"Leaving a Taste"--August 16, 2019

“Leaving A Taste”—Mark 9:49-50

[Jesus said:] “For everyone will be salted with fire. 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.” [Mark 9:49-50]
The main thing is to keep your holy weirdness.  The kind that makes you look reckless and foolish to all the respectable business people you know, on account of how you keep giving yourself away.  That kind of holy weirdness.

We could spend pages of words and hours of the day teasing out all the different nuances of meaning to how salt was used in the first century, but the quick and dirty of it is this: followers of Jesus are to keep their holy weirdness.

Or, if you prefer, stay salty—but in the peculiar way that Kingdom-people mean the word “salty.” Whether we are talking about using it as a preservative of food, an antiseptic ingredient, a melter of ice, or a flavoring for food, in every case, salt is the small thing that stands out. You don’t eat a whole block of salt. You don’t use salt to preserve more salt. You don’t use salt to melt salt. You use salt on something else, for the benefit of that something else. And what makes the salt important in each of those uses is its strangeness, its otherness. Salt has the chemical properties that allow it to melt ice and preserve food and all the rest—things that the food or the ice can’t do by themselves. What makes salt good is what makes salt different… or to say it less politely, weird. (You could say the same about the other metaphor Jesus used to describe Kingdom people: yeast—that strange substance that has the weird property of making bread dough rise, whose only usefulness for baking or brewing is in its weirdness.)

Salt leaves a taste in your mouth that lingers.  And yet, salt spends itself--getting dissolved, consumed, given away--in order to leave those enduring changes.  Salt gives itself away for the sake of whatever else it is put into, from the meat you don't want to spoil (in a time like the first century AD which had no refrigeration) to the ice you use to make homemade ice cream, to the things you want to sterilize or clean.  Salt's strange properties are the things that make it useful.

That’s what Jesus is tapping into here. Kingdom people are going to be weird—but weird in good ways. Weird in the sense that we will have different priorities from the world around us, weird in the sense that our neighbors and co-workers will look at us cockeyed and wonder why we do the strange things we do. Weird in the sense that, as the old line of Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard put it, “our lives would not make sense if God did not exist.” That holy weirdness is part of how God intends to be present in the world. Don’t lose that, Jesus says. Hold onto that.  

And hold onto the particular kind of weirdness that salt has.  Jesus isn't advocating just randomly bizarre behavior, but a particular kind, with a particular agenda.  In a world that's always angling for more, bigger, and newer, we will be the people practicing contentment with what we have, where we are. In a culture that is actively enshrining, "But what will I GET out of helping you?" as a guiding policy, we will be people who seek to give ourselves away for others, regardless of what benefit we get in return.  In a society that rarely aims any higher than seeking its own gratification, we will be people who are willing to put our own interests, convenience, or comfortableness on hold for the sake of looking out for others.  We'll be the voices that can say, like Ralph Waldo Emerson did once, "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived, and lived well."  In a day and time like ours that takes "Me and My Group First" as a core principle, such a way of life will be counter-cultural indeed.  We'll be weird, then, if we dare to follow Jesus.

You will note here that Jesus’ little parable assumes we already are salty people—marked with a holy weirdness and the pungent flavor of grace—and not that we are supposed to somehow make ourselves salty. Belonging to Jesus makes us weird. Being followers of a King who goes to a cross ensures that we will be peculiar, too. Being citizens of that kind of Kingdom cannot help but guarantee that we will seem out of step and out of pace with the hurrying and scurrying folks around us trying to get ahead in the rat race and pile up more stuff for themselves. Our holy weirdness is a gift. The question is simply whether we will miss that and instead fritter it away to be more like everybody else.

You have to remember that today’s verses come right after Jesus’ (admittedly strange) teaching that we should be willing to lose hands and feet and eyes if they are obstacles to being Jesus’ followers. To the world around us, that sounds like foolishness. To the world around us, that kind of costly calculus is nonsense. To the world around us, you are always supposed to look out for number one, and should never really have to risk losing something you want in life, and after all, you should be able to get whatever you want instantly, without delay or sacrifice. There are going to be lots of voices around us that say it’s stupid to do the strange things Kingdom people do, like forgiving debts and grudges, like sharing our abundance with people who have nothing, like welcoming foreigners and visiting prisoners, like weeping with those who weep when we could have avoided the tears, or being joyful over someone else’s good news. And there are going to be voices who say it is nonsense not to be always going after a bigger promotion, larger house, more expensive car, or greater prestige. All that seems as natural to the world as keeping your hands and feet and eyes intact. And frankly, being willing to lose all those perks they call the good life sounds, well… weird.

It is weird. It is a holy weirdness, though, and Jesus says that is what we are meant to keep about us. Funny, how the strange set of values we have that will perplex and confuse the world around us will also bring us an unexpected contentment amid a world that is always grabbing for more and is unsatisfied with what it has. Funny, huh, now that Jesus mentions it, how “having salt in yourself” might just be the way to “be at peace with each other” after all? How blessedly… weird.

Lord Jesus, you have marked us as your own and made us your peculiar people. Let us keep that distinctive flavor as we live in the world where we find ourselves in this day.