You are the Salt of the Earth

Working people salt the fields of
entrepreneurship! Industry lies
 fallow! Just Kidding. 

This week the reading was Matthew 5, the one that includes my favorite powerful dangerous seven words ‘You are a city on a hill,” the ones that have driven my curriculum, and in a lot of ways, me over the past few years.

Also in there, though, is 'you are a light unto the world', and 'you are the salt of the earth.'

It’s been a wounded week, for a lot of people apparently, because Andy got salt in there this Sunday.

It’s funny how when we say someone is “salt of the earth” we mean that the person is unpretentious. When Jesus says ‘you are the salt of the earth’ he is usually interpreted as meaning that the people of god are cool. But at the same time, the salting of the earth is a punishment that vanquishing armies carry out in defeated cities to prevent things from growing there and to symbolize that the city will not be reinhabited.

The Puritans did it to the natives in their city on a hill.

"Purple monkey dishwasher! I'm white for
some reason!" Sayeth the Lord. 

It is a confusing etymology.

Jesus says “But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

Um. OK.

Good ol’ Jesus, he liked you to figure stuff out for yourself. You got to think half the time the disciples were like “oh, yeah, we get that, Isa, that makes perfect sense to us! Salt. Totally.” Then they’d look at each other like “WTF?”

I think he might have been saying “you are salt, so be salt. What’s the point of salt that isn’t salt?”

This reminds me of a poem that I loved written by a dude that I went to college with, Ali Green, which started “Be who you be, ‘cause you ain’t who you not.”

I don’t think it’s really about salt at all. It’s about your being the thing you are, and there being no point to you if you are not that.

Andy saw the purpose of the salt, to carry the metaphor, as being to make the undesirable more bearable. He saw discipleship as a willingness to do so. “You are the salt of the earth,” he said, “expect to be shaken loose on some unpalatable things.”

You are, too. You, whatever salt you are, are *the* salt for some distasteful thing somewhere. Probably somewhere nearby.

John Winthrop. Both salt and
salter of the earth. 

The most distasteful part of A Model of Christian Charity, the speech that puts the US at the top of the hill, for most Americans and me anyhow, is the part where Winthrop says that “GOD ALMIGHTY in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.”

Totally counter revolutionary! Mario would not be happy. But this idea is growing on me. Winthrop (probably Calvin, what am I, some kind of theologian?) says that god made us unequal, made us imperfect on purpose specifically so that we would need each other and god. (More evidence that god is a little insecure.)

Everyone is salt for some other person’s tasteless lentil stew. The seeking, the striving to first be who you be, and then to apply that where it goes is how god intended us to spend these hours. God made us without the answers so we could seek the answers, god made us hungry so we would go get food. Need is a divine instruction. And people are uniquely instructed- different from the other animals.

Winthrop seems to be saying.

That is all well and good. I’m a little weary of being the salt this week though.

I guess that brokendowness is my marching orders. Onward, faux-Christian soldiers.