Last Sunday's Thought: having salt in ourselves

‘The secret ingredient your sermon is missing.’ The title of the post I received was sufficiently intriguing to require urgent examination. If only there were just one missing ingredient was my first thought. And then came the answer: ‘Preachers cannot be content to glide along the surface of the biblical ocean, telling their hearers of the great treasures that lie under the boat. Instead, they are to dive down into the depths of the water, see it themselves, marvel, and then come up and exclaim, with seaweed on their shoulders, as one who has themselves seen: “This is who God is!” “This is what Christ has done for your souls!”… Effective preachers are those who have been personally moved by the text before they attempt to see others moved by the text.’

         This is great, I thought, let’s try to apply it to an ingredient that is in today’s gospel: salt. And then I came unstuck. How can I be moved by the text ‘everyone will be salted with fire’ when I don’t understand it? It so happens that Mark 9:49 is renowned as a difficult text, so my difficulty is not unique. One of the reasons on that we compare biblical translations is that sometimes the comparison provides a clue to different understandings of the text where there are difficulties. The King James Bible has ‘every one shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt’, while the New King James Bible has a slight difference: ‘everyone will be seasoned with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt’. The Good News Bible has a non-literal translation: ‘Everyone will be purified by fire as a sacrifice is purified by salt.’

         So we can deduce from some of the different translations that there is an allusion here to the Hebrew sacrifices in which meat was salted so as to extract the blood and thus ‘purify’ the animal. The fire that is alluded to in this sense, therefore, is not hell fire but the fire of the sacrificial altar. ‘Everyone will be purified by fire as a sacrifice is purified by salt’, as the Good News Bible or Today’s English Version has it.

         It is an interpretation which makes sense, but is it the meaning of the text? Can we be moved by the text ‘everyone will be salted with fire’ if it is given this meaning? It is clear that in Hebrew ‘being salted’ can mean to be destroyed utterly. There is an example in Judges 9:45, where ‘Abimelech fought against the city [that is, Shechem] all that day; he took the city, and killed the people that were in it; and he razed the city and sowed it with salt.’ To be salted in this way is to be destroyed without any capacity for regeneration; those who suffer this fate perish or are lost completely.

         In the preceding verses Mark records Jesus’ warnings about offending ‘these little ones’ and Jesus’ suggestions that we would be better off to rid ourselves of offending parts of our body than to be cast into hell, where the fire never goes out and “their worm does not die”. It fits this context to translate Mark 9:49 thus: ‘everyone [who is sent to hell] will be completely destroyed (by fire).’ In other words, this verse has to be read as the conclusion of the previous passage and not as the introduction to the last verse of chapter 9 of Mark’s gospel.

         Tom Wright translates verse 50 thus: ‘salt is great stuff; but if salt becomes unsalty, how can you make it salty again? You need salt among yourselves. Live at peace with each other.’ How can salt remain salt if it loses its saltiness? The most obvious way is through dilution by water, and one translation says as much (though it does not convey the idea beautifully): ‘if the salt becomes deprived of its salt content.’ We know that elsewhere Jesus depicts his followers – today’s Christians – as the salt of the earth (Matthew 5:13, a similar but not identical passage). For the salt of the earth to lose its degree of saltiness, the Gospel would have to diluted in the life of the believer. Perhaps the individual becomes a complacent Christian, or a person who does not live out the Christian message.

Luke’s gospel (Luke 14:34) has a similar passage to Mark, but neither Matthew nor Luke conclude in the way that Mark does: ‘Have salt in [or among] yourselves, and be at peace with one another.’ This is a great insight of Jesus’ which is now rather lost because of concerns about excessive amounts of salt in our diet. Almost all pre-modern communities had a concept of ‘sharing salt’ among themselves as a sign of community friendship or, in Christian terminology, love. Sharing salt IS being peace with one another. Today, as one charity has shown, the letters of the word Salt can spell out something even more than being at peace with one another: Sharing Abundant Life Together, or helping those with those with no or very low incomes. This is the role of Christians as the salt of the earth. At its best, the loving Christian servant community in Church becomes the helping Christian community serving the needs of those outside the Church. In this way Salt is more than ‘good’; it is indeed ‘great stuff’. In the words of the author of ‘The secret ingredient your sermon is missing’: This is who God is! This is what Christ has done for …our souls!

