“Be Salty:” A sermon

Be Salty

September 29, 2024

James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

Stuart Higginbotham

Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.

The other day, I was talking with a dear soul in the parish, and we looked at each other as she asked, “Do you think things will hold together?” She was asking about all of it: the wider world, our nation, this community, and the parish all at the same time. 

It is a question that continues to raise its head, and I could feel in my body that same tension that set up camp during those worst eighteen months of Covid. Will this hold together? Can we hold together? And me being me, I started thinking, can I hold this together? I could feel my heart rate increase.

See, we are all wired in different ways, and one of my superpowers, as we joke, is the ability to feel what others are feeling. Sometimes, it feels like waves through a room, sometimes like threads that suddenly pull tight or loosen. 

Given my family system, what might have been a gift in some ways became a burden as others looked to me to gauge a situation. Something in them knew I could feel what they were feeling, so if that was the case, maybe I could make them feel better! And off we went into my childhood and beyond.

Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.

Here we are stepping into stewardship season, that time of year when we want to make sure that the parish can raise its budget for next year. Here we are at this time when we anticipate everyone leaning in to support the shared ministry of this parish, and we wonder about follow up calls into November to make sure we can continue to thrive as a parish–even as so many other churches are struggling, and many are not able to make it. And we have plenty of bandwidth to manage stewardship season, right, because there’s nothing else going on right now that might make us stressful.  😉 

“Do you think things will hold together?” It is a question that I keep in my pocket like a heavy stone as your rector. 

When it comes to this question and the ongoing tension we feel, here’s the lesson I keep having to learn myself: it is not my job to “hold this together.” It wasn’t my job to make my family feel better when they faced an opportunity for growth but didn’t want to step into that space, and it isn’t my job always to make this community feel better either. It’s an ego trip to think that holding this all is actually my responsibility, and actually, sometimes it is important to be convicted about something and actually reflect on how we are living. I have to constantly turn my heart toward the Spirit’s presence in my life, in this parish, in this community, and in the world, and trust that God is at work, holding us all. 

It is the Spirit’s “job” to invite us to practice our faith to transform our lives. My “job”–any of our job–is to do what I can to align with that movement of the Spirit with integrity and compassion, knowing that, as we say, “people will people all over the place.” If anyone holds this together, it is the Spirit, and the Spirit calls us to do our part as disciples of Jesus Christ. 

For every tense conversation, for every confused moment, for every time when someone gets pinched because something in the parish didn’t meet their expectations or their preference, or someone said something they couldn’t believe they said (which happens a lot these days), what if we paused and took a deep breath and asked, “How do you think the Spirit might be at work in your life at this moment?” Or, “What do you think Christian maturity would look like at this moment?”

Maybe that’s the best question of all to ask right now: “What might Christian maturity look like at this moment?”

Look at today’s reading from the Book of James. It is curious that we have had these selections from James these weeks, because this book challenges us to see how our practice of faith actually impacts the way we live in the world. Yes, we come here to praise God, and praise is at the heart of our lives, AND our praise of God transforms the way we live in the world. The letter of James tells us that praise should have an impact, a consequence of faith, or it is hollow.

The other day, we heard this challenging line from James that said “faith without works is dead,” and perhaps that shook us a bit as we wondered just how what we do in this space on Sundays actually transforms the we live in the world. 

Today’s reading highlights the way we live together in community. If someone is suffering, we pray. If someone is cheerful, we praise God. If anyone needs prayer, we come together and pray for one another. We are accountable to one another. What we do affects each other. How we believe should actually shape the way we live in the world, and if it doesn’t do so, then James–and the prophets and Jesus–challenges us to ask ourselves just what is the point of such a belief. In liturgical studies, we say “how we pray shapes the way we believe, and how we believe shapes the way we live in the world.” Put another way, we must always move past having a mere temple cult mentality where we come to the temple to pay someone else to offer a sacrifice for us and then go about our lives thinking we have done what need to achieve favor.

In today’s Gospel from Mark, we see again how we are accountable to one another: if you put a stumbling block in front of anyone, it’s better to tie a millstone around your neck and be thrown into the sea. As Mark says, saltiness is vital. We are called to be salty, to have a flavor in our spiritual practice. You notice if salt lands on your tongue, and we should notice how faith impacts our life–every aspect of our life.

For those who may think I’m meddling, I’m not. I’m being your priest. In terms of this season, I’m not telling you how to vote, because when it comes to the call of Jesus Christ, voting is actually small potatoes. The call of Christ demands that we interrogate our entire lives and see how our beliefs and actions are attuned with Jesus’ Spirit. 

One of the challenges we have with “church life” these days is that so much of our cultural assumptions are geared to individual satisfaction. We can get what we want with a click of a button, so we start to think that church itself is about getting what we want. 

And we want what we want without having to make choices that shift how we have already set up our lives. We want all of it. Here’s where Christian maturity comes in. We invest in what we think makes meaning in our lives, what we think matters most. We make all sorts of choices, and in an entertainment-driven culture where instant gratification is the marker of what we consider worthwhile, we honestly have a difficult time with seeing how a sustained discipline of faith can transform our hearts over time. We may ask if we come to a service and don’t feel that level of instant gratification–or an emotional high–then what is the point? 

Of course perhaps we begin to realize that something more was or is needed–that saltiness–when our lives face a crisis and something happens in our family and we ask ourselves how this could happen, how we can make meaning of it. And we look around and see where our support systems are at that moment. Notice how people checked on each other after the storm. That is why Christian community is important, and that level of transformed pastoral support must be invested in. If we think we can go through life simply squeezing our spiritual health into the small empty spaces in our calendar that are left over after we have filled it with everything else, we should not be surprised that we will reach a challenging time feeling dry and even angry. “Where was God?” we may ask, when the question really is “where were we?” and what can we do to nurture our practice of faith?

Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.

Here is a metaphor that might help us understand why investing in our practice of faith is important. The oceans did not become salty by suddenly dumping a large amount of salt into them at one point. The oceans became salty over millions and billions of years as rocks slowly eroded and dissolved from the crash of waves and the pull of the moon with tides and the flow of rivers as they traveled across long distances.  

Since we’ve been looking at symbols and metaphors in the Sunday forum, reflect on that for a moment: that oceans become salty over long periods of time with the ebb and flow of life, the pull of the moon and tides, and the flow of rivers. What can we learn about how we can commit to a disciplined practice of faith? What can we learn about the stones in our lives, the hardness of heart, that must be eroded, if you will, by the pressure of the Spirit, by our practice of prayer?

What can we learn about how our practice of faith flows like a river through the landscape of our lives, concentrating the Spirit in us, if you will, until we can taste it?

Yes, the world can be a scary place these days–and ever has that been the case. Yes, storms come and we care for one another. Yes, some grasp for power and we struggle to make sense of it all. 

Yes, we pause, look at one another and ask, “Do you think things will hold together?” I do. I do, because my heart tells me to trust in the power of the Living Spirit of Christ whose presence saturates our lives and always invites us to share in God’s dream for the world.