“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled by men.” (Matthew 5:13)
Salt today has become such a commonplace part of our lives, available in every home or restaurant, and costing almost nothing--so much so that we take it entirely for granted. But it hasn’t always been that way--and in fact, even up to the time of the Civil War salt was such a valuable commodity that battles were fought over it. It’s even been said that if the Confederate forces had been able to protect their salt supplies, the war might have ended very differently. It was that important.
In the days before refrigeration, meat was preserved exclusively by salting, and otherwise would spoil within only a few days in warmer weather. So it was a vital part of provisioning armies with the necessary diet to keep up their morale. Equally important, salt was used in curing leather, another crucial military application in that time.
In ancient Greece, salt even was traded for slaves, giving rise to the expression of someone not being “worth his salt.” In the Roman Empire, salt was such a vital commodity that soldiers were paid partly with a ration of salt, which became the origin of our word “salary.”
Salt has also been an important part of medical treatment throughout history, from countless home remedies to its vital place in hospitals today, in the form of IVs of saline (a mixture of salt and water), used to treat dehydration, flush wounds and sustain patients throughout surgery, dialysis and chemotherapy. Without salt, muscles won’t contract, blood won’t circulate, food won’t digest and the heart won’t beat. Salt is vital to life.
All this is simply to say that when Jesus spoke these words, to be the salt of the earth meant to provide a precious and invaluable benefit to the world. And, of course, he meant that in spiritual terms--for us, the Church, by our presence, to embody a vital blessing to the world.
Let’s be honest, though: these are challenging times--for our country, for the world in general, and for the Church. With the dysfunctional state of our politics; mass shootings; rampant greed; racial injustice; sexual immorality and the coarsening of our culture in general; terrorism; the catastrophic consequences of climate change--and, of course, the decline of the Church and its influence in America--the darkness around us is deepening.
And yet, it’s in times like these and in the greatest darkness that light matters most and shines the brightest--and when the Church has been at its best. This is one of those times when we especially need to be reminded of our identity as the salt of the earth: to be the life-giving spiritual presence and vital influence the world so desperately needs.
An African American woman boarded a bus one afternoon in Montgomery, Alabama to return home after her day’s work as a seamstress. It was 1955, and obeying the Jim Crow laws for where to sit, she passed by the first ten rows of seats reserved for whites and sat in row 11.
As the bus filled up, though, a white man entered and couldn’t find a seat in his section, so the driver, following standard practice, ordered that all four blacks in row 11 vacate their seats so he could have one. (By the way, the law in Montgomery at that time also gave bus drivers the authority to carry guns to enforce their decisions.)
But Rosa Parks, a devout Christian and advocate for social justice, took a stand and refused to move. She simply couldn’t obey that unjust order, regardless of the consequences. She was promptly arrested and convicted of breaking the law. She appealed the decision, however, thus setting in motion a course of events that would overturn the legality of those discriminatory laws.
The Black Church took the lead in organizing the boycott of city buses that very next Sunday, choosing a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. as their coordinator. Since three-fourths of the riders on city buses were black, the boycott had a crippling effect on the local economy.
Black workers walked miles to and from their jobs, rain or shine, and soon were benefited by a carpool of 300 cars--despite persistent harassment from the police, who ticketed waiting passengers for loitering and stopped carpool drivers for every kind of contrived infraction. But the boycott persisted, and thirteen months later the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional--and not only buses, but trains across the South were integrated. And that became the first victory of the Civil Rights movement to change racist laws and attitudes, whose legacy continues to this day.
This is a familiar example of the Church being salt in the world by standing for justice. There have been many other examples along those lines, including the adoption of child labor laws, the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, and the moral and spiritual leadership of the Church in Eastern Europe to lead the way in defeating Soviet communism, to name just a few. The Church doesn’t generally get nearly the credit she deserves from a secular society for her prominent role in these causes, but we should take a lesson from them.
“You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus said. Just as salt serves such a vital, life-giving purpose in all sorts of way physically, so our role as Christians, and our place in the world as the Church collectively, is to provide a crucially important spiritual presence and influence in a world that so desperately need God and the good news of our salvation through Jesus Christ.
So what does that look like, and how does it really happen? The answer is two-fold: through prayer and our faithfulness. Prayer, because we can’t do this, or anything of real and lasting significance, without God’s help--but also through faithfulness, in doing our part.
When we pray together every Sunday morning, for others in need, for the Church, and for our country, we aren’t just going through the motions. Or at least I hope not. We should be praying earnestly, from the heart, calling on God for his help--his grace and mercy--and believing that he’s listening and that he cares, and honors the prayers of his people. As the writer of Hebrews encourages us, “Let us approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (4:16). God wants us to call on him, to draw near and to trust him as our loving Father, who’s always there for us. So much so that we can boldly approach his throne of grace.
God doesn’t want us to carry the world on our shoulders--all of those very heavy problems we mentioned earlier that are too great for us--but to turn to him for help with them. You or I can only do so much ourselves about all those challenges, but we have access to the great spiritual power of prayer, and this is certainly a time for us to call on God for his help. We can’t just lament; we need to pray.
And the other part of the equation is our own need for faithfulness. God will do his part, but he also wants us to do ours: to be faithful in our generation, as we’re told about David, who “served God’s purpose in his generation” (Acts 13:36.
That means living in a personal relationship with God, growing in our knowledge of God and his love in Jesus Christ, and his good will for our lives. Because as we follow Jesus closely, he’ll use our lives in ways that will make a difference, and that will be much more than what we could ever hope to do, or to be, on our own. But this doesn’t have to happen in some dramatic, heroic way, either. As I was walking my dog early this morning, I saw an older man leaving a house just as I was passing, and sort of scampering across the street. To be honest, my first thought was that he was sneaking around after paying someone a visit that night, but then I noticed him picking up a newspaper from the sidewalk in front of a neighbor’s house and throwing it up onto the porch. We greeted as he crossed the street again back towards me, and he said, “I just wish the newspaper carrier would realize that everyone can’t walk out to the sidewalk to get their paper. The woman who lives there uses a walker and has a hard time getting around.” So this was evidently his daily morning act of kindness, by helping his neighbor in that small but important way, and she may very well not even have known he was doing. But it blessed me to witness, especially after my initial uncharitable suspicion, and it reminded me of the contagious power of simple goodness.
And as Paul writes to the Colossians, “Be wise in the way you act towards outsiders. Make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” ( Colossians 4:5-6) Our words should be full of grace--or as Paul puts it, “seasoned with salt,” bringing out the flavor in life, its best spiritual quality. Our words have a power of their own. So we need to remember that and only speak them for good to bless and encourage others in grace. Because we’re either part of the solution or part of the problem. And much of being salt is a matter of our kindness and goodness.
And in fact, Jesus includes a warning in this teaching, that we keep our saltiness and beware of losing it, beware of becoming spiritually useless. A nominal Christian--a Christian in name only--is of no real value to anyone. We need to stay salty, to be the life-giving presence in the world we’re called to be--through prayer and our faithfulness.
