preaching and you sit there listening, the work that he does whenever we pronounce his name with faith, hope, and love.  It is the work he does for us and through us when we pray, when we break the bread and drink the cup as he instructed, when in humble service we love each other as he loved us.  It is the work of revealing to the world its own true glory, and he will do it, and we will do it with him, until the world’s story of itself and God’s story of the world are the same story once again.