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I’m struck all over again, Lord, by what a unique time this is as we’ve gathered

together from all across the city to sing Your praises and to lift to You our

prayers and to return to You our resources and now, at this point, we

throw ourselves wide open and all we are doing for the next half hour

or so is seeking to be attentive to You. Help us to do that. Take away

the distractions. Enliven our spirits. Open our minds and our

hearts. Speak to us. We pray in Jesus’ name.

Amen.

 

 

 

The Exile Chronicles: Chapter 2.

 

Twenty of us got off the plane two weeks ago yesterday in Mexico City. We walked down the long terminal corridor and came around the bend and there in front of us was the line for customs. Actually, there were two lines stretching all the way back from the desk: one that was for citizens, for residents, and the other that was clearly labeled for those who were non-residents, non-citizens, the people who were foreigners to the land.

 

We made our way through customs and that only reinforced the sense that this was not our native land. We came to the customs desk and the question that was put to us was first spoken in Spanish. We had documents that indicated that our citizenship was from elsewhere. Those documents were stamped with the stamp that said that while we were allowed to visit in this place, this place was not our home.

 

And all of that sense of not being at home was confirmed when we spilled out of the other side of customs as a group of twenty and gathered ourselves together and tried to figure out what to do next. All of the signs were in Spanish. We had no idea of where we were going or how to get there and we only had a little over an hour to get to our next flight in order to get to Merida. So, we began to ask for directions. I went up and spoke to one person in my fractured Spanish. I found myself often saying, “No entiendo. Lo siento.” which means or “No entiende” (I don’t even say it right.) Anyways, whatever it is: I don’t understand. I’m sorry. I had lots of occasion to say that.

 

But first I went up to one person. That person told me that we needed to go through baggage claim. So, we went down the corridor to the left and came to the entrance and there the guard asked where we were going and we said we were going to get our baggage and she said, “No. This isn’t the way you’re supposed to go. You weren’t supposed to have come through customs. You’re supposed to be on the other side of that wall and going down that corridor you can see through the glass.”

 

So, we went back to the exit to customs and spoke to the guard there and he said, “There’s no way you can go back through here.” And we told him where we were trying to get and he said, “You need to go down that corridor to the right until you get to the stairs and go upstairs.” So, we went down this corridor to the right and got to the end and there were no stairs anywhere!

 

So, we went back to the guard who was at the customs entrance and tried to explain where we were going and he said, “Oh, you need to go through baggage claim to get your baggage.” So, we went back to the guard there who said we weren’t supposed to go there but over here, and she said, “I’ll let you in, but don’t get your baggage. You’re supposed to go over there.”

 

We went over to this person who finally said, “You need to go out there and exit the airport.” Exit the airport? We’re trying to get on another flight.

 

We imagined how silly we must have looked to the natives as we paraded this way and then paraded this way and then paraded this way.

 

When you’re in that kind of situation, out of your element, an alien in a foreign world, there are two strong reactions that go on inside of you. Aren’t there?

 

We want to do one of two things: get out or blend in. Out of frustration at the difficulties, you can feel tempted to retreat back to safety: to just turn around and get back on the plane that’s going back home—to retreat to the safety and familiarity of your own culture, to pull out of contact with this culture and go back where you belong. Or, if you’re determined to stay, the other temptation that rises up with equal strength is that which arises out of your sense of self-consciousness feeling like you’re standing out, that you’re looking like an idiot, attracting attention, and you can feel tempted to try to do everything you can to blend into that new culture—to adopt its language and its customs and its appearances and become as inconspicuous as you can.

 

The hardest thing of all when you go as a foreigner into a new land is to retain your distinctiveness as a citizen of your culture while retaining your place as a visitor in this culture.

 

Our experience at the airport in Mexico City offers, I think, a helpful parallel to our experience as followers of Christ living in a world to which we don’t belong.

 

This is the second message in our series that takes us through to our mission celebration in February called The Exile Chronicles in which we’re wrestling with our place as followers of Christ in this world in which we live.

