Grace United Methodist Church
pastorwillrice@gmail.com
Matthew 5:13-16
You can ask any member of my Disciple I class, Bible study is hard work. One of the hardest parts of Bible study is putting aside what you think you already know about what scripture means so that you can actually listen to what it has to say. It is not necessarily our fault that we come to scripture with a whole lot of preconceived notions about what it means. Even as a person who didn’t grow up reading scripture or hearing sermons, I had some notions about what things meant. As people over the years have interpreted the Bible, their interpretations have become part of the collective conscious of Christians a non-Christians alike. Some of these interpretations work their way into the language of the culture. You don’t have to read the parable of the Good Samaritan to know what a Good Samaritan is. I never read the Bible but I knew what it meant to say someone “walks on water” or is a “doubting Thomas.”
You don’t need a Bible study to know what the phrase “salt of the earth means.” You can look it up in the dictionary, which I did. It is listed as an idiom. Being a little fuzzy on high school English, I then had to look up idiom.
id·i·om (
d
-
m) n. A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, as in keep tabs on.
Salt of the earth is an idiom that means “A person or group considered as the best or noblest part of society.”[1]
So, if I were to use the cultural understanding of this idiom to interpret the scripture from which it originally came, this would be a short sermon, I could say, “You are the salt of the earth! Congratulations! You have arrived!” I like the sound of that. They are very clear in seminary that you need to occasionally preach a “feel-good” sermon or people will stop liking you. I want people to like me so… “You are the salt of the earth! Congratulations! You have arrived!”
But, I am not so sure. What is salt anyway? Sodium Chloride is its chemical compound. I am not sure we think of salt the way that Jesus thought of salt. When I think of salt, I think of the stuff they used to melt the ice off the roads in my home in upstate
When I think of salt, I also hear my doctor’s voice in my head telling me not to eat so much of it, it is supposed to raise my blood pressure. When I think of salt, my heart is also strangely warmed when I think of all the things I like to put it on, especially French fries!
I think we can assume when Jesus speaks of salt, he is thinking of it in the positive way. In Jesus’ day and in the place where he lived salt was nearly as precious as Gold, though much more abundant. The
Salt was precious because salt was life sustaining. Remember, people in Jesus time didn’t have refrigerators. Salt, because it was readily available, was an essential food preservative. Since most of us have refrigerators, we don’t do this much anymore, but meat soaked in a salt solution and then dried can last for months without refrigeration. The salt draws moisture out of the meat and kills the bacteria that normally makes it go bad. We tend to eat meat cured this way more as a delicacy than out of necessity. For people in Jesus’ day, without salt, food would spoil and there just wouldn’t be enough to eat.
Salt sustains.
You can imagine that a substance of this importance would start to gain, almost religious significance. This simple substance could stop rot and decay and help to preserve life-giving food. It may not seem so apparent to us in a time with frozen food and microwaves, but in Jesus’ time, it must have seemed almost mystical.
Now of course, it also didn’t take people long to figure out that this stuff makes things taste good. We now have so many cooking methods and sweeteners and spices that we tend to forget how miraculous salt can be. It is not the flavor of the salt, it is how it enhances the flavor of other things. Sometimes I will buy a wonderful piece of fish and cook it nice and slow on the grill and then bring it in and cut off a piece and it tastes like nothing. I then put just a dash of salt on it, and pow, the wonderful flavor of the fish and the smoke from the grill pop right out.
Salt seasons.
Imagine living in a time when cooking was pretty basic, done in a stone fire heated oven or over a simple open flame without any McCormick Grill Mates marinades or A1 Steak Sauce, salt was just plain miraculous.
The importance and value of salt is certainly attested to in the Bible. Job 6:6 reads:
6Can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt?
Its seasoning properties are referred to as far back as Exodus (Ex. 30:35) as salt was used to season the incense used in worship. According to Leviticus 2, all offerings made to God had to be seasoned with salt.
13You shall not omit from your grain offerings the salt of the covenant with your God; with all your offerings you shall offer salt.
Which is all a long way of saying, when Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth;” he was saying quite a bit. I think with a deeper understanding of what salt would have meant to Jesus’ original audience, the idiomatic definition of salt of the earth as, “A person or group considered as the best or noblest part of society,” is quite limited, if not incorrect.
My contention is that this statement, “you are the salt of the earth,” is not a statement of status, but rather a statement of function.[2] I think this is immensely important so let me say it again. I believe the statement, “you are the salt of the earth,” is not a statement of status, but a statement of function.
Let me try to explain. If “you are the salt of the earth,” was a statement of status, I might say, as I did before “congratulations! (polite applause) You have arrived, you are the salt of the earth.”
If “you are the salt of the earth,” is a statement of function,” I might say, “we better get to work, we have a lot to do, we are supposed to be the salt of the earth.”
