2020.02.09 Salt of The Earth. Who, Me?

Jesus is on a roll with his platform, Sermon on the Mount, as remembered in Matthew’s gospel, delivering a hefty load of expectations, addressed to his Jewish listeners: “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, then how can its saltiness be restored? It is no good for anything but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

Pretty harsh! Jesus was a wise and compassionate teacher, not one to offer gut courses in how to get into God’s graces. He offered Beatitudes (blessings) to help his listeners feel safe before he unfurled the full syllabus, replete with many images they would not/could not forget. One has always drawn me up short. I remember it often.

You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!

They didn’t forget. Even after Jesus was long dead and it took sixty years for anyone to write things down, they never stopped talking—talking, arguing, wondering, puzzling. We’re still doing this centuries later. The biblical memoir retains its powerful sting and crispness—saltiness.  Why?

First, Jesus was so charismatic they came to believe that he was intimate with their God and Creator—intimate enough to speak for God, and to God. 

Second, the followers, mostly poor and filled with fear and longing, were open to a message of hope against hope, even though it bewildered them and left them reeling. So drawn were they into Jesus’s irresistible message that God had not abandoned them that they kept on coming back for more.

Finally, there was a compelling reason to stay—a promise: energy and inspiration to find their own answers, to become activists if you will.  To stay salty.


You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!


Today this charge looms large on our own horizons in this United States and in our Christian religion. How do we believe in ourselves when we’re so divided? How are we to be salty when so much feels flavorless? When so many do not want even to keep up with the daily news? When we go blind to the salty potential of putative enemies? Whom shall we follow?

Religious and political authority of Jesus’s day were stumped yet attracted as well, but they resorted to politics. They said: Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” they scoffed. Jesus was of course from Nazareth, a veritable slum not worth its own salt.

We are as scattered and in disarray in this country as they were in Jesus’s day. And yet we hear the echo and the challenge of Jesus’s wisdom ring in our ears, and sometimes from our public platforms.

You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!


I don’t know where you look for your saltiness, but I wonder if there is a Nazareth inside you, a hidden place you don’t easily reveal for fear of ridicule?  Or outside you: someplace or group you revile out of fear? We all have our “nazareths.”  Many can still feel stunned by ancient words so profound, demanding, and simultaneously compelling and frightening.

You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!

I don’t use salt anymore for health reasons and plain common sense, so I miss salt, its taste on my tongue, how it enhances an already good meal. Salt can jar my taste buds awake. I miss saltiness. Yet, if salt loses its saltiness can it be restored, or is it really doomed and worthless, a Jesus suggests?

Well, salt is not just a flavor savory, it is also a preservative. Most of us know people who are like the salt of the earth—good folks, often old, who have character, sardonic wit, and crust. There were many old salts in Gloucester where we served a parish for thirteen years. These are the people who remember, who preserve the good with the bad in their history and culture. These are they who are not afraid to argue and fight for what they love—and also to change their views for the same reason.

Our American democracy is at stake right now. It feels to many as if the saltiness has drained right out of it. This is not a new phenomenon. According to Jill Lepore, writing for The New Yorker Magazine (2/3/2020):“It’s the paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to argue about it.” That has been true throughout our history. This is how we preserve it. This is not at all to dismiss genuine concern and worry; it is, however, to say that when we are puzzled and bewildered and sure there’s not any good thing to come out of this, like Nazareth, just keep talking and arguing and loving and caring anyway, just as Jesus’s followers did.

I would say the same thing about the Bible—scriptures some call holy in the way that many Americans reverence the Bill of Rights and our Constitution. Why is this immense Holy Bible still alive? Why still salty?

We argue about what we love the most, and in the arguing process itself come new vitality, new awakenings, new directions, new ways to stay salty—both flavorful and preservative. So it was for Jesus’s listeners. So it will be for us.


You are the salt of the earth. Do not lose your saltiness!