I’d like to talk a little about salt and light.
Let’s start with salt.
Our Lord says you are salt of the earth. Great! What does that mean?
Salt was very important in the ancient world. So much so that it was often used as currency. Roman soldiers were partly paid in salt. It is said to be from this that we get the word soldier – ‘sal dare’, meaning to give salt. From the same source we get the word salary, ‘salarium’.
Salt was a scarce and expensive commodity and extremely valuable. To sit above or below the salt identified precedence in the seating arrangements at a feast, according to one’s rank. Not to be worth one’s salt was a great insult.
Here we see that Jesus says to his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth.”
Why was salt so valuable.
First, it was necessary for survival. Ancient diets were mostly starchy and did not have a lot of sodium in them. Thus the need for other sources of dietary salt needed to be found simply for good health.
Salt was used as a preservative, especially for meat and fish. There were no refrigerators in the ancient world.
It had medicinal uses, especially in healing of battle wounds.
Finally, as then as now, it tends to bring out the best flavors in most food. Even caramel. Yum!
So when Jesus is telling his disciples they are the salt of the earth, it is no small thing.
He is telling them that they are of untold value.
Also perhaps that they preserve the best of humanity, that they are agents of healing, bringing out the best in those around them.
To be the salt of the earth is to be something special, something essential. That’s how much our God thinks of us.
What about light?
I don’t use props very often when I preach these days. But back when I was Fr. Young Priest, I once preached on this very gospel passage using a Colman Lantern and a wicker bushel basket, just to see if the image that Jesus used held true. In prepping the homily, I learned that if I left the gas on for just a couple seconds longer than the instructions called for, the lamp made a nice loud “POOF!” sound when I hit the electronic ignition. Needless to say, it really got the peoples’ attention.
[Hey do you know anything about skydiving?
No, do you know anything about Colman stoves?]
Then I put the basket over the lantern. Sure enough, that wicker basket effectively blocked out all the light from the lantern, rendering it useless as a source of illumination. I left the basket on there for some time.
As I continued with the homily, I could see people getting more and more nervous. Even though they couldn’t see it, they knew that that Coleman lantern was burning away inside that basket. They also knew that Coleman lanterns are a prodigious source of heat as well as light; and they knew the longer I left that basket on there, the more likely that basket was to burst into flames at any moment.
I removed the basket before that could happen, of course, but the point was well made. We are the light of the world because we are loved by God. When we open ourselves to that love, we can’t help but radiate the light of God’s love to others. It is a fire burning within us. If we try to hide that light (or even if others try to do so), it will find a way out to burst out anyway. It cannot be contained. So powerful is the white-hot flame of God’s love.
My dear friends in Christ in St. Patrick’s Parish, YOU are the salt of Muldoon. You are the light of Nunaka Valley. You are the heart and the arms and the hands of Christ in your neighborhood.
As salt and light, our job as a parish family is to become so much a part of our neighborhoods, our schools, our community councils (which meets on the third Thursday of every month in the at 9131 Centennial Cir, that’s February 20th for those of you who are interested); in short, anywhere where that God has put you in 99504; our job is to become so much a part of the local community in 99504 that they cannot imagine life without us.