Keep Your Salt Levels High Series

Have a taste of this [hand out teaspoon of salt to someone in the front row]

“If salt loses it’s saltiness with what will you season it?”

I have two things that I would like to draw out of today’s texts about ways in which we can lose our saltiness - one personal and one public. One personal - about how live our lives, and one public - about how we run organisations which we belong to, be it companies or the Church. Which would you like me to talk about first?

[Take a vote of the congregation. The point of doing this is that while I don’t change the content of what I say, by giving the congregation a choice over the order I say it in, I give them a sense of ownership]

PUBLIC

Everyone knows that the Vietnam War was a disaster for the Americans. However it took until 1997 that definitive work on why the Vietnam War was a disaster was published - a PhD thesis entitled “Derelection of Duty” by one HR MacMaster.

The problem with the Vietnam War was (according to McMaster) not that America made mistakes - but that it failed to learn from them.

On the ground Captains knew exactly what was wrong with the commands they were getting. But if they disobeyed them, they may save their soldiers lives, but they would not get promoted. This went right up the ranks. Even the highest General could not speak directly to President Johnson about any concerns they had. They had to speak through the Defense Secretary McNamara. Any one who tried to bi pass the chain of command would be told off. And even if the Generals did get through to McNamara, they were meant to listen and obey, not feed back ideas. “if you are not for us you are against us” And so, even though everyone at the bottom knew what was going wrong, no one could get their superiors to listen to them. And the War was lost.

Consider our Gospel reading. The Apostles were quite clear there was a chain of command. At the top was Jesus. They argued frequently about who came next. Was it John and James ? Was it Peter and Andrew? Was it Judas the money man? But one thing they were sure of … it was the 12 who came next. So what was someone out side the twelve doing trying to cast out demons in Jesus’s name? He wasn’t even a proper disciple of any sort - he had just seen someone in distress, and had acted to help WITHOUT the proper permissions. Jesus on the other hand takes a different attitude.

“Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able to soon afterwards speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us….. If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung round your neck and you were thrown into the sea”

Look what Jesus does here - he is quite happy to tell people off when they are getting it wrong (he tells the powerful Apostles off) but he is even more happy giving permission “Do not stop him”. Here was someone at the bottom of the hierarchy seeing someone in need, and casting out the demon in Jesus name.

In pretty much every company up and down the land, people on the shop floor … the lowly cleaner on the hospital ward, the zero-hours customer assistant in the shop, the lowest ranking guy or gal in the factory. - All these have ideas, often very good ideas, about how the job could be done better. Any of you in this congregation who have relatively low ranking jobs will probably agree with me. The problem companies face is how do you get those ideas from the bottom to the top.

So moving on from Vietnam to the disastrous war in Iraq. It’s pretty disastrous at the moment. It started off pretty disastrous. But there were pockets in the middle when things were turned around.

It started off just like Vietnam - a defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld who refused to listen to anything the Generals were saying. And when Generals tried to say the plan wasn’t working, they got side lined, not promoted.

But one particular Colonel, was put in charge of a Town called Tel Afar, where things were going disastrously wrongly. He quickly turned things around. He listened to those who were below who were telling him what was going wrong, and ignored the orders from above him. In that particular area (and for as long as that Colonel was in charge) Al Quaida in that area (what is now ISIS) was totally defeated. For his troubles, this Colonel was twice passed over for promotion. But he had the confidence to carry on - and when he couldn’t get his ideas heard up the chain of command he would phone those higher up in the line, or where that failed call a journalist. How did this Colonel has the confidence to challenge that unquestioning loyalty to a top down chain of command was the best way to win a war? Because this Colonel was HR MacMaster - the very same man who 7 years earlier had written the seminal PhD on why America lost the Vietnam war.