Now if being the salt of the earth is a statement of function, what are we supposed to do about it? You know a statement of function almost sounds like a mission statement. You know, I think we have one of those. It is Grace WINS, We Invite, Nurture, Serve.
Let’s think about it, what does salt do again? Salt sustains and salt seasons. Salt sustains life, it preserves food, it keeps bacteria from spoiling it. Salt seasons, we all know that one, it makes food taste better. How are we like salt? We sustain and we season this is our function. As Christ’s representatives in the world, we sustain life. We sustain it in two ways. First, and these are not in a particular order, We sustain life by sharing the Gospel, the good news of God in Jesus Christ. That is part of what we mean when we say we invite and nurture. Let me read you a line from the Gospel according to John 20:31:
31But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah,* the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
Second, we sustain life by providing for the least, the last, and the lost. That is what we are talking about when we say we serve. We sustain life by making sure that the people in our community, city, state country and world have enough to eat and drink, that they have clothes and shelter and a chance at life. 1 John 3
17How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister* in need and yet refuses help? 18Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
Salt sustains and salt seasons, the second half of that, seasoning means we are to, our function also is to season the world. Let me read you a quote:
Have you looked at these Christians closely? Hollow-eyed, pale-cheeked, flat breasted all; they brood their lives away, unspurred by ambition; the sun shines for them, but they do not see it; the earth offers them its fullness, but they desire it no; all their desire is to renounce and to suffer that they may come to die.”[3]
That was written by Roman emperor Julian who took the throne after
Well thank goodness that isn’t true anymore…
13"You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
Well, here at Grace we are a pretty lively bunch, but I have to tell you, we have to think about perception. I can tell you from experience that young, unchurched folks think we are boring with a capital B. Now that may simply be a perception problem, but it is our perception problem.
Salt sustains and salt seasons. If we are to truly be the salt of the earth we must “discover the lost radiance of the Christian faith.” This should be exciting. It should be so exciting that people look at us and can’t help but wonder what the heck we are doing.
If we were more like habanero peppers and less like salt free all purpose food seasoning, we probably wouldn’t have to worry as much about evangelism because people would be coming to us to see what was going on.
Salt sustains and seasons. These two are intricately linked. It is through our actions as sustainers that we season. It is not as if we need to spend part of our time out bringing life and hope and part of our time being exciting. They are indeed one and the same.
Salt sustains and seasons.
I have to tell you, my first few weeks here at Grace were a little overwhelming. It seems I walked in during the middle of a little thing called Sea City Work Camp. Since I was so new and was still trying to find the bathroom and unpack my books, I was not much help to the youth and adults who were out in the sun every day repairing homes, replacing roofs and expressing God’s love to people in need in word and action. I got to watch and take it all in as they would all come back exhausted and exhilarated. They were invigorated by the life sustaining they were a part of and they were invigorating to watch.
Salt sustains and salt seasons.
You know, I spend a lot of time up here and in the classroom trying to be the one to share the gospel and teach the gospel and motivate others to accept and spread the good news, but here in the evening, watching those youth and adults reflecting upon what they did during the day, I was the recipient of the salty seasoning of their sustaining service.
Salt sustains and salt seasons.
Today is a day where if you realize that you want to be a part of sustaining and seasoning you can find how. Today is the second Sunday of our emphasis on stewardship of service. Some people misunderstand the goal of such a thing. They think that we, as church leadership are just look for volunteers to fill all the positions at the church. I will tell you honestly, if that was what church was all about, I would find something else to do with my time. This is about being the salt of the earth, this is about sustaining and seasoning ministries through which we reach out to each other and the world surrounding us to spread the love of God in word and deed and in doing so, radiate the love and joy that comes only from truly being active in the work of God.
Salt sustains and salt seasons.
In the list of ministries that you can commit to, ministries that you can learn more about in the glassway today, there is something that will not only bring God’s grace to someone else, there is something that will make your heart sing while you do it. It may be in feeding the homeless through Metro Ministries Loves and Fishes. It may be showing prison inmates that God’s love extends to them too through Kairos Prison Ministry. Maybe you are called to visit people who can’t come to church or who are in the hospital. You might be ready to help make
Maybe you won’t find anything among the ministries we offer. it may be that God has put something else on your heart. You might be being called to get
You are the salt of the earth! That is our function, our sustaining and seasoning commission to bring life, to bring the good news of Christ to the world both through our actions and by the invigorating example those actions set.
You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world. Through all this, may to God be the Glory.
[1] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
[2] Douglas R.A. Hare, Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, Matthew, (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1993) 44
[3] Roman Emporer Julian, as quoted in, William Barclay, The Daily Bible Study Series, The Gospel of Matthew. Volume 1, (Phildadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956-58) 116
[4] Ibid., 116
