Salt & Light

Those of you who know me well will realise that my science fiction geekery does not end with Dr Who. In addition to being passed over for the role of the Doctor, (I would clearly be far better than Peter Capaldi) I should also have been born with super powers. From a young child I remember pretending to be Superman or more frequently Spiderman. In fact at the gym recently I was doing what are technically called “box jumps”. A standing jump from the floor onto a box approximately 36 inches high. Due to the boxes height you land with your legs bent and your arms splayed out in front. Any other geeks in the congregation will appreciate that this is a real Spiderman pose – clearly they are spider man jumps and the hashtag “spidercanon” will be featuring on social media in the very near future.

But the lycra clad web slinger is not just about entertainment, as in many comic and science fiction stories there is a message too and the one which runs throughout Spiderman is something his uncle says to our hero shortly before his grandfather is killed – “With great power, comes great responsibility”

I mention this because the expression would not be out of place at the beginning of today’s gospel reading. A couple of weeks ago when Canon Nick launched our “In Thanks to God” programme for November, we read the passage which go just before this one,  the passage we know as the beatitudes, the “blessed are…” statements. And they are followed by this command to be salt and light – “with great blessings come great responsibility”

Jesus is telling his disciples, is telling us, that having been blessed in so many ways we now have a very important role within the world, within our culture and he uses two metaphors to explain this.

The first is salt. To discover the meaning of this we need to understand what salt was used for and how it would have been understood by Jesus’ original audience. There is a problem here, biblical scholars have identified no less than eleven different uses for salt. It was highly valued, so much so that Roman soldiers were often paid in salt. If a soldier did not carry out their duties well others would say “He is not worth his salt” – that is where the expression, “worth his salt” comes from. Even today when someone embodies real goodness we say that they are “the salt of the earth” Salt could be a preservative, an antiseptic, a fire catalyst and even a fertilizer. However in this reading Jesus mention of taste seems to imply the understanding of salt as we would understand it today – as a seasoning agent – to improve the taste of food.

Many people put salt on their chips, some also put salt on other food such as salad but no matter how good that makes the chips or the salad taste I have never heard anyone say “oh wow that is great salt!” I have however heard people say “Wow, these chips are fantastic” or “This salad tastes delicious”. The job of salt is not to make you think how great salt is, but how great the salted food is. Our job as Christians, as salt if you will, is not to draw attention to ourselves, it is not to say this salt is amazing. It is to make the food taste better, to spice up life, society, our world. It is anything but bland. It has bite and it has impact.

Maybe part of the problem with the church declining is we have focused too much on the salt, on ourselves, rather than on the world, the food we are supposed to be improving and enhancing. As many of you will be aware there is lots of talk at the moment about Church growth. But surely once again our focus is wrong – Jesus didn’t come to build churches, Jesus came to bring in the kingdom of God. Jesus didn’t come to make church goers, he came to make disciples. Jesus didn’t come to enable people to have a relationship with a church institution, Jesus came to enable us to have a relationship with God, with others and with ourselves.

My job, your job, our job is not to get more people to come to the Cathedral. The work Jesus calls, indeed commands us to do, is help build up the kingdom of God. If I meet someone who doesn’t come to the Cathedral, who doesn’t worship God or indeed express their spirituality in the way I do and I get talking to them about faith and the world I am not in the business of getting them to come to the 10.30am Eucharist every week. My job is to be salt, to help make the world that they and I inhabit a better place. To build a relationship with that person and enable them to express their relationship with God in the way that is right for them. To spice up life – that might be to encourage and improve – salt does that – but it might be to challenge – salt has a bite and acts as an antiseptic and can sting as well – anyone who has swam in the sea with an open cut will testify to that!

Our focus needs to be on being salt – on improving and enhancing up the world and the society we live in. Jesus does not leave it there – he goes on to add another metaphor. You are the light of the world.

The world can be a dark place. After Friday evening’s events in Paris I do not need to tell any of you that. There has been an understandable amount of shock, outrage and anger but Martin Luther King Jnr put it best when he said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that” If we arrive home and it is dark the first thing we do is not to draw the curtains or pull the blinds to make it even darker. We switch a light on. Jesus calls us to be that light which goes on and banishes the darkness. There is a real sense that the French flags appearing on Facebook, pictures of the Eiffel Tower drawn by Banksy popping up everywhere,  buildings around Europe being lit in the colours of the French flag, prayers being said, world leaders standing shoulder to shoulder with the French is exactly that – a light going on. We need to make sure that those lights go on whether the darkness effects a Western European country or whether it hits Syria or Iraq or Nigeria or wherever in the world innocent people suffer at the hand of terrorists.

We are lights of the world but we are the only ones. We don’t  have a monopoly on God and on sharing God’s kingdom with others. On Friday night amidst that carnage and destruction and death and darkness there were, as there always are in those situations, helpers, lights.  We may call them paramedics or police officers. We might even simply recognise them as fellow human beings who open their homes to ensure strangers are safe as happened on Friday in Paris or who sit and hold the hand of a dying stranger rather than leave them on their own.

I pray that none of us will ever be in the situation that those people in Paris were but in whatever situation we are in we are called to be salt and light in the world. So where can we be that? Anywhere, helping friends and neighbours, working to support community projects, sharing our God given skills. On Friday I met a young man from Portugal in the Cathedral. He has been in the UK for four years, coming from Goa originally. He had work in Birmingham but that came to an end so he took up the offer of a job here in Portsmouth. When he got here there was no job and he is now homeless and jobless with no friends or family. The hostels in the city were unable to offer him anywhere to stay because they are set up for people from Portsmouth. Now forget the rights or wrongs of immigration, forget whether he should or shouldn’t be here, the fact is he is here and has no food and nowhere to live. This weekend he will have slept rough in Commercial Road again, with the wind and the rain and the rubbish and the rats. Was I salt and light to him? I was able to listen to him, pray with and for him, direct him to somewhere he could get food, give him a warm drink. Encourage him to use the Cathedral as a shelter during the day. But what he really needs, what would be salt for him, what would be a light for him, is somewhere to sleep in the warm and the dry. And it breaks my heart today just as it did on Friday that I was unable to provide that for him.

Two weeks ago Canon Nick introduced our stewardship programme for November, “In Thanks to God” – now some of you may have dismissed this as simply the Cathedral asking for more money or more volunteers. It isn’t. It is about all of us asking ourselves whether we are salt and light in the world, and if we are whether that is what God wants for us and we keep doing it or whether we need to be salt and light in a different way. If you have not yet picked up one of the packs of information which goes with our programme then please take one today. Read it, reflect, pray, take advantage of the bible studies or silent prayer times we are offering and consider how you are building the kingdom of God.

Take also the sachet of salt you were given as you arrived this morning.  Keep it with you this week. Carry it with you in your pocket, your wallet, your handbag. Put it on your mantelpiece, your desk or stick it to your fridge door. Every time you see it, touch it or discover it in your pocket, pray. Ask God to help you discover the ways in which God wants you to be salt and light in the world.

Then use the response forms in the pack to make a commitment to God. To make a commitment to be salt and light, and bring them to the services next week where we will collect them up and offer them to God on the alter.

What an appropriate place to put those commitments we will make because it isn’t about us, it’s about God.

“let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” Amen