 

Now, Jesus teaches us clearly that something profound is to happen to us when we become his followers. We don’t just slightly rearrange some of our Sunday mornings when it’s convenient for us, or we don’t just try hard to live by a different set of moral standards. What the Scriptures teach us is that when we become his followers, Jesus does a work of transformation on the inside out in us, and he changes us. He makes us new as his people and we, at that point, yield up our lives to the Lord offering over the direction and the ownership of our lives to Him and transferring our citizenship from this world to the kingdom of heaven.

 

Now, the language that we speak, the laws by which we seek to live, the priorities that we have come to value, the sovereign before whom alone we will bow: all of these are now of the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom in which we’ve come to belong—not to this world in which we live. And yet, here we are in this world standing in the non-resident, non-citizen line.

 

Jesus gives advice to his followers as they stand in that line and try to make their way as foreigners in a strange land. As he communicated in his prayer with and for his followers on the last night of his life, Jesus tells us that we are to be in this world but not of this world.

 

IN: John chapter 17 verse 18: “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.” he prays to his Father.

 

IN, but not OF: John 17:16: “They are not of the world any more than I am of this world.”

 

In the passage that we’re looking at this morning and next Sunday, Jesus gives his followers two pithy word pictures that describe the sort of role that he intends for us to have in this world in which we yet live, but to which we no longer belong.

 

Let’s turn to that passage. You’ll find in it chapter 5 in Matthew’s Gospel, page 1501 in your pew Bible. Matthew chapter 5 verse 13. Jesus says,

 

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is not longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled by men.”

 

Now, in order to make sense of this, we need to hear these words as they would have been heard by the men and women who had gathered around Jesus on the slope of that hill on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee two thousand years ago.

 

The world then would have known nothing about the fact that salt is a chemical compound called sodium chloride, or that salt is necessary to the human body to transport nutrients and oxygen, to communicate nerve impulses or to move muscles. Nor would they have been familiar with many of the contemporary uses of salt such as spreading salt on highways to melt snow or ice, or lining a bucket in order to make homemade ice cream, or throwing it into an appliance in your basement to soften your water, or any of the other 14,000 uses for salt that are on Morton Salt’s website.

 

But salt had a great significance in Biblical times, a significance that would have made this metaphor not only readily understood but also quite powerful to those who heard it when Jesus first spoke these words.

 

What did Jesus mean when he said, “You are the salt of the earth?”

 

It’s important that we know, first of all, that in contrast to our experience of salt which is probably one of the very least expensive things you can find in the entire grocery store, in Jesus’ day salt was a costly, rare and highly valued commodity that significantly shaped the trade and the economy of the entire world.

 

According to Mark Kurlansky, who wrote a book called Salt: A World History:

 

“From the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought after commodities in human history.”

 

“For all of history until the twentieth century, salt was desperately searched for, traded for, and fought over.”

 

Now salt was produced primarily in two places in Jesus’ day. The first of those was in one of a hundred or so different saltworks called salinas that ringed the Mediterranean. Many of those are still being used today, incidentally. And in each of those the water from the Mediterranean Sea—the salt water—was brought into a series of shallow basins and then the bright sun would evaporate away the water and leave salt crystals. This salt that’s up here is from one of those salinas that surround the Mediterranean Sea that’s still in operation today.

 

The other place that salt would have been gathered for the people that Jesus spoke with was in a huge vein of salt—one of the largest in the world—seven miles long that’s right near the base of the Dead Sea called Jebel Usdum and that was a place where they would have gathered in the rock that was in the earth and ground it up to make it useful.

 

This salt was shaped into tapered cylinders in order to be transported and sold, and then it was caravanned along the trade routes all around the world.

 

Salt was one of the first international commodities of trade and, in fact, the very first of the numerous Roman roads to have been built was a road that was designed specifically to transport salt from a production site to a place where it could be brought into the realm of trade.

 

The country that controlled the production and the trade of salt was at an economic advantage over all of the others. In fact, (I found this fascinating) more wars in human history have been fought over salt than over gold.

 

For millennia salt has represented wealth. It has been referred to as “white gold” and “edible money”—quite literally edible money in some cases. Roman soldiers were given a salt ration, and at times they were actually paid with salt. That payment with salt was called a salarium from which we get our word salary. And somebody being worth his salt was somebody who earned what he was receiving in terms of the payment of salt. And to eat the salt of the palace was to be on the royal payroll.

