The Salt of Faith: Nurturing Christian Maturity in Challenging Times
How can we explore the importance of maintaining one’s spiritual “saltiness” through consistent faith practices, especially during uncertain and stressful times? Our practice of faith encourages us to embrace Christian maturity by integrating our beliefs into daily life, rather than seeking instant gratification or viewing faith as a mere obligation.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
In the name of the father, and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“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.”
The other day I was talking with a dear soul in the parish, and we looked at each other as she asked, “Do you think things will hold together?” She was talking about all of it. The wider world, our nation, this town and the parish all at the same time. It is a question that continues to raise its head. And I could feel in my body that same tension that set up camp during those worst 18 months of Covid. Will this hold together? Can we hold together? And me being me, being wired the way I am, I started to think, can I hold this together? I could feel my heart rate increase.
Well, we’re all wired in very different ways, and one of my superpowers, as we joke, is the ability to feel what others are feeling. Sometimes it feels like waves through a room, and sometimes it feels like threads that suddenly pulled tight or loosened. Given my family system, what might have been a gift in some ways became a burden in other ways because others look to me to gauge any situation. Something in them knew I could feel what they were feeling. So if that was the case, maybe I can make them feel better. And off we went into my childhood story. Up until now.
“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?”
Here we are stepping into stewardship season, every rector’s favorite time of the year. It’s just my favorite that time of year when we want to make sure that the parish can raise its budget for next year. Here we are at this time, when we anticipate everyone leaning in to support the shared life of this parish, and we wonder about follow up calls into November to make sure that we can continue to thrive as a parish, even as so many others are struggling and many churches are not able to make it. And we have plenty of bandwidth to manage this stewardship season, right? Because there’s nothing else going on that might make us stressful.
Do you think things will hold together? It is a question that I keep in my pocket like a heavy stone as your rector, when it comes to this question, in the ongoing tension we feel, here’s the lesson I keep having to learn for myself. It’s not my job to hold this together. It wasn’t my job to make my family feel happy when they faced a chance for growth, but didn’t want to step into that space. And it isn’t my job always to make this parish feel happy either. It’s an ego trip to think that holding this all is actually mine to do, and it actually is sometimes important to actually be pinched and not happy. Because maybe we need to pay attention to something in our life.
I have to constantly turn my heart toward the Spirit’s presence in my life, in this parish, in this town, and in the world, and trust that God is at work somehow holding us all. It is the Spirit’s job to invite us to practice our faith to transform our lives. My job, any of our job, is to do what we can to align with that movement of the spirit with integrity and compassion, knowing that, as we say, people will. People all over the place. If anyone holds this together, it is the spirit. And the spirit calls us to do our part as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Here’s what this looks like for every tense conversation, for every confused moment, for every time when someone gets pinched. Work on something in the parish. Didn’t meet their expectations or their preference, or someone said something they couldn’t believe, they said, which happens 47 times a day. Now, every time that we feel pinched, if we could pause and take a deep breath and ask, how do you think the spirit might be at work in my life at this moment? Or what do you think Christian maturity would look like at this moment? Maybe that’s the best one for us to hold on to. What might Christian maturity look like at this moment?
Look, if you will, at your bulletin to this reading from the book of James. (James 5:13-20) I think it’s fascinating that we’ve had these texts from James these weeks, because this book challenges us to see how our practice of faith actually impacts the way we live in the world. Yes, we come here to praise God, and praise is at the heart of our lives, and our praise of God transforms the way we live in the world. The letter of James tells us that praise should have an impact, a consequence of faith, or it is hollow. The other day we heard this challenging line from James that said faith without works is dead. And maybe that shook us a bit as we wondered just how what we do in this space on Sundays actually transforms the way we live in the world.
Today’s reading highlights the way we live together. Look at this. If someone is suffering, the text says, we pray. If someone is cheerful, we praise God. If anyone needs prayer, we come together and we pray for each other. We are accountable to each other. What we do affects each other. How we believe should actually shape the way we live in the world. And if it doesn’t do so. Then James and the prophets, the entire biblical witness and Jesus Christ himself challenges us to ask ourselves just is what the point of such a belief in our studies?
