‘You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.” (Matthew 5:13)
In this passage from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus compares his disciples to salt, and he meant it as a compliment. Salt, after all, is intrinsically useful. In Jesus’ day, salt was used in medicine, industry, agriculture, and was an incredibly valuable commodity, not to mention that it made food taste better and last longer.
Salt made people’s lives better.
But salt would lose its effectiveness if it got mixed up with other stuff. In the scene Jesus describes, it’s salt getting mixed up with dirt or sand or so much of some other substance that it becomes good for nothing–incapable of adding flavor, preserving, helping.
In a similar way, Jesus would teach his disciples that they could lose their effectiveness by getting mixed up with worldly concerns and vices.
Greed, materialism, self-righteousness, anger and violence–it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Jesus saying, “When your faith gets mixed up with things like these it’s no longer good for anything.”
In fact, he basically does say that in the sermon’s takeaway line,
But strive [or seek ye] first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:33)Today and for the next three Sundays we’re going to use the comparison Jesus made between his disciples and salt as our starting point for a deeper look at what qualities or attributes might be lacking from our life with God or what we might need in greater measure.
Remembering salt’s usefulness, we’re going to look at some of the ways good discipleship can make our lives and the lives of people around us better.
In order to help us maintain our focus and organize our thoughts through this series, I’ve created a simple acronym for salt or s-a-l-t.
Each week we’ll examine a quality of discipleship that begins with the corresponding letter in salt. For example, today, week one, it’s something that begins with the letter “s,” in week two, a quality that begins with “a,” and so on and so forth.
All the while, we’ll be looking for positive connections between our life with God, our inner life, and our life with others.
So let’s begin.
S, S is for Surrender.
An old gospel hymn introduces us to this elusive, yet powerful mark of Christian discipleship.
All to Jesus I surrender, all to Him I freely give;“I surrender all.”I will ever love and trust Him, in His presence daily live.
I remember singing those words in church as a child. I didn’t really know what they meant, but I remember singing them nonetheless.
Actually, to be fair to little-kid-me, I wasn’t totally clueless. My parents, grandparents, and some of the saints I’m remembering today, worked hard to teach me the difference between right and wrong. They taught me that I should always try to do good, but that they and God would always love me and would forgive me when I messed up.
“To surrender,” in that context, was almost synonymous with asking for forgiveness.
“I surrender all to you, Jesus. Please forgive me for the wrong that I have done, the sins that I have committed.”
I can picture myself sitting in Sunday School circa 1982 in a hand-me-down suit with a clip on tie, bowing my head and praying a prayer that sounded a whole lot like that.
Maybe you have similar memories about the beginnings of your faith journey–baisc lessons, simple lessons, about Jesus’s love and the power of forgiveness.
That’s not a bad place to start, but our faith, like our understanding of self, grows and changes over time.
So does our understanding of life’s complexities and the web of motivations that often leave us confused, broken, and adrift.
If only the challenges and stresses of life were always about the decisions we make when faced with clear cut choices between right and wrong, then maybe we’d have a shot at figuring things out.
Instead, despite our best efforts, we often make a mess of things, hurt the people we love, and find ourