Author: John Drymon

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Salt is so common in our culture that Jesus’ words to the crowd in this morning’s Gospel “you are the salt of the earth” don’t initially make as much sense to us as they would have to the original audience. We have so much salt that not only do we put too much of it in our food, but when the weather gets bad we start throwing it on streets and sidewalks. If we’re not putting it in our bodies, we’re getting the stuff on our cars and shoes and the bottoms of our overcoats. Salt is ubiquitous.

Maybe our superabundance of salt is why we’ve taken that old expression from the Gospel “salt of the earth” to mean precisely the opposite of what it actually means. When we say somebody is “salt of the earth” we usually mean that he is an ordinary fellow: simple and honest and unassuming. In reality, what Jesus meant by “salt of the earth” was quite different.

You see, in ancient times, salt was a relatively valuable commodity, even in places very different from and unconnected to the Ancient Near East and the Roman Empire, hence the Mayan fresco on your bulletin cover page this morning. You wouldn’t think about spreading it on roads, and unless you were particularly well off, you’d go broke before you had had enough salt to cause health problems. Certainly salt wasn’t especially rare, but neither was it inexpensive enough to allow an ordinary person to keep a salt shaker on his table, much less buy a frozen dinner containing 300% of his recommended daily sodium intake.

Salt wasn’t as common then as it is today, but it was likely a great deal more important. For one thing, we do need some salt to live, and sodium deficiency was probably a greater problem in the ancient world than was its opposite. What’s more, artificial refrigeration wouldn’t come for about 1800 years, so unless you lived in a cold climate, you’d preserve meat and fish with a hefty amount of salt. So important was salt, that Roman soldiers had at one time been paid with it, later being given a stipend to buy it, called a “salarium”, which comes from the Latin for salt and which later becomes the English word “salary”. So, in the ancient world the aphorism “time is money” would not have been as accurate as something like “salt is money”.

So, when Jesus says “you are the salt of the earth” he’s not suggesting that his disciples are defined by simplicity and a lack of pretension. Rather, he’s saying that there is something remarkably valuable about them, and not just valuable. Precious metals and rare spices and even glass were extremely valuable in ancient Rome, but they were luxuries. You didn’t really need them, and to have them served mainly to impress one’s peers. Salt was valuable, but it was also necessary. Everyone needed a little, and a little could make life so much better.

If a Christian is the salt of the earth, then, it means that what we are has the potential to bring a valuable and necessary commodity into the world. We who know Christ can season the situations in which we find ourselves with the salt of the virtues, and a little bit goes a long way. A little temperance here, a dash of charity, a few teaspoons of patience…

But then we get to that puzzling question which follows Jesus’ declaration that we are the salt of the earth: “but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored?” Now Jesus wasn’t a chemist, nor am I, but I think I remember enough from my junior year of high school to say with some certainty that salt cannot easily lose its saltness. (I’m sure some of you are more well up on your chemistry, so please correct me if I’m getting something wrong.) Sodium chloride is what we call a stable ionic compound, its atoms held together by electrostatic attractions formed when the sodium loses one of its electrons to the chlorine, creating a positively charged sodium and a negatively charged chlorine. These two atoms are held together by electrical forces which are very strong and thus difficult to break.

Though Jesus wouldn’t have known anything about chemistry, I suspect he knew that salt couldn’t lose its saltness through simple observation. He wouldn’t have ever seen salt go stale, because it didn’t happen. Now, some of the commentaries I’ve read this week did a lot of exegetical handwaving to explain how salt might be capable of losing its saltiness, due to impurities, but I think this misses the point, and I for one am not troubled about having a savior who didn’t know sodium chloride from potassium lactate. That said, I suspect Jesus had a hunch that salt was necessarily salty. Why then this apparent warning? Perhaps (and this is just a hunch) the point is precisely that the idea of salt losing its saltness is silly. It’s just as silly as that other image in this morning’s Gospel: hiding a candle under a bushel basket- which I imagine would either snuff the candle or cause a fire hazard, but in all events, nobody would have reason to do it. You’d just blow the candle out and light it later when you needed it.

Perhaps the point is that if we’re salt and light, we cannot be otherwise. We can convince ourselves that we’re not salt, but we still are. We can refuse to use that which is in us to season our encounters with others, but it’s still there. We who have been baptized cannot be unbaptized. We can ignore our status as children of God; we can try to run away from it, but our adoption as God’s children, our existence as salt and light, is objective and irrevocable.

So, to all who are baptized, you are salt and light. You can’t get away from it, so you might as well commit yourselves to figuring out what bland, perishable thing in this world could use a little seasoning and a little saving. You might as well commit yourselves to figuring out what dark corner of this world could use a little light. That is what we’re here for, but more importantly, that’s what we are. We might as well embrace what we are: salt and light.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I was recently reminded of an early modern trope (which itself has a foundation in antiquity), and while that may sound like an awfully erudite, or even pretentious way to start a sermon, I hasten to add that I was not reminded of this by my extensive reading of history or literary criticism, but by a video game I just finished playing. The game, Pentiment, is a murder mystery that takes place in a sixteenth century Bavarian monastery, and while it includes a great deal of educational detail about the politics of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire and the ideas being popularized at the time by humanists and Protestant reformers, it’s still a video game, which I realize might be seen by some as a rather foolish pastime for a clergyman, but I think this is appropriate, for reasons that will soon become clear.

