The happy medium of salt and light

All Saints by the Lake, Dorval

Epiphany V, Year A

February 5, 2023

 

For if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.

It doesn’t actually seem to be clear to any commentators on the Bible what this sentence means. Salt is one of the simplest chemical compounds known to humanity – just straight sodium chloride – and can only “lose its taste” if dissolved or adulterated. There were no midden piles of spoiled salt accumulating next to the homes of people in first-century Palestine.

Perhaps Jesus was just fishing for a metaphor to parallel the next one, in which he says, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.” This image clarifies and illuminates (puns entirely intended) the one about salt; what is being asked of us is that we act according to our nature, as salt and light, rather than wasting or hiding those gifts.

And what else do salt and light have in common? You can probably think of a number of things, but the one I want to focus on today is how both salt and light point at, bring out, things other than themselves. You don’t salt your food because you want it to taste salty; you salt it because salt brings out the other flavours in the dish. You don’t turn on the light because you want to stare into a 100-watt bulb (please don’t do this; you’ll damage your eyes) you turn on the light so that you can see to read your book, drink your coffee, pet your dog, or look at the expression on your spouse’s face.

There are some Christians who, in my humble opinion, overdo it. They take an extreme brand of Christianity and insist that anything that is not overtly and specifically related to that belief system must be shunned. Everything must be Jesus-branded, and they reject even perfectly wholesome and harmless things that aren’t explicitly their version of “Christian”. This, to me, seems like the equivalent of dumping a solid layer of salt on top of your food and shining your halogen headlights straight in somebody’s eyes. Life is not meant to be only salt and light.

However, I would venture to say that those of us in the less, shall we say, abrasive forms of Christianity have let ourselves get a bit hidden under a bushel. We may not know the mechanism by which Jesus thought salt lost its taste, but we can look at ourselves and wonder whether maybe we do need our saltiness restored a bit. We’ve let ourselves be so browbeaten by the all-salt-all-the-time contingent that we might be eating, and serving to others, food with no taste at all.

So how do we find the happy medium of salt and light?

Well, look at what I just said about both – salt is there to highlight the flavours of everything else. Light is there to illuminate everything else.

Our faith, our belief, is meant to add colour and piquancy, insight and illumination, to everything in God’s good creation. Not to smother it under a thick blanket of explicit religion-speak.

As Anglicans, we revere God the Creator, Christ the Incarnate, and the indwelling Holy Spirit. We believe that everything is sacred, holy, sacramental. Everything is always coming from and returning to God.

So we can enjoy the beauty and infinite variety of the world without always having to make it, on the surface, all about Jesus. But, conversely, in order to be salt and light, we do need to remember that, deep down, everything is in fact about Jesus (and the Creator, and the Spirit). We need to let our faith inform everything in our lives – but that doesn’t mean we’re obliged to be annoying about it.

This week, CBC Quebec named Tina Oppong-Lefebvre, an Anglican and member of the Cathedral congregation, as one of their 2023 Black Changemakers, referencing her work as the head teacher of the day program at the Jewish General Hospital’s child psychiatry department. This is not work that requires one to be religious; the children are of all faiths and backgrounds, and preaching to them about Jesus would be deeply inappropriate. But I am sure that Tina’s work is deeply informed by her faith, as she strives to teach and care for some of Montreal’s most vulnerable children. And I’m sure she would not hesitate to tell you about those connections if you asked her – the whole large, boisterous Oppong family (who will be making an appearance on Family Feud Canada next week!) are not shy about how their faith and their life of prayer sustains them.

In this parish, there are educators and medical professionals; scientists and engineers; lawyers and administrators, civil servants, bankers and accountants; consultants, IT folks, artists, musicians, florists, designers, plumbers, and innumerable other paths in life. None of these jobs are dependent on being a Christian. All of them can be done excellently by someone of any faith or none. But if you are a believing, practicing Christian, you bring something to your life’s work that is qualitatively different from what someone else would bring to it. That is the salt and the light.

You bring your understanding of how God has made and sustains this world; you bring your conviction that all creation is sacramental and all humankind bears God’s image; you bring your awareness that to be a true leader is to be a servant; and you bring your unshakable faith that good can come out of evil and life inevitably comes out of death.

As the letter of Peter says, “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” Browbeating people is counterproductive – and yet in order to be salt and light, we do need to be able to explain to others what Jesus means to us. Which means we need to be able to explain it to ourselves.

Can you, if challenged, come up with an elevator speech about the difference that knowing Jesus makes in your life? Or does your salt maybe need to be a tiny bit saltier, your light shine forth a little brighter from under that bushel?

And if you need help figuring out the answer to the question “what does Jesus mean for me and what difference does it make?”, well, that’s what the church is here for. Maybe we’ll have a quiet day soon to invite people to think about it and guide them to come up with their own answers. Maybe we’ll do it as part of our ongoing self-reflection as a congregation. In the meantime, if this question stirs something in you, I’m always more than happy to talk about it over a cup of coffee at Non Solo Pane.

In the best Anglican tradition, we want just the right happy medium of salt and light. Not so much that we’re gagging and blinded, not so little that we’re eating tasteless food in the dark. Just enough so that our sight, our taste, our experience of the world are alive, vivid, heightened, flavoured, illuminated.

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly … your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

Amen.