 

Salt was so valuable because it was recognized even in Jesus’ time as being necessary to sustain life.

 

One of Jesus’ contemporaries, a Jewish teacher, said, “The world cannot do without it.”

 

For people whose diet was primarily vegetables, an external source of salt was recognized even then as being crucial. They realized that there was a sequence that started with headaches and then weakness and then lightheadedness and then nausea. And if a victim was deprived of salt long enough, that person would die. Now, interestingly (I think this is an interesting insight for us as Jesus calls us “The salt of the earth.”), at no time in this process does the person who’s dying from a lack of salt experience a craving for salt.

 

It was listed by an ancient Jewish writer as a necessity of life alongside of water, fire and iron. You see this in Ezra chapter 7 where Ezra is making a list of things that are considered necessities for surviving as this group of people go back to their homeland, and he specifically requests a portion of salt alongside of other things.

 

The Roman official Pliny said, “To the whole body nothing is better than sun and salt.”

 

The Romans were so convinced of the necessity of salt for life that they actually considered it to be a legal right to receive salt whether or not you could afford it, and they would often ration salt to their citizens across the Roman Empire.

 

So, what we can conclude already at this point—some fascinating things for us to think about—as Jesus says to us “You are the salt of the earth” is that salt is something that is of great value for the entire world; it is necessary for life though it may not be desired, and its need may not be felt.

 

How was salt used in Jesus’ day? Well, there were a cluster of uses that all related to a certain quality of salt. Let me walk through those.

 

First, and the primary one, is that salt was used to preserve food. Until modern times when refrigeration was invented, salt was the only thing that was available alongside smoking to preserve food so that it could be kept for a long time.

 

Salting food was a method of preservation first developed by the Egyptians going all the way back to about 2000 B.C. where in tombs dating back to that time we can find samples of salted fish and salted meat. They used salt from evaporated sea water as we’ve described to preserve fish and fowl. They would splay the animal open and then pack it tightly with salt and then place it in a sealed earthenware jar.

 

By doing this it had the effect like cooking the meat. Curing meat in salt absorbs the moisture in which bacteria grow, it inhibits the growth of micro-organisms and of yeast which can lead to spoiling of food. In high enough concentrations it can actually kill unwanted bacteria, and salt has the capacity of unwinding proteins that can also lead to its spoiling. So, salt has an effect resembling cooking and in addition to preserving fish and fowl as the Egyptians did, by the time of Jesus the Romans used salt to preserve virtually anything that was edible: wine, olives, vegetables, greens, meat, eggs.

 

Salt was also used—in addition to preserving food—it was used to flavor food as a flavor enhancer, as a condiment. This was common among agrarian societies in that day. There was often salt found on the table in a shell or in a clay bowl, but it was used not just to spice up food, it was actually often used to mask either the rotting food or food that was bitter—to mask the taste of those things. It would take the edge off of food that otherwise wasn’t palatable. One example of this is that salt was used to sprinkle on bitter tasting lettuce from which we get the expression salad.

 

It was a common ingredient in Jewish cooking alongside a number of other spices. The Jewish people in Jesus’ day loved strongly seasoned food, so mustards and rues and saffrons and corianders and dills and all kinds of other things alongside salt.

 

Recipes of the time actually suggested that salt from a certain mine or certain region be used in a certain recipe because the salt would mix together with the other minerals that were unique to that area and add a distinctive flavor that they thought went well with some foods and didn’t go well with other foods.

 

The Romans also seasoned everything with salt, but they used a unique compound that they created called garum. Garum was a mixture of salt water and rotting fish that they would put together in a jar and let ferment and then they would put it on all of their food—vegetables, fruit, fish, meat, you name it.

 

It gives you an idea of how bad that taste or smell of the food was before they tried to mask it with that.

 

A third use that’s related for salt was to heal disease. Salt was viewed in Jesus’ time as a medicine. They would mix salt together with other things in a medicinal sort of syrup to be drunk. And even garum was used as a medicine. It was used also to heal toothache, to heal bleeding wounds, damaged tissue.