Anyway, the trope of which I was reminded is that of the “Ship of Fools”, an allegory going back to Plato’s Republic, but re-popularized nearly two thousand years later by both a painting by Hieronymus Bosch and a satirical book by the German humanist Sebastian Brant. It depicted the Church at the time not as the Ark of Salvation but as a boat piloted by clowns who fight with each other to set the course, the least competent often navigating, all under the patronage of the fictional Saint Grobian, patron of coarse and vulgar people.

While this gave a great deal of grist for the mill for contemporary figures like Erasmus and Luther, I was surprised and encouraged that in the game, the ship of fools stood in as the means by which the protagonist whom the player controls travels between his dreams–where he receives wisdom from figures as diverse as Socrates, Prester John, and Beatrice from the Divine Comedy–and his waking life where he must put this wisdom to use in service of justice. The suggestion is that there may be wisdom in what appears to the world to be folly.

Another trope from the Christian tradition along these lines (this time from the East) can be found on the front of your bulletins this morning. The holy fool (in this instance St. Basil) was a figure particularly popular in Russian Orthodoxy, though they could be found throughout Christendom during different eras beginning as early as the Fourth Century, in which God’s power and wisdom could be seen by one who intentionally hid his or her cleverness and moral perfection from the world by acting apparently irrational. It is, perhaps, a bit of an extreme approach, but one can see the point these holy fools were trying to make.

“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing,” says St. Paul, “but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” We must recognize that that which gives our lives meaning is reckoned foolish by much of the world, and that the proper response to this reality is not to feel threatened. Most of us would like to be considered intelligent, but to what lengths will we go to be reckoned wise by the world’s standards, especially when our faith may be considered by some to be a handicap, when some see us as holy fools aboard a ship piloted by fools?

What it all comes down to, as far as I can tell, is the limited nature of the world’s definition of knowledge. In the study of epistemology—that is, the study of how we know what we know—the belief of some is that reason and observation are the only two means available to the human mind for acquiring knowledge. With the exception of those who believe theological truths can be proved by either of these means or a combination of them (an argument I’d be willing to entertain but which has yet to be presented to me in a convincing manner) most Christians will protest that truths about God can be known just as fully by other means, namely by faith. Faith, in this sense, is not merely a set of propositions to which we give our assent for the heck of it, but is itself a tool used for acquiring wisdom (it serves an epistemic function parallel to reason and observation). Paul calls this means of knowledge a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. In our context, faith can be a stumbling block to the logician and folly to the scientist, “but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks (to logicians and scientists and the simple alike), Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

We cannot be threatened by the derision with which our faith is held by some in the larger culture. We cannot be threatened by those who claim it’s all a bunch of fairy stories, because we know that we are justified by the true power and wisdom of God. We are promised that though we may not be wise by their standards, our folly, our absolutely silly insistence that we can know that which we cannot see, will shame the wisdom of the wise.

So, let’s revel in our folly. Let’s be fools for Christ. Instead of being threatened by those the world sees as wise, let’s embrace the fact that what we are can seem to be nuts. Let’s get over the self-consciousness, the embarrassment we can feel when our commitment to Christ is seen as a bit odd in some of the circles in which we run. Embrace that oddness. Christ never said the Christian path would be respectable; he said it was the way of life and joy and peace. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take life and joy and peace over respectability any day.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we find ourselves right in the middle of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, an ecumenical observance held in one form or another for over a hundred years between the feasts of the Confession of St. Peter and the Conversion of Saint Paul. It’s a time when we are called to pray for that state of affairs which was our Lord’s last desire before his crucifixion, “that they all may be one”, and that God may, as one of our prayers puts it, “give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions.”

I’m often reminded, looking around not only at divisions within the church but the stark divisions within our society, of both the church’s unique potential (indeed, our unique responsibility) to bring about unity in the face of such profound division as well as our historic inability to do so, at least considering just how many varieties of Christians and churches there are. I suppose one could say that’s a good thing (let a thousand flowers bloom, and all that), but I remain convinced that unity should always be the goal for Christian bodies. It’s because keeping the people of God apart from each other is the most powerful tool of the enemy. Thus, creating and encouraging division is quite literally diabolical.

Consider our current reality in light of the situation we see outlined in today’s epistle reading. The Apostle Paul writes to the Christians in Corinth, whose congregation is fraught with controversy and division. The Corinthians were choosing up sides, demanding that their preferred spiritual leader and his ethos be made the norm. “I belong to Paul!” “I belong to Apollos!” “I belong to Cephas!” Why all of this division? If God speaks to us, as we are promised, in a clear, distinct, discernible voice shouldn’t we be able to avoid such divisions in the Church? Should not the same Lord who spoke so clearly to those first disciples beside the Syrian sea, call to us, too, and bring us together. Were these early Christians in Corinth deaf to the voice of God by their own volition? Are we still?

