February 9, 2020 Sermon: Salt of the Earth

Today’s sermon for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany in RCL Year A is based on Matthew 5:13-20 and 1 Corinthians 2:1-16. Essays this week in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 1 were helpful, as well as Bethany Ringdal’s February 7 GodPause devotional.

How many of you regularly put salt on your food? If my mom were here, she’d be the first to raise her hand. My mom is of the firm belief that just about everything is better with salt.

Last weekend when she was here for Micah’s baptism, we went out to the bowling alley, and she put salt on her pizza. That’s weird, right?

But I’m sure she’s not alone. You probably know most Americans already have far too much salt in our diets from the processed food we eat, yet every restaurant and every kitchen table has a salt shaker.

Did you know we need salt to live? As you might remember from high school chemistry class, salt is NaCl – sodium chloride. In our bodies, sodium is essential for nerve and muscle function and to keep up blood pressure and regulate fluids. We need the chloride for stomach acid and to regulate blood pH and pressure.

Not only are human beings designed to need salt on its own, but historically, salt is also essential as a preservative. Before refrigeration, salt was the best way to preserve meat. Salt is so important it’s even been used as currency.

Have you ever heard the expression “worth his salt”? Like, “any preacher worth his salt will eventually talk about Jesus and not cooking ingredients?” “Worth his salt” comes from the Roman army, where soldiers were sometimes paid in salt (source). In fact, the root of our word “salary” is the Latin “salarium,” meaning a soldier’s allowance to buy salt.

Today as we continue with Jesus’ sermon on the mount, we hear Jesus tell his followers, “You are the salt of the earth.”

As Christians, we believe God created the whole world, and we believe all life continues to be sustained by the Holy Spirit. If that’s true, and if we as Jesus’ followers are the ones carrying that message to the world, I don’t think it’s going too far to say the church—the Body of Christ—us—are essential for the life of the world. In order to live, the world needs the church.

In cooking, salt is one of the basic spices used to enhance food. I read this week that the role of salt in cooking is to make “come alive what would otherwise seem tasteless and bland.”

That’s not a bad image for our role in the world as church. God has tasked us with caring for creation. We’re here to be ambassadors for God, to spice up life, to help the world come alive the way God has always intended it to be.

Of course, right after Jesus declares that we are the salt of the earth, he gives a warning. “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”

Obviously from a chemical perspective, salt cannot literally lose its taste. Sodium chloride is always going to taste like sodium chloride.

So what is our saltiness as the church? What does it look like for the church to forget what it is? What do we as Christians and as the church have to offer to the world? What is the light we can’t hide under a bushel basket?

The church is a lot of things to a lot of people. If you haven’t read an annual report yet, grab one and skim through it, and you’ll see the breadth of the work we do together, the work God is doing in just this one congregation. There’s a lot of good work, more than any one of us realize is going on.

But there’s one thing we do that is central. Our job, our calling, our mission, our purpose as a church is always to help people grow in their relationship with God. Everything else, all the ways we help people live out their faith in fellowship, in service, in worship, all of it flows from this primary calling to be the body of Christ working for the redemption of the world, building God’s kingdom, restoring the relationship between people and God.

Listen to Paul in 1 Corinthians: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Our identity as a church, our identity as followers of Jesus is found only in Jesus Christ and him crucified. Everything we know about God’s love for us and for the world depends on Jesus hanging on the cross, God in the flesh, dying for us out of love.

J. Ellsworth Kalas challenges us to ask if the church wasn’t here, what would be missing in the world? What unique flavor do we disciples bring as the salt of the earth? What light are we shining?




One answer is that we’d lose a lot of friends. Many of us have good friends in the church. In fact, the church might be the best place to make friends and form deep relationships. But there are other places in the world to make friends. Fellowship is vital to being a church community, but we can find other opportunities to eat donuts and play games and even have potlucks.

Maybe it’s one of my favorite parts of church, the music, the arts. But there are other places you can go to hear music or sing. If the church disappeared, there’d still be colleges and art museums and orchestras. Colleges and universities could take care of ethical and historical studies too.

Maybe social justice. Without the church, we’d certainly lose a lot of good work in serving the poor, the hungry, the least of these. But as much as I love mission trips and service projects, there are many other structures for meeting those needs.
But nowhere else in the world will proclaim Jesus. No other organization exists to proclaim the good news that God has loved us from eternity and has entered into the world to live with us and to die for us to give us abundant life that starts now and continues for eternity.

No other group in the world exists to proclaim that God’s love is for everyone, for those who are members, and those who are could not care less about faith. The mystery of God’s grace belongs solely to the church to proclaim.

Ounique job is—as Paul puts it—to “interpret spiritual things.” That realm is trusted to us. There are many beautiful by-products of that message, many great things we can and should offer as the church, but they’re all secondary to our mission of proclaiming Jesus Christ crucified and risen.

When we lose sight of that purpose, when our salt loses its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

And remember, salt thrown out is not only useless, it’s actually harmful. When an invading army wants to destroy an enemy country, they salt their fields to prevent them from growing crops.

We’ve all seen examples of the church losing its mission and becoming harmful. Televangelists using the church to make a profit instead of to serve their neighbors; church leaders trading their call to humbly speak truth for earthly political power. The solution is to remember why we exist, to remember what we have to offer. Former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple famously said, “The church is the only organization on earth that exists for those who are not its members.” God is always calling us to serve beyond ourselves.

To fulfill our calling, we need to focus on the unique proclamation we have to offer. A devotion I read pointed out, “A whole meal might contain a spoonful of salt, all told—but you would never want to eat all that salt in one bite. Salt only does its job when it is well dispersed.”

The church is the same. We gather together to encourage and support each other in our walk with Jesus, but we are only really doing our job when we disperse into the world, to our families, to our co-workers, to our neighbors. We have a particular calling, a particular witness, but we’re not called to “stay in our lane.” Our witness extends to all of life. There is plenty of shadow in need of God’s light.

Both salt and light are only effective when they are spread out. Jesus calls us to let our lights shine before others not so they’ll look at us and recognize how great we are, but so they’ll see our good works and give glory to our Father in heaven.

As followers of Jesus, our job is to “refract God’s light so that all peoples and nations can know of God’s justice and mercy.”

The good news of Jesus takes shape in the way we live, in the actions we take as individuals and as a church. God’s light is always present. God’s love and care are all around us.

But when we serve others, when we express God’s love, we’re focusing that light for others to see. Our words and our actions proclaim Jesus to the world.

Later in this letter, Paul describes our job as being God’s hands and feet in the world.

In the 1500’s, St. Teresa of Avila put it like this: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world.

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”

You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. May you always reflect Christ. Amen