We say how we pray shapes the way we believe and how we believe shapes the way we live in the world. That’s how this works. That’s what this does. Put this way, we must always move past having a mere temple cult mentality where we come to the temple to pay someone else, to offer a sacrifice for us, and then we go about our lives thinking that we have done what we need to to achieve favor.
In our reading from Mark (Mark 9:38-50) that you’ll see, we see again how we are accountable to each other. If you put a stumbling block in front of anyone, it’s better to tie a millstone around your neck and be thrown into the sea. If your arm, if your hand offends you, cut it off. I love the acolytes faces when they got to that point, the boys looked at each other and went. If your hand offends you, cut it off. If your foot offends you, cut it off. As Mark says, saltiness is vital. We are called to be salty, to have a flavor in our spiritual practice. You notice if salt lands on your tongue, and we should notice how faith impacts our life, every aspect of our life.
For those who think I’m meddling, I’m not. I’m being your priest. Because in terms of this season, I’m not telling you how to vote. Because when it comes to the call of Jesus Christ, voting is actually small potatoes. The call of Jesus Christ demands that we integrate our entire lives and see how our beliefs and our actions are attuned with Jesus’s spirit. One of the challenges, as we say we have with church life these days, is that so much of our cultural assumptions are geared toward individual satisfaction, and we can get what we want with a click of a button. So we start to think that church itself is about getting what we want, and we want what we want, without having to make any choices that shift how we have already set up our lives. We want all of it.
Here’s where Christian maturity comes in. We invest in what we think makes meaning in our lives. What we believe matters most. We make all sorts of choices. And in an entertainment driven world where instant gratification is the marker of what we consider worthwhile. We honestly have a difficult time with seeing how a sustained practice of faith can transform our hearts over time.
We may come to a service and ask ourselves if we don’t feel that instant level of gratification, or if we’re not entertained. Then what is the point? Of course, we perhaps begin to realize that something more was or is needed that saltiness. When our lives face a challenge, a crisis, and something happens in our family, we ask ourselves, how could this happen? And how can we make meaning of it? And we look around ourselves and we see where our support systems are at that moment.
Notice how we all checked on each other with the storm. That is why Christian community is important not to be entertained. It’s on the level of a transformed pastoral support that must be invested in. If we think we can go through life simply squeezing in our spiritual health into the small, empty spaces in our calendar that are left over after we filled it with everything else we should not be surprised that we will reach a challenging time feeling dry and even angry. And we ask, where was God? When the question really is where were we? Where were we in the sense of what can we do to nurture our practice of faith?
Salt is good, but if salt is lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.
Here is a metaphor that might help us see why investing in our practice of faith is important. The oceans, the oceans did not become salty by suddenly dumping a large amount of salt into them at one point. It didn’t work like that. The oceans became salty over millions and billions of years, as rocks slowly eroded and dissolved from the crash of waves and the pull of the moon with tides and the flow of rivers and streams as they traveled across the landscape.
Since we’ve been looking at symbols in our Sunday form, reflect on that for a moment. The oceans become salty over long periods of time with the ebb and the flow of life. The pull of the moon and the tides, and the flow of streams and rivers across the landscape of our souls. What can we learn about how we can commit to a practice of faith? What can we learn about the stones in our lives? The hardness of our heart that must be eroded if you will allow the pressure of the spirit by our practice of prayer. What can we learn about how our practice of faith flows like a river through the landscape of our lives, concentrating the spirit in us, if you will, until we can taste it?
Yes, the world can be a scary place these days and ever has that been the case? Yes. Storms come and we care for each other. Yes, some grasp for power and we struggle to make sense of it all. Yes, we pause and we look at each other and we ask, do you think things will hold together? I do. I believe they will, because my heart tells me to trust in the power of the living Spirit of Christ, whose presence saturates our lives and always invites us to share in God’s dream for our world.
Amen.