An Open Table where Love knows no borders

What are you good for?

A sermon on Matthew 5: 13-20 & 1 Corinthians 2: 1-16 by Nathan Nettleton

I entered a competition to win a hundred bottles of beer recently. It was run by a beer club I’m a member of and to enter, all I had to do was make a donation to the Queensland Premier’s Flood Relief Appeal and forward my receipt to the beer club. They described it as part of their commitment to making the world a better place, one beer at a time! I’m impressed by people who think up and organise things like that. The person from the club who organised it could have just sent off a $500 donation herself, but instead she thought, “I wonder if I could use my $500 in a way that would induce a few hundred other people to donate as well.” Now I’d like to think that I would have donated anyway, because I don’t like to think of myself as the kind of person who has to be motivated by self interest before I do anything, but I can’t be sure I would have. I intended to even before hearing about the beer, but I didn’t get around to it until the beer was on the line, and I know there are plenty of times when I have good intentions and never get around to seeing them through. So I’m thankful for the creative action of the Beer Club that helped make sure I did. And in the unlikely event that I win the beer, that will be nice too!

Of course, since then, we’ve had the biggest cyclone ever and now we’ve got floods in Victoria again too. It feels like the planet is starting to kick back at us, and we’ll all find it harder and harder to know how to respond if the natural disasters keep coming at this sort of rate. A few months after the Black Saturday bush fires, a few of us went and spent a day helping rebuild the fences on some affected farms. It was only a very small contribution, but it was real and it was hands-on, and we got a lot out of it too. Someone suggested to me the other day that we might think about doing something similar this year in the aftermath of the floods, and that seems like a very good idea. The clean-up will be going on for months. Jesus said that we are to be the salt of the earth, and one thing that is true of salt is that it doesn’t do anything from a distance. It doesn’t write cheques. It has to come into contact with something before it has any sort of effect.

But when we are faced by large scale disasters or other major human and environmental needs, we usually feel pretty inadequate. One of the things that often stops us from getting more directly involved is this sense of inadequacy. We feel unqualified and ill-equipped. The needs are so big, and we’ve got no idea what we’re doing. We have no training in rescue or recovery work, or in rebuilding or counselling or anything else that seems very relevant. When I baked the communion bread this morning, the salt appeared to be the most insignificant ingredient — there was so little of it. And yet, if I’d left it out, you’d have all noticed the difference. Sure, the flour made a bigger contribution, but the little contributions are still important and without them, the bigger contributions are still lacking something. Our bit of fencing work or the Beer Club’s hundred bottles won’t save the world, but they show that everyone can do something, and every little something helps.

As I reflect on this in light of today’s Bible readings, it strikes me that our sense of being unqualified and inadequate affects us in all sorts of areas to do with our engagement in God’s mission in the world around us. Disaster relief efforts are at the forefront of our thinking at the present time, for obvious reasons, but in all manner of ministries, from evangelism to peace-making, from intercessory prayer to non-violent resistance, most of us feel that we are not ready to do much yet and that we don’t know enough and we haven’t had the necessary training to be able to make a real start.

Let me briefly point out a couple of things from our Bible readings. A superficial glance at our reading from the Apostle Paul’s Corinthian correspondence might seem to reinforce our feelings of inadequacy. Paul talks about people being spiritual or unspiritual, and being mature enough for the deep things of God, or not. Immediately we feel ourselves sliding down his scales: not very spiritual, not very mature, not ready for anything deep. But look again. Firstly, Paul describes himself when he first came to preach the gospel in Corinth. He says that he was weak and frightened and that what he was saying was so simple that no one would have been impressed. He says he deliberately avoided talking about anything more complex and just kept his message to the one topic of Jesus the Messiah and him crucified. And he is saying that even if you could get into more complex things, there is no point in doing so, for the message that people need to hear and respond to is quite simple and you already know it. But even more importantly he is saying that you shouldn’t get hung up on whether you know enough or can speak or act well enough to achieve anything, because ultimately it is not up to you. The Spirit of God will make every use of your willingness and your faithfulness, but she has little need of your brilliance or your competence. Personal brilliance and well-qualified competence only tend to get in the way and so the Spirit is often far more able to work effectively through those who think they have little to offer but are willing to be available and have a go.

The other point that the Apostle is making here is that everything we need comes as a gift from God. We can’t earn it or work at it or receive education and training in it. You don’t need to go off to college and get post-graduate qualifications in theology and ministry. You just need to be willing to receive the gift as a gift. Those who Paul describes as unspiritual are not so because of their lack of training, but because they have dismissed God’s gifts as worthless and set off without them. Accept the gifts, and everything else starts to become clear.

This lines up well with what Jesus says about our role as the salt of the earth. You see, he doesn’t say this as a command or an instruction. He is not telling us that we should be the salt of the earth. It is simply a statement of fact. You are the salt of the earth. Yes, he raises the question of whether we are effective salt or so contaminated as to be useless, but there is no plan B. We are the salt of the earth, for better or for worse. But just as Paul said of himself, salt is not supposed to be the most noticeable and impressive thing. If you have a meal and all you can taste is the salt, it is not a good meal. Similarly with the other illustration Jesus uses, the purpose of a light is not usually to draw attention to itself, but to make everything else visible in all its glory. Salt seasons and preserves and sometimes contributes to other important chemical reactions, but its value is never in drawing attention to itself. It is for the benefit of the other things. You are the salt of the earth. Your role is to help bring out the full flavours of life as God intended it to be lived. Your role is to help preserve all that is good and stop the world going rancid. These are not big things in themselves, but boy we notice it when they are not happening, when the saltiness is gone and things start going tasteless and off.

Friends, you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and your saltiness or light is not an accomplishment, but a gift from God. Your role is to keep yourself from becoming so contaminated that your saltiness can no longer be discerned, or your light can no longer be made out, and to get out there where the salt and light are needed and reflect brightly the glory of God and bring out the full flavours of the life that God has given us. You don’t need anything more before you can play your part. It is all a gift, and we’re it.

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