Celebrating Evensong at our spiritual home

St Bartholomew offers St Guthlac a whip to scourge his tormentors (from the St Guthlac Roll, originally at Croyland Abbey; now held by the British Library)

It’s wonderful to be here, at Crowland Abbey our spiritual home, in our centenary year and shortly before our centenary service on 28 November. Just up the road there is a stone which is called St Guthlac’s cross. St. Guthlac was the hermit who inspired the foundation of Crowland Abbey in AD 714. The stone, which is inscribed ‘HANC PETRA GUTHLAC’ is thought to be one of a number of boundary markers indicating the limit of influence of Crowland Abbey in medieval times.

         And there could scarcely be a better occasion on which to hold this ‘parish away’ Evensong than today, 29 September, the feast of St Michael and all Angels. For angels are very much a part of the story of Guthlac, the hermit, on the island of Crowland. 

         The Anglo-Saxon poem known as Guthlac A reads thus: ‘the time was within the discretion of God at which he would assign an angel to Guthlac in his conscience so that the cravings for sinful things subsided within him. The hour was at hand: two guardians watched about him who kept up a struggle – the angel of the Lord and the terrible demon… they incited him on both sides until the Lord of the heavenly multitudes made an end of the strife, in favour of the angel…’

         A little later on, the poem continues: ‘Guthlac was good. In his soul, he carried celestial hope; he attained the salvation of eternal life. Close by him was an angel, a trusty guardian to him who, as one of the few, settled the wasteland… Zealously [Guthlac] equipped himself with spiritual weapons and vestments; he sanctified the place and as his rallying-point he first raised up the Cross of Christ. Where this soldier outvied a host of perils, many of God’s martyrs became active. Guthlac’s precious part in this we attribute to God; he gave him the victory and the strength of prudence, the protection of mighty powers, when with sudden volleys a multitude of devils came to begin feuding. In their malice they were incapable of leaving him alone and they brought many temptations to Guthlac’s spirit. Help was close by him; the angel fortified him with courage when they furiously menaced him with the greedy turbulence of fire…’

         The tests and challenges to Guthlac continue for another ten pages or so in the poem. ‘Then’, we learn, ‘from heaven came a holy messenger of the Lord who by word of mouth proclaimed supernal terror upon the miserable spirits…’ We are not at first told who this holy messenger was, but he proclaimed his message thus: ‘I am the judge; the Lord commanded me to say at once that you should heal each one of his hurts with your own hands and thereafter be obedient to him at his own discretion. I shall not conceal my aspect in front of the multitude of you. I am servant of the ordaining Lord. I am one of the twelve whom he, in human form, loved in his heart as most trusty. He sent me here from the heavens. He saw that on earth you were inflicting torments on his dependant, out of envy. He is my brother; his tribulation distressed me. I shall see to it that when this friend – with whom, now I am allowed to succour him, I want to keep up this friendship – is living in that sanctuary, you will often see my face. I want to visit him now. I shall bring his words and works to the Lord in witness; he will know his doings.’ And only after this speech is the name of the angel revealed. ‘Guthlac’s spirit was filled with bliss then, once Bartholomew had proclaimed the message of God.’

         The monk Felix, in his life of St Guthlac, notes that he arrived at Crowland on 24 August (he says 25 August), St Bartholomew’s day, ‘with whose help, under divine providence, he had made a beginning of his dwelling in the desert. He was then about 26 years of age when he determined with heavenly aid to be a soldier of the true God amid the gloomy thickets of that remote desert. Then girding himself with spiritual arms against the wiles of the foul foe, he took the shield of faith, the breastplate of hope, the helmet of chastity, the bow of patience, the arrows of psalmody, making himself strong for the fight.’

