February 9, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Spendsavour Salt

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 112:1–6
Matthew 5:13–20

“But if salt has lost its taste . . .”
Matthew 5:13 (NRSV)

It is worth noting that Jesus says: “You are the salt.” Being salt isn’t a demand; it is simply a corollary of being called to be a disciple, something which permeates the follower’s whole being.

Leith Fisher

Last evening, Missy and I took part in one of our favorite events of the year, gathering at the Union League Club with a bunch of Chicago Scots to celebrate the life and work of the great bard of Scotland, Robert Burns. It was our annual Burns Supper. They happen all over the world, wherever there are people who are Scottish or of Scots heritage or Scots by inclination or lovers of great literature.

These dinners are a little like a church service. Certain things have to happen at certain times, so it’s like liturgy. At the beginning, they have the bagpipes, and they pipe in the haggis, which, despite John Vest’s doubt a couple of weeks ago, is actually a very lovely, spicy dish. We have the “Address to a Haggis,” Burns’ famous poem in celebration of the pudding, the haggis. And then after dinner there is what’s called “The Immortal Memories,” which is a bit like a sermon, a reflection on Burns’ life, his works, and his influence. And then there’s the “Toast to the Lassies,” celebrating womanhood, and then the response to the Laddies and then the toasts with a little bit of the golden fluid in a little glass. Someone remarked after this morning’s 9:30 service that I’d obviously done very well by being able to be up and about this morning after a Burns Supper. We did leave a little early.

I love the work of Robert Burns, a great nature poet, writer of love songs, and, famously of course, the writer of “Auld Lang Syne,” which is always sung at the end of the Burns Supper. One of my favorite of Burns’ works is a poem called “Holy Willy’s Prayer.” Burns wrote this biting satire on religious hypocrisy based on a real person and elder in a local church who saw himself as being very righteous and very holy but was actually a deeply flawed and troubled man, a man who was a persecutor of one of Burns’ great friends. Burns wrote “Holy Willy’s Prayer” as an indictment of a person who stands as a paragon of salt that has lost its saltiness, one whose expression of religious faith is seen to be empty. Here in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses these two metaphors to describe the life of faith: salt and light. Light he says, that can be shared and shown to others in faithful loving, and salt that most ordinary thing of the world and yet, Jesus says, if it loses its flavor, its saltiness, it’s no use for anybody.

Another great poet who writes on these simple but profound metaphors of Jesus—salt and light—is Gerard Manley Hopkins. A great Victorian poet and Jesuit priest who spent most of his life and ministry in some of the most difficult parts of the United Kingdom, Hopkins was, like Burns, a great poet of nature. In his poem “The Candle Indoors,” Hopkins meditates on the meaning of salt and light as Jesus speaks about in the Sermon on the Mount. Let me just read you the first few lines of the poem:

Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by
I muse at how it’s being put blissful back
With yellowy moisture, mild night’s blear-all black,
Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye.

It’s a beautiful poem, really splendid—go home and find it online or on your bookshelf. It has one of my favorite lines in all of literature, with its alliteration and almost made-up words: “to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye.” Think of that as you squint and look at the flame of a candle. Hopkins’ poem is a meditation in which he imagines going down the road and seeing a candle and hoping that the people who are looking at the candle are praising God in their lives. But then there’s a turn, there’s a shift in which Hopkins reflects that it’s not his position to expect that of others, but rather to look inward and ask about his own faith and life. And he asks this question at the end of the poem about whether “cast by conscience out, he himself is spendsavour salt.” Isn’t that a marvelous word: spendsavour. It’s not a real word. Hopkins made it up, but you get the sense as you unpack it—spendsavour—that’s lost, salt that has lost its flavor. It is worth nothing. “The Candle Indoors” is a poem that asks the question, how do we keep the savor of our salt?