 

Salt was also used to purify the body. It was seen as a purifying agent. One of the customs that was common among Jewish people that was common virtually worldwide in Jesus’ day and continues to be the case in some places today is the practice of rubbing salt on the skin of a newborn child. This is believed by people in ancient civilizations to have healing and strengthening properties for the health of a child, but also to set apart a child—to sanctify that child—and even somehow to sort of bless that child: to protect that child from evil. And you see this alluded to in Ezekiel chapter 16 verse 4.

 

One final example of this preservative or preventative feature of salt is its use to fertilize soil. According to Roman writers Cato, and Virgil, and Pliny and others, a light application of salt in a field was a means of improving the productivity of the soil because it both killed back the weeds and it helped to improve the soil quality beneath the surface. But they also recognized in Jesus’ day that if you used too much salt, it had the opposite effect: that it would sterilize the soil killing all vegetation and hardening the soil. They called this “sowing with salt.” And that was used as an example of a curse in Jesus’ day.

 

So, salt is necessary for health and wholeness. It holds back corruption, it masks spoiling, it prevents and holds back sickness, it stops the advance of weeds, and it wards off evil.

 

There’s one other significant use of salt in Jesus’ day—a symbolic one that relates to a completely different quality of salt than its preservative and healing quality. Salt’s essence does not change over time. If you leave it in a jar for years and years, when you go back to it, it’s still there in the same form. If you dissolve it in water, if you evaporate the water out, the salt all remains in crystallized form. If you attempt to burn it, if you sift through the ashes you can find all of the salt is still there.

 

Because of this indestructible quality of salt, salt was used to symbolically represent lasting friendship.

 

Salt made those who ate at a common table friends. It was a symbol of friendship and loyalty.

 

There were a number of expressions in Jesus’ day that communicated this:

 

“to eat someone’s salt” was to be on friendly terms with that person, to enjoy his hospitality;

 

“to have eaten salt together” was to have ties of friendship between you and to be bound to one another in some form of friendship;

 

and “to have eaten a bushel of salt together” means that you’re such long-lasting friends that that’s how much you’ve eaten through all of the meals that you’ve shared together.

 

More specifically, because of that—because of that association—salt began to be used to seal formal contractual agreements between parties. It symbolized the binding of a lasting agreement or alliance. Each of the parties would eat salt and sometimes that salt was passed around on the edge of the blade of a sword.

 

So, there were expressions that came up around this:

 

the expression “there is salt between us” means we have made a covenant with one another;

 

and to “have tasted the salt” with someone means to have become a covenant ally with that person.

 

More specifically still—and this shows up in the Scriptures and, I think, informs some of what Jesus is communicating. Salt was used to seal covenants between God and humanity. If you want to, you can turn to Leviticus chapter 2 where you find this in chapter 2 verse 13:

 

Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offering. Add salt to all your offerings.

 

This is repeated in Numbers chapter 18 verse 19 where it says:

 

It is an everlasting covenant of salt.

 

Salt was sprinkled on the offering, it was sprinkled on the incense, it was even sprinkled on the wood that was used on the altar to burn up the sacrifice. Now, that salt wasn’t used in a preservative fashion at all: obviously, this meat’s about to be consumed by the fire. This was used instead to represent the idea of the enduring quality of God’s covenant commitment to His people.

 

God will never forsake us, and we should never forsake God.

 

So salt, in addition to this image of a picture of having a preservative and healing quality, it’s also because of its enduring nature—a symbolic reminder of God’s presence in this world and His constancy towards those He’s made, of His keeping up His end of His bargain with humanity from age to age.

 

Jesus says to you, to me, “You are the salt of the earth.”

 

If you are his follower, you are the salt of the earth.

 

So what is it that we’ve learned that that means? Jesus is saying, first of all, you are of great value to this world; you are needed in this world; you are necessary for its life though you may not be desired by this world, and the need for you in this world may not be felt by all.

 

You are necessary, specifically, for the health and the wholeness of this world—to help, to stay, to hold back its corruption, its advancing disease, the onslaught of weeds that threaten to overgrow its vibrant and healthy life, to ward off evil.

