Keep your salt levels topped up

We are called to be salt and light to the world, but to do so we need to keep our salt levels topped up and we need to be close to God to reflect his light most effectively.

I’m the right age to just remember the moon landings. The memory will be clearer will be clearer to many of you, but I was five when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969; that makes me 55 now if you are trying to work it out. I remember being taken outside by my parents at night and my father pointing towards the moon and telling me, with awe in his voice, that people were standing on the moon at that very moment.

Of course, at 5 you don’t really know what’s remarkable and what isn’t, but I picked up my father’s sense of how amazing it was. Over the next three years 12 people, 12 men, walked on the moon and another 9 travelled to it without stepping foot on it. It was an extraordinary engineering achievement and a triumph of human will that probably wouldn’t have happened without a very unique set of circumstances. I certainly didn’t understand that at the time, but it left me with an enduring interest in space exploration and I’ve read many books on it over the years.

I’ll come back to why I’ve mentioned this is a while, but it is linked to today’s gospel reading. Todays reading was about salt and light and our need to be both. It’s part of the sermon on the mount, the first part of which we heard last week. Jesus is talking to his disciples. He was being followed by the crowds, and to avoid them he goes up a mountain and sits down. He is joined by his disciples and he teaches them.

He tells them who is blessed; the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, and he finishes these statements with; “and blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” () and this is immediately followed by “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” () and “You are the light of the world, let your light shine before others” ().

What does Jesus mean by likening us to salt and light? What did salt represent in the world that Jesus lived in? Well it represented a number of things. The most obvious is flavour, it makes food taste better, but that wasn’t the only thing. Salt represented purity. At the time of Jesus, when sacrifices were still offered to God in the temple according to the law of Moses, salt was added to the sacrifices. And Salt was associated with life: it was rubbed into the skin of new-born babies.

We have an even better understanding of the importance of salt for life now than they did then. We now know that the human body contains salt, not a lot but not having enough endangers our life.

One of the most common blood test doctors will perform measures urea and electrolytes. If you’ve had blood tested its almost certainly included this one. Electrolytes are salts and they are essential for conducting nerve impulses. They control the heart. They literally ensure your heart keeps beating.

One of the dangers of excessive heat and sweating is that we can lose too much salt through our sweat. The actor Anthony Andrews, who starred in Brideshead Revisited in the 1980s, was almost killed a few years ago when he was performing in a particularly strenuous play. Because it was so physically demanding, he sweated enormous amounts.

Although he drank plenty of water to make up for this, he didn’t take anything to replace the salt he had lost. He collapsed and ended up spending three days in intensive care. Salt is essential for life. If you’ve been on a drip in hospital, it will have contained salt. If you’ve had a wound washed and dressed it will have been washed in salty water.

And what about light, well light enables us to see. Light guides us through things, through the world, and it guides us to things as well. Planes can only land and night because there are lights on the ground to guide them in. Light warns us of danger

Now this could be a sermon about what we should do, to be salt and light. And possibly Barry talked about that this morning, but this is a healing service, and I want to approach it from a slightly different angle. The passage is primarily a command to the disciples to be a light to the world and not to lose their saltiness.

But that’s not want I want to focus on, because this passage is not just a command to do to be salt and light to others, it’s also a command to look after our relationship with God. Because the salt and light we share with the world isn’t our own, it comes from God and it’s a product of our relationship with God.

Jesus warns us not to lose our saltiness. He’s not saying; “Try harder, do more”, he’s telling us we need to keep on topping up our ‘spiritual’ salt levels, so that we don’t end up like a spiritual version of Anthony Andrews, with the salt flushed out of our body and us unable to do anything, no longer good for anything. Jesus isn’t saying, “Try harder”, he’s saying “Come to me”.

How do we top up our spiritual saltiness? By spending time with God, by spending time in prayer, not as a chore, but because spending time with God, even if it’s just sitting in silence in his presence revives us spiritually. It involves reading the bible, or hearing it read, daily if possible; not because God will be angry with us, or disappointed in us if we don’t, but because its often the means by which God speaks to us.

It involves meeting with each other and praying for each other, and by being willing to ask for prayer when we need it from those we are in community with. It’s by admitting our weakness and our need, knowing that God loves us so much. God won’t turn away anyone who turns to him. Prayer and scripture are our salt. They bring life, they renew our purity, they preserve our faith and they bring flavour to our existence.

Why do we reflect God’s light? Jesus tells us. Because when people see it, they will give glory to our Father in heaven. Being a light to the world involved faithfully being visible, as Christians, so that the world can see, not just that we are Christians, but that what we are, we are because of Jesus Christ. What we are, we are because of Jesus Christ. Trusting God doesn’t use up faith, it enables it to grow. As a student minister this is what I’ve learnt more than anything else, it’s that trusting God, and seeing God work, that builds up faith.

Because the light we shine isn’t our light. How could it be? It’s the light of God reflected by us, reflected through us. The full moon gives reflected light even when the sun isn’t in the sky, just as people can see the light of God reflected in us, even when they can’t see, or touch, or hear God. And the light of God can reflect off the worst of us, because it’s not our light; it’s God’s.

I started the sermon talking about the moon missions. Do you know what colour the moon is? It might surprise you because it surprised me when I read it. It’s black. The moon is black.

It makes sense really. Moon light is dimmer than sunlight. If the moon were lighter, it would reflect more. If it was white, or if it were a mirror reflecting the sun it would be as bright as the sun, but even as it is, it’s bright enough to see by when there’s a full moon. Its reflected light is bright enough to guide us when the sun can’t be seen.

Scientists knew the moon was black before humans walked on it, but it wasn’t until we went to the moon and obtained moon rocks that it could be wholly proved. It surprised the earliest astronauts. When they got back into the lunar module after they had walked on the moon they looked as if they had been down a mineshaft. One astronaut described the moon as being like a giant cinder in the sky. The moon itself couldn’t be darker, but it still reflects the light of the sun.

The difference between the moon and us is that the moon is fixed in the sky. It can’t get closer to the sun, but we can get closer to God’ and the closer we get the more of God we reflect. My father-in-law died in October, by the time he died he was a dried husk really, at least physically. He was little more than a cinder himself, but until close to the end he shone with love and concern and interest in others. He had spent a lifetime walking with his God and the light of God that shone out of him to the end.

We should aspire, I do aspire to be like that.

Pause.

There’s kind of a postscript to the sermon. There is an interesting fact about the astronauts that walked on the moon. There were only ever twelve of them, but two of them went on to become evangelists. James Irwin, Jim Irwin, who was Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 15, and Charles Duke who was Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 16, and I actually met James Irwin, how geeky is that! He gave a lecture at my school when I was a boy, and he talked about his faith in Jesus Christ as much as his experiences on the moon and in space.

James Irwin had had a Christian upbringing but had walked away from it as young boy. Throughout his time in the US Air Force, and later in NASA, he had no faith. His first marriage broke down as many astronaut marriages did, at least in part because of what he himself described as ‘his cruelty’, but he said that his experience in space made God more real to him. After he returned to earth, he became a Christian again. He later said, “Jesus walking on the earth is far more important than man walking on the moon”, and I’ve still got a photograph, signed by Jim Irwin, of him on the moon that I was given at the time. It says, “His love from the moon”. It’s not his own love that motivated Jim Irwin to the end of his life, it was the love of God.