How does our faith have meaning and depth in the world? One of the simplest and most profound, fascinating figures in Christian history is Brother Lawrence. Brother Lawrence was a monk, a medieval Benedictine monk in France. He was on the bottom rung of the ladder of the hierarchy of the monastery where he served. Brother Lawrence, you see, spent most of his life working in the kitchen, cooking the meals for the brothers, cleaning the pots and scrubbing the pans. And yet through his spirituality of humility and service, Brother Lawrence became famous in his own time. He wrote letters that were published. He was interviewed, and these interviews and letters were collected in one of the classics of Christian mysticism and spirituality, Practicing the Presence of God. Brother Lawrence, you see, believed that “the most excellent method of going to God is that of doing our common business purely for the love of God.” Doing our common business purely for the love of God, through a movement here and Brother Lawrence’s reflection of how we see the world, how we see it such that it is new, that it is new creation, You see when we are oriented to God’s love, to God’s presence, all that we do, everything in our most ordinary things, all we do reconciles us to God and to each other, brings us into relationship with God. That movement we mentioned earlier during the baptism service when I lifted up the scriptural concept that we love because God loved us first. And this is our salvation. Think of that word - salvation. It comes from the Latin, the root of which means - to heal, like a salve that we would put on an injury. Salvation means to heal, to find wholeness or oneness to heal that which is broken. That is a new way of seeing God’s wonder active and present in the world, God’s grace eminent, close by, in the ordinary things of our life and our world.

I got an email this week from Stacy Jackson, the Executive Director of Chicago Lights, our mission programs here at Fourth Church. She forwarded me an email from Alex Cornwell, who is the Director of our Tutoring and Scholarship program. Alex had written to Stacy with a story. Stephen and Paul were matched here at Fourth Church for four years in our Tutoring program. Stephen was the tutor, and Paul was the student. They stayed in contact after graduation. But Paul lost his way a bit. He didn’t follow through with school. Didn’t follow through with jobs. Didn’t follow through with meeting with Stephen. He had a baby and on and on. But Stephen stuck with him through it all and kept encouraging him to do more and better. Alex writes that Paul finally got his stuff together. Started school, married his baby’s mother, and Stephen got him linked with Year Up, which is a program that prepares eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds to work in the corporate IT world. Year Up trains them—they get school credits—and then places them in a job. Alex writes, “Paul is currently a full-time salaried employee with a major employer in their IT department and doing very well. Just another good news story to share.” Good news. Gospel. Saltiness. This is a story of Stephen, who kept his saltiness, who stayed in there, with the result of transforming life’s closeness with God in the ordinary.

It’s one of the things that has always fascinated me and which I’ve explored in my own journey of faith with a fine writer, a Catholic called Paul Mariani, a poet, a critic. In his book God and the Imagination, he reflects on this eminent closeness with God and writes about being open to seeing God in the ordinariness of the world. He writes, like other writers in the Christian tradition, “I shared a language that pays homage to the splendid grittiness of the physical as well as to the splendor and consolation of the spiritual—in a word, a sacramental language.” He says, “If the incarnation has indeed occurred, as I believe it has, then the evidence of that central act in human history, when the creator took on our limitations with our bones and flesh, should have consequences that are reverberating down to our own moment.” Evidence of God’s eminent presence ought to be capable of breaking in on us each day the way air and light and sound do, if only we know what to look and listen for.

That’s how we save ourselves from becoming spendsavour salt—by knowing what to look and listen for. In a sense, we told this story in the baptism of our little ones this morning. Baptism is itself a narrative—the narrative of the story of newness, of new creation, reconciliation with God and re-creation, putting off the old and taking on the new. In some baptism traditions, a new white garment would be placed over the person who was just baptized, symbolizing the putting off of the old, taking on of the new—saltiness.

One of the great preachers and pray-ers of our Reformed tradition, George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, speaks of this in one of his most famous prayers, The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory. It’s about saltiness in our faith and light. The prayer ends like this:

By the glories of your creation which we did not devise,
by the assurance of your freeing us, which we could not accomplish,
by the wind of your Spirit eddying down the sanctuaries,
whispering through our recaptured oneness,
fanning our faith to flame,
help us to put on the wedding garment.
So shall we go out into the world,
new created,
new redeemed, and new enchained together,
to fight for your kingdom in our fallen world.
Salt that has not lost its saltiness.

Thanks be to God. Amen.