 

And your presence in this world is intended to be a symbolic reminder of God’s presence in this world and of His constancy of care and compassion and provision for this world, of God keeping up His end of the bargain and inviting us to do the same.

 

Jesus goes on. He says,

 

“You are the salt of the earth. 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 by men.”

 

Now this is really a strange comment at first glance. Because what we have already learned about sodium chloride is that it resists change. It is a very stable compound resistant to nearly every attack.

 

So how is it that salt could lose its saltiness?

 

There are two ways in which this can happen.

 

First, as a number of people pointed out in my reading, there is no way you can hide salt in food. Its presence is always noted by the tongue. It cannot be hidden.

 

So, one way for us to lose our saltiness is if we never come in contact with that which God intends that we would be a part of preserving and healing.

 

The second way in which we can lose our saltiness is if we become contaminated by other minerals. This would be characteristic of the salt that was collected from the Dead Sea in particular where there were crystals of gypsum called carnallite which would have been mixed in with the salt and looked just like salt but caused the salt to taste bitter and make it unusable. Or there was a fine silt—a clay—which would be mixed in with the salt and you couldn’t tell it by looking at it, but it would give the salt a stale taste and make it unusable.

And then what would happen is when moisture hit the salt, the salt would be swept away and all that would remain would be these other crystals that were bitter and unusable.

 

The other way in which contaminates could enter into salt is by digging it out of the ground. Often it was difficult to get pure salt when you did that. You’d get a portion of rock and a portion of salt and they would often pack that into meat. But would happen over time is that the salt would leach out of the rock and it would no longer be useful. All that would be left would be a chunk of stone empty of its salt content and all they could do with it would be to throw it away. It would be of no value.

 

So what do these things tell us about what Jesus is communicating to us?

 

Jesus is saying that this is what’s true about the world in which we live. It is decaying and it needs preserving. It is bitter and bland and rotting and it needs flavoring. It is sick and it needs healing.

 

We can see this is all sorts of places as we look across the sweep of our society. We see it morally as our world is losing a sense of right and wrong, of good and evil and their crucial role in guiding us in our actions.

 

And we see it spiritually as our world, our society, has lost the sense of God and His right place at the center of our life together.

 

And this ripples over into all sorts of different aspects of our society. You can see this in the breakdown of the marriage and the family and the inversion of so many homes in which the children rule the home rather than being properly parented. The loss of recognizing the value of human life especially at both ends of the spectrum: of those not yet born and those coming into their later years. You can see this in the expression of racial and economic injustices: the corruption that is seeping its way through our society—of poverty and illiteracy and a cycle of violence and of neglect of children.

 

Look at any part of our culture and you can see evidence of the corruption that God calls us to be part of identifying and responding to. In the realm of education which denies the possibility of objective truth. In the realm of entertainment where violence and crime and sex are used to entertain us and where the lines between right and wrong are blurred—where we’re desensitized towards violence. Where sports figures such as those we’ll see this afternoon—many of them earn a hundred times the salary of those who are teaching our children and raising them up to become fruitful and productive citizens in our society. In the realm of politics we see the pervasiveness of trash politics—of negative campaigning and personal attacks—and irresponsible voting that’s based not on right or wrong but purely on the basis of partisan allegiance: self-serving actions, bribes accepted to pass or repeal laws, sound byte campaigning instead of dealing with substance, saying what a constituency wants to hear. In the realm of business we see this in products that are being oversold, where claims are being made about the products that are false simply in an effort to gain money for personal gain, workers in the workplace with a sense of entitlement that the time in the workplace is theirs to use how they want, that the company’s supplies are theirs to take home and use however they wish.

 

We see this in companies creating unbeneficial products, at the least, or even unsafe products such as some of the cigarettes and forms of alcohol and pornography and violent video games that are being produced as an expression of our economy and an increasing effort to cut corners to make products less durable and beneficial for their users, or less safe, or more harmful for the environment, and causing worse pollutants to go into our natural resources.

 

We see this in a move towards no-fault and morally neutral laws that take away consideration of right and wrong and invite increasingly loop-hole sort of thinking.

