Salt

Proper 21, 18 Pentecost

26 Sep 2021

Chemistry and physics fascinated me when I “discovered” them in high school. I wish I had taken more physics and chemistry courses in college (yes that marks me as outside the bounds of a normal, same human being). There was one notable exception: quantitative analysis, the chemistry course I loved to hate. Through the convoluted way we were forced to have a major and a minor in our undergraduate years, I found that I without a whole lot of courses in something I needed to take one more chemistry course. As a non-chemistry major, I did not have a lot of course choices. So I took Quantitative Analysis. The lecture and book learning part were not difficult, but the lab work was, well, a different matter. To get a good grade you had to perform multiple chemical processes on an unknown starting compound and then end up with a precise amount of a final compound. With rare exceptions, my amounts were way off the mark. Oh and speaking of Mark you are likely wondering at this point what all of this has to do with my ruminations on the Gospel reading for this week. It all boils down, pun intended, to salt. Most all of the compounds we analyzed were salts of some cation (that is a positively charged ion). Table salt is sodium chloride, NaCl. The salt of potassium is KCl or potassium chloride. Salts are the combination of a cation, or positively charge ion, and an anion, or negatively charge ion. There are alkaline salts and acidic salts, organic salts and inorganic salts and so on and so on.

So the term salt, for any one with a background in chemistry, is a highly charged (again excuse the pun) subject. And a chemist will also tell you that salt cannot lose its saltiness unless the compound is broken apart, in which case it is no longer a salt anyway.

All of this left me quite puzzled about what Jesus was trying to say to me in Mark’s Gospel. When I realized that analytical chemistry was not going to teach me anything about Jesus is the point I understood that Mark was speaking in hyperbole and metaphor. Never take anything literally or we will all end up blind and with only one hand or foot.

If I were listening to Jesus speak what would I be thinking? I am following and listening to someone who is known to be unique, but badly misunderstood.

That day you and I would see someone casting out demons, that is doing something that helps a person, and doing it in the name of Jesus but that individual hadn’t passed the test for the Jesus Disciple License. What would you do? The disciples, perhaps feeling a bit displaced or out of the spotlight, protested. They came to Jesus feeling a bit puffed up with themselves, thinking they would receive great praise. Would you have done the same? Mark tells us Jesus said that whenever the right thing is done, that alone is enough. It comes from God. Now we can argue that we don’t always agree about what is the right thing, but most the time it is clear. If someone is healed because they felt the spirit at a Pentecostal gathering or because they went on a silent retreat at a Catholic monastery or attended a service at a Hindu temple, is not that the right thing?

I do not have a monopoly on the Truth; neither do you.

What about removing an eye or an arm or a foot? I have read that work related amputations or loss of an eye were not that uncommon in Jesus’s time; a sacrifice to work that needed to be done in order to survive. Perhaps we are being taught that living a cozy and convenient life, being a Sunday only Christian, is not at the heart of what it means to BE a Christian. If I were in the crowd listening to Jesus, or to Mark’s Gospel, I would hope I would recognize that following Jesus and staying true to the Gospel requires a willingness to surrender something precious if that is what it takes. We cannot be armchair Christians. At one point I heard it said that the Episcopal Church was the Republican Party at prayer. I think that was wholly unfair and untrue, but it does point out that there was a sense that if we showed up on Sundays and did our due diligence, that was enough.

It is not.

We need to be the salt; in this case the simple and universal salt that chemists call sodium chloride. This is the ubiquitous salt that preserves food and makes it tasty. If the salt is contaminated, it is worthless. We are not called upon to be complex designer sea salts, but rather common salt.

Ricky Skaggs and Mick Jagger have recorded songs entitled Salt of the Earth; a 1954 movie based on an actual strike against a zinc mine bears the same name; it was blacklisted as subversive because it advanced a feminist, socialist, and pro-Latino viewpoint.

Would any of you who garden pour the contents of your Morton Kosher Salt on your garden? Not if you wanted plants to grow!! Conquerors in ancient times poured salt on fields to prevent the conquered from using them to grow crops.

Yet, like those tiny mustard seeds, can be overlooked and underappreciated.

No; don’t cut off your hand or foot, but rather understand that you are human. You will make mistakes as you trek on the Way that we call Christianity. You will cause people to stumble. But most of the stumbling we do is our own; not born of intent to do harm but rather of ignorance or excessive zeal. Jesus cautions us that if we have a litmus test at all it should be that what is being done is done with true love. Are people being healed? Are they being fed and housed? Is creation being cared for? Is God being praised and thanked?

If we start to give up the things that bind us to our material existence, we find that we have less reason for jealousy and fear. We don’t have to protect or horde anything. St. Francis may be the ultimate example of kenosis, or self-emptying, in a fully human being; Jesus is our ultimate example - period.

Don’t let anything keep you from loving one another. Don’t let anything prevent you from loving the entirety of creation. Don’t be stumbling block.

James puts it front and center: pray and sing and have others pray over you, whether for illness or for the forgiveness of sin. James spends a lot of time telling you less about why and more about how. You are a community; this community gathers on Sundays and gathers for Bible study. We keep each other grounded and faithful. The more we act communally, the less likely we are to worry that our eye will offend or our hand sin.

Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.