My sons and I just got back from a Boy Scout weekend adventure staying in a cabin, hiking, stargazing, and cooking outdoors. When we prepared for this trip into the wilderness, I made sure I had packed the two most essential items for leaving my home. Franks Extra Ed Hot Sauce and Himalayan Pink Rock Salt. What can I say, I’m a foodie.
Salt is used for many things.
You can preserve a wide variety of foods with salt either by coating meat in salt or pickling vegetables. My grandfather was a lobsterman, and I remember – not all that fondly – the enormous bait barrels that he took when resetting traps. They were filled to the brim with salt and hundreds of pounds of fish. Smelled like the end of the world.
When I lived in Granite Springs, we had a well water system. Our water was very good, but it was “Hard Water” which means its filled with scaly minerals like Magnesium and calcium that stick to pipes, make the water taste heavy, and leave white powdery residue on everything. We had to buy 50 pound bags of Salt Softener, a dozen bags at a time, to run the Water Softener system. Basically the salt is used electrified to create a chemical reaction that iodizes the water and removes the scaly minerals making it “Soft”.
We regularly salt the roads before it snows or throw it down on an icy walkway. Salt melts ice – that is another type of chemical reaction.
Salt can be used to destroy fertile ground – when the Romans beat the Carthaginians in war they took the further step of trying to ensure that Carthage would never again be a major city by salting the earth, ensuring that there the earth would not be suitable for farming for generations.
And of course salt seasons food, which is why I bring it with me when I leave my own kitchen.
You are the salt of the earth.
Salt changes the things it comes in contact with. It can be used to preserve, it can be used to purify, it can be used to alter an environment, it can be used to destroy, and it can be used to season. However it is used, it causes change.
When Jesus speaks to his disciples – you and me – and says that we are the salt of the earth, I take that to mean that we have been given the power and gifts by God to change the things that we come in contact with.
Consider a person who if gifted at persuading people. That person could use that gift to encourage others to use their lives and talents to build up the common good – seasoning bland or flavorless people with a zest for charity and good works. That person could use that same gift of persuasion to encourage perseverance through difficult times. That person could persuade others to purify themselves of hard vices. Or that person could also use the gift of persuasion as a means of discouragement – sowing discord so that the others find it difficult or even impossible to bear fruit.
There is no doubt that every single one of us has been given amazing gifts by God. This church is full of persuasive people. I can be a pretty persuasive person. How do you and I use that sort of God given gift?
Do you use it, as Isaiah says, for “the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil”?
Do you use it, as Isaiah says, to encourage others to “offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted”?
It is an interesting time to be alive. Social Media and other forms of communication allow any of us to communicate with hundreds or even thousands of people. The television, internet, and print are littered with anger, accusations, lies, fear, and hysteria.
Into that stew we are thrown. Are we going to season that stew in a way that it begins to satisfy the needs of the afflicted? Or are we going to season it with more pointing of the finger, more speaking of evil.
We are the salt of the earth. I don’t think we have a lack of saltiness, and I want to encourage you with every fiber of my being to use yourselves as salt for the common good.
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