Well, let’s take a step back, and remember how we got here; first let’s recognize the difference between disagreement and division. It is perfectly normal and acceptable that once I have devoted a great deal of careful thought and sincere prayer in the working out of some belief, I have every right to claim that I believe my opinion to be correct. Yet, perhaps, this belief of mine which I now go round purporting as truth may be diametrically opposed to your belief. You have spent just as much time analyzing the ins and outs of the matter, you have spent just as much time in prayer, and you believe your opinion to be more correct than mine (indeed, you, too, believe that your opinion is quite properly “true”). So far none of this is very controversial.

Sometimes these differences, however, lead to fractures in the church like what we read about in the epistle. For us, though, these fractures are often more insidious. There are certainly arguments that have taken place in the church throughout its history which posed the threat of literal schism (and, indeed, sometimes did result in that), but what I mean to discuss is more the growth of a particular mindset.

There is sometimes a tendency, and this is a tendency to which I am personally disposed, to define our position in the church, first along sectarian and ideological lines, and secondly, and sometimes then only with a great deal of prodding, in terms of our baptism and our shared life with all people through Christ. In other words, we get how we prioritize our connection to Christ’s Church backwards.

That is, we are often quite ready to proclaim that we are active members of Trinity Parish in the Diocese of Ohio, in the Episcopal Church, USA (or that we are progressive Christians or traditional Christians or high-church or low-church or whatever). That’s how we define our Christianity, but we fail to first and foremost allow our Christianity to define everything else because we’re uncomfortable with whose company it puts us into. Don’t get me wrong- it is good and proper for one to strongly identify with his or her (lower case ‘c’) church or party within the church; the trick is to do so without falling victim to an ugly form of sectarianism which would claim that a part is greater than the whole (that is, the capital ‘C’ Church).

All of this is to say that our situation is much more like that of the Corinthians than we might like. We cannot, in fact, always expect God to speak to us in easily discernible ways, and this will necessarily lead to some difference among us Christians. We must, nonetheless, struggle to hear the still, small voice of God in our hearts, realizing that others will hear or interpret or act on the same voice in very different ways. Once we think we’ve heard this voice, that is once we believe we have discerned the will of God in our lives, we must also be very careful not to speak as though we know for absolute certain that we have the authority of Almighty God on our side unless we’re willing to stake our lives on it, remembering that these differences exist.

That, my friends, is a sin each of us can fall into and which I sometimes fall into myself. The need to be right or the need to sound smart, which is to say, the sin of pride, can very quickly lead us to deny the Christianity (even the humanity) of the one with whom we disagree. But this is the power of the evil one saying, “you don’t need that member, tear it off.” He was baptized by Apollos while I belong to Cephas. And the worst thing about it, is that even when I start to pray about it, even when I set out to make the most self-abnegating sorts of prayers about it, I keep coming back to what I want out of it. Lord change his heart. No, Lord, change my heart, so I can put up with such foolishness. Is that second one any better?

It seems to me that the best thing we can do when we see the seeds of division have been sewn between ourselves and a brother or sister – whether it’s because of a different view of some religious claim or politics or just conflicting personalities – is to maintain a holy silence, to listen for what God might be saying to us in the quietness of our hearts. This is important, because it has nothing to do with me trying to change God’s mind or make somebody else more like me or even my trying to understand somebody else (which itself has just a twinge of selfishness, because it assumes that I need to be able to understand them). Maybe whatever needs to happen in that relationship is better known to God than it is to me, and I just need to be quiet.

There’s a story I like from the lives of the Desert Fathers about a Fourth Century church leader named Theophilus. Theophilus was Archbishop of Alexandria when he had a dispute in his diocese and traveled to the desert to seek the sage advice of the hermit Abba Pambo. Upon reaching Abba Pambo’s hermitage, the Archbishop was greeted warmly by the brethren, yet Abba Pambo said nothing. The other monks left, leaving Theophilus and Pambo alone, and still Abba Pambo said nothing. After a long while, the Archbishop broke the silence: “Father, say something to me that I might be edified.” Abba Pambo replied “If you are not edified by my silence, you will not be edified by my speech.” Theophilus needed more than sage advice. He needed to quiet down and open himself up to what God was trying to tell him.

And, if we glean nothing else from such prayer, even if we are not yet ready or able to hear the still, small voice of God, we can at least find a greater comfort. We can take comfort that despite our inability to comprehend the mind of God, God still knows us completely. And then, even when we cannot understand why our divisions remain unhealed, we can rest in the heart of the one who knows no division and find in that place the perfect Communion which for all our pettiness and petulance and peevishness cannot permit the dividing walls we’ve constructed to stand. May that spiritual communion then become manifest in our words, in our actions, in our relationships, that all our divisions may cease and that Christ may be all in all.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.