Salt Of The Earth

“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.