Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on World Communion Sunday, October 1, 2000, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-20, 24-29; Mark 9:38-50

Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.
    -Mark 9:50

     "Why did we ever leave Egypt?" The question drips with regret and reproach and self-pity, and also of course with obvious amnesia. Why did we ever ask to be delivered from our slavery? Why did we ever hope for better things? Why did we ever rattle the bars of the prison that held us captive? Why did we ever push the envelope, think outside the box, or stick our necks out? Why did we ever trade in our familiar, predictable, miserable predicament for this wild mix of promises and possibilities? Why did we ever allow ourselves to be seduced by this loose cannon of a God?

     Why did we ever leave Egypt? The words should be etched in stone over the doors of churches and carved in the varnished wood of Communion tables for a continuing reminder of this hard truth about living the life of faith: that everyone who lives by faith will sooner or later, certainly and inevitably, be sorry to have done so and yearn to renounce it.

     Regret is part of the deal. Ingratitude, weariness, nostalgia - they are all part of the deal. Forget about Robert Frost and his Yankee self-satisfaction in choosing the path less traveled, that made all the difference. Forget the simple joy of those Christians who only need to be born again once and their salvation is forever after on cruise control.

     Why did it have to be manna that fell from heaven to feed those people in that wilderness? Why couldn't it be fish and meat, cucumbers and melons and leeks and onions? Is that too much to ask of the LORD, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the almighty Creator of all the worlds that ever were or will be?

     And what of this Communion of ours? We call it a heavenly banquet, we call it the food and drink of heaven, the bread of life, the cup of salvation. So why isn't it more delightful, more intoxicating than it is?

     The pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day will turn out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors if we are silly enough to go chasing after them. That is what happens to all faith. The only faith to which it does not happen is a false faith, a habit of stubborn denial masquerading as faith.

     So what are you going to do? Are you going to go slinking, or striding, back to Egypt? Do you think the Israelites in the wilderness were about to do that? Of course not! They just needed to kvetch, that's all. They needed to exercise their God-given right to be dissatisfied, no matter what God did for them. And so do we.

     There is no evidence that God actually followed through on that threat to shove manna down their throats until it was coming out of their nostrils and they loathed it. There was no need. They already loathed it, entirely on their own. And so do we.

     But the LORD did see fit to endow a certain number of them with peculiar gifts of spirit and prophecy to counterbalance this characteristic negativity of the people, in order that the burden of it might not fall entirely upon poor bedeviled old Moses. And Moses, far from viewing this as an intrusion upon his prerogatives, wished aloud that all the LORD's people were prophets with the spirit of the LORD upon them. That way they could all carry the burden of each other's pathological mulishness. Wouldn't it be nice if we could do that for each other?

     Well, if you believe the witness of Jesus in this gospel, that wish of Moses' has in fact been fulfilled, and we are all gifted to be prophets and bearers of the spirit to one another. Jesus has his own word for this gift: he calls it salt.

     Forget low-sodium diets for a moment. Forget refrigeration and irradiation and sanitation. Think salt and fire instead, and ask yourself how a thing can be "salted with fire," in Jesus' peculiar phrasing, as if salt and fire were somehow similar to each other.

     But they are! Fire and salt have in common that when they are present, they cause changes that cannot be undone, and they postpone or eliminate deterioration and rot. Food once roasted, sun-dried, smoked, salted, cured or pickled has a taste and texture it never had all by itself, and it also resists becoming loathsome.

     According to my dictionary, the meaning of "salty," apart from the literal one, is: Marked by sharp and often witty incisiveness, verging on impropriety. Salt is scandalous! You would have thought that if people live in New Hampshire, they wouldn't need anyone to tell them to be salty, like it's part of the way we are. But that's exactly Jesus' point: the saltiness is already there, or we have already been touched with that fire. All we have to do is be aware of it, remember it, take advantage of it, refuse to ignore it, be open to it, watch and listen for it, in short, to use a good Christian word, all we have to do is to discern it.

     Our Rockingham Association of churches and ministers is going to meet in this building later today to see if it can discern what one particular man from this congregation is made of, what kind of salt he has in him and what he is likely to do with it. But that process of spiritual discernment is one we must all undertake and undergo on a daily basis, if perhaps with less overt solemnity and ceremony than will show itself here this afternoon.

     Have salt in yourselves. The salt to resist the putrefaction of this culture of greed and gossip and trivial titillation. The salt not to take offense at this scandalously unarmed and disarming Messiah. The salt to hope for good things. The salt to live in peace with each other and to taste and see how gracious the LORD is.
Amen