         Felix goes on to tell us how ‘the blessed Bartholomew his trusty helper presented himself before his gaze in the morning watches’. Bartholomew ‘remained in his presence and began to comfort him with spiritual precepts, promising that he would come to his aid in all tribulations. Felix tells us that there was ‘a certain hermit who dwelt in the midst of the fen on an island called Crowland, whose fame for miracles of various kinds filled almost the whole of Britain, far and wide’. ‘For no sick man went away from him without relief, no afflicted person without healing, no sad ones without joy, no weary ones without encouragement, no mourners without comfort, no anxious ones without counsel; but as he abounded in true charity, he shared equally in the sufferings of them all.’

         Guthlac died relatively young on 11 April 714 at the age of 41, fifteen years after he began his solitary life. He recalled on his death bed that from his second year at Crowland God had sent him and angel every morning and evening to talk with him for his consolation, ‘who showed me mysteries which is not lawful for man to utter, who relieved the hardness of my toil with heavenly oracles, and who revealed to me things which were absent as though they were present’. Twelve months after his death his body was found without corruption and the garments in which he had been wrapped shone with all their former newness and original brightness.

         Scholarly attention to the embellishment of Guthlac’s life after 714 has shown that the solitary hermit who was venerated  for his ascetism was gradually transformed into the image of the promoter and defender of a wealthy religious institution. By the fourteenth century, this stifled popular veneration for St Guthlac, who in earlier times had been second in popularity only to St Cuthbert. And this is probably why, now, sadly Guthlac is relatively forgotten while Cuthbert (whose remains were translated to Durham as late as 999) is well known. It’s difficult to be regarded both as an ascetic and the defender of a wealthy monastery.

         Today, Crowland is no longer a wealthy monastery. It is a splendid historic church with associated ruins, but the church itself requires a great deal of conservation work because its splendid masonry is damaged. We should not, perhaps, regard English Heritage as the modern equivalent of St Bartholomew, coming to the rescue of St Guthlac against his tormentors by handing him a scourge. Yet it certainly is the case that without the current work on restoring the fabric of the Church, the historic church would have had a very uncertain future. Already pews have been cordoned off because of falling masonry. Eventually, the area that was safe to use would have become too restricted to be manageable. So we wish the abbey well in its restoration and pray that the parish’s finances will recover from the considerable outlay that the work is costing even with the assistance of English Heritage.

         All of which introduces the question of ‘mission versus conservation’ but this is an either/or question that should not need to be posed. All our historic buildings should be conserved, but this task of maintaining our heritage should not have to be at a cost to the mission of the church. All too often, up and down the land, our historic churches are faced with continual challenges as to how to finance work that needs to be done just to maintain (not to improve) the fabric. Sometimes it leads to the development of a new relationship with the local community which seeks to join in the collaborative task of maintaining that which is unique and irreplaceable to the community. On other occasions this is simply impossible because the costs are too high and the building is of national, and not just local, significance. The problems of securing the fabric of Crowland Abbey are greater in scale than the problems of adapting St Guthlac’s, Knighton, into a church appropriate for the twenty-first century; but they are not necessarily different in kind. If and when our present national funding crisis passes, there will have to be a new assessment of the purposes and possibilities of assisting the funding of church buildings dedicated to the service of their communities, or as in the case of Crowland Abbey, which are a potential attraction to tourists and pilgrims. At present the original religious purpose of the building serves too often as the reason or lame excuse for funding assistance being denied rather than facilitated. It is unlikely that we will return to the era when whole communities and wealthy benefactors paid for the construction of great cathedrals and huge churches; but in a country with so many churches of particular interest and beauty it seems perverse in the extreme to make it so difficult, as at present, to keep what is usually the central, or even the only, public building alive and vibrant for the future.