 

We see this in the area of medicine with the accumulation of wealth by some physicians who feel entitled to that place that in our economy uniquely rewards that kind of bundle of wealth that arrives in their hands and perhaps an unwillingness to see all patients with needs regardless of the ability of that patient to pay for those needs.

 

In the military, the use of torture techniques.

 

I mean you can go on and on, look at every arena in our society and see this advancing creep of sin and disease and corruption, of things not being the shalom that God purposes that they would be.

 

So what is our place in this world?

 

What this tells us is true about the place of followers of Christ in this world is that we are necessary for the welfare of this world, though the world may not feel its need for us, and that this world requires the presence of the people of God in order for it to thrive.

 

As John Stott says:

 

God intends the most powerful of all restraints in sinful society to be His own redeemed, regenerate, and righteous people.

 

We are of great value to this world. That is part of God’s design.

 

But we are of value to this world only if two things are true of us and remain true of us.

 

First, that we remain in contact with that which needs preserving or healing.

It’s not enough to be near it or in it, we’ve got to be in contact with it.

 

And that we retain our salt-nature. It’s not enough to be a bit salty. We are intended to be pure salt as we come into contact with this world.

 

So God calls us to 1) contact with the world and 2) Christlikeness in the world.

 

So, the question for us as the people of God this morning—two questions:

 

First, where has God put us in this world? Where in the world in which God has placed you is there evidence of our society being sick and in need of healing, or rotting and in need of curing? And that God has put you in that place to have you be part of the way that He affects change here?

 

Where has God already placed you: in your school, on your team, in your place of residence, in your work place, in your family system?

 

God calls us to wade in and to come in contact with this broken and hurting and fallen world. Will it be awkward? Yes. Will it be frustrating? Absolutely. Will it be painful? Often. Is it necessary? Absolutely. Is it our calling? Yes.

 

We are called to resist the temptation when we come to the border of this foreign land into which God has sent us. We are called to resist the temptation to turn and retreat and go back and just huddle with others who share our beliefs, to hop on the plane and go back to the place where we are safe, but instead to wade in, to come in contact with this world that there God might use us for a redemptive difference in it.

 

But, secondly, we have to ask the question: where has the world gotten into us? Where have I allowed this world’s brokenness and disease to take up residence in this temple in which Jesus resides on the throne? Where have I accepted this world’s compromises? Where have I allowed it to contaminate me? Where have I considered its disease to become as acceptable thing that I will become a carrier of as I go through my life in this world?

 

God would have us look hard at the ways that we have lost our saltiness because of contamination with the world’s values and priorities and principles, and to invite God to make us salty again.

 

And I’ll tell you this, people of God: if three postures, if three practices are absent from your life, you will lose your saltiness and you will blend in:

 

Abiding: worshipping God, and seeking God in prayer. Not just from time to time on Sunday morning, but every day coming before God in worship and in prayer and inviting Him to be about His work of transformation in your life.

 

Relating: being together with others who are salt and light, others who God has called to be difference-makers in this world and to allow them to encourage you and to challenge you and to stretch you and to help expose the places in your life where you have allowed the world’s contaminates to creep in.

 

And Learning: being in the Scriptures in your own personal study, in Bible study, in learning communities, reading books, whatever it is that you would allow the content of the Scriptures to shape and renew who you are as a follower of Christ as God’s spirit works in you.

 

Here too we need to resist the temptation to blend in. Having resisted the temptation to walk away from the foreign land, we need to resist the temptation of stepping over into the residents’ line and blending in and becoming one of this world.

 

God calls us The Salt of the Earth. We are necessary for this world’s life and vitality and wholeness.

 

God calls us The Salt of the Earth. He intends to use us to help bring a preserving and healing quality to this broken world.

 

God calls us The Salt of the Earth. He intends that we would be, in the way that we live and who we are, evidence of the presence of God in the midst of this fallen world: an expression of this world’s hope and life by the way in which we live.

 

You are The Salt of the Earth. Don’t retreat from it. Don’t retreat into it.

 

Be distinctive as the People of God and wade in to the praise of His glorious grace.

 

Amen.