"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."
Ok, I'll admit it. I pour salt on just about every food imaginable. Chicken, steak, French fries. Sarah yelled at me once for putting salt on kraft Mac and cheese. That was the day that I learned about sodium levels in my food.
But the truth is that I salt everything because I love the flavor of salt. Some people reach for the chocolate, and others like me reach for the potato chips. Now imagine that my favorite steak dinner is sitting in front if me, and I sprinkle some of those delightful white flakes on my meat, and they don't have any flavor to them. Nothing. I get all the harmful effects of extra sodium in my diet, but no flavor. I would feel completely ripped off, not to mention completely unsatisfied.
Some people who have preached on this passage have gone into all different uses for salt, which it definitely has a couple, but I don't think we should ask too much of this passage. Jesus doesn't say that we are salt that doesn't melt ice, he says we might be salt without flavor. So for the sake of argument, let's say that this passage is a call to us to spice things up.
I spent this past week at the Alive festival, which is a wonderful Christian music festival in Ohio. While the music and the worship were awesome, as I walked around the festival grounds and through the merch tent and everything, and I saw how all our t-shirts and everything, I realized we were trying to hide from the world. And I got really sad, because if we spend all of our time hiding from the world, we're probably not doing a good job of spicing things up. If we keep to ourselves, if we create our own sterile culture rather than influencing and creating culture at large, are we just salt without flavor? Are we doing the world a great disservice by trying to keep ourselves safe from it?
Or perhaps put another way, are we shinning a bright light all the while keeping it under the basket of our safety? More on this thought tomorrow.
Godspeed,
J
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