Last Sunday's Thought: not the Servants' Church but a Servant Church

In its early years around 1912 our church, in all probability, was the church of the servants in Knighton, while the non-servants went to the other (posher?) church. If so, then St Guthlac’s might have been called at the outset the ‘servants’ church’. It may have been a bit like the ‘downstairs’ bit in an episode of Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey. What I would like to suggest is that for our continued progress as a church we need to be not the ‘servants’ church’ but a servant church. There is an important distinction between the two.

We have heard some of the great words of Jesus so often that it is sometimes difficult to appreciate their impact on those who first heard his message and the revolutionary implications of what he said. ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all’ (Mark 9:35). Two millennia after the death of Christ the implications of these words are still far from being worked out in society at large, which seems to have ignored what he said altogether. Leadership is confused with power and status. The world is still inhabiting the mindset of the disciples who argued with one another on who was the greatest. As James remarks in his epistle, ‘where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind’ (James 3:16). This happens in churches when the spirit of the world is allowed to enter and to infect our personal and spiritual relationships.

Yet the leadership model exemplified in the New Testament first by John the Baptist and then by Jesus is counter-intuitive and hostile to the existing definitions. John the Baptist said clearly of Christ, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’ (John 3:30). To be a forerunner or prophet means that you must be willing to stand down and be displaced by the person who succeeds you.

One writer, Alan E. Nelson, states: ‘You can be a servant and not a leader. You can be a leader and not a servant. But to be a servant leader, you must first become a servant.’ We have in Christ the model of what we mean by this. At its best, the church on Sunday is a display of what sacrificial service looks like. The church is a servant organisation. We are here to care for one another. But it is more than this. It is a voluntary servant organisation. The world can scarcely comprehend this. This is because we live in a highly commercial world where time is money and time is only exchanged for money. (Your solicitor adds up the time he or she spends talking to you and you are charged for this along with everything else that is done, each letter, each advice and so on).

Yet in a church, an organization of committed volunteers, people are not serving for money. It is not the expectation of material reward which causes them to serve. It is their devotion to Christ! Those who give their time for this Church do so for no reward but that of serving Christ. It is a powerful message to the world in our 100^th year. We are indebted to the work that is put in by all our volunteers on behalf of our community church. It is a great blessing, although it can never be taken for granted. We are insufficiently numerous. People do get tired and we need a wider circle of volunteers. The more volunteers we have, the greater the progress we will make as a church.

If we want to continue to grow into a stronger, healthier church, we must continue on the path of being a humble, servant-spirited church. The servant relationship is where a group of people choose to serve each other in their different roles. Servant ministry is about a group of people working together and assisting each other for the purpose of achieving something greater than each could possibly achieve on their own.

Recently we held a coffee morning for some of the folk from the care homes in our area and it was a highly successful event. We need to continue the activity in the future as an ongoing part of the life of a community church. Why is it so important? Many of those in care homes are relatively isolated with few friends as visitors and perhaps little or no family to call on them. There was a genuine joy among those who we served and chatted to. They had a good time out. It was something different for them. It was a new stimulus.

Being a true servant is seeing people as opportunity for a relationship rather than just as needy people we walk by every day. Being able to see them with Christ’s eyes shows other people His presence within the depths of our hearts. Serving others is one of the most effective ways to lead them to the Lord. Christ is most effectively revealed to others through actions rather than words. ‘Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus [who] emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness…’ (Philippians 2:3-5,7).

Let us pray. May God help us to be a strong, healthy, growing church. To achieve this we need to become servants of others. For some of us this will come easily because God has gifted us in this way. For the rest of us it will require more effort. To be the kind of servants God calls us to be we need to be humble and forgiving. For our church to continue to grow and to be all that God wants us to be will depend upon our willingness to serve. Father, please continue to work on this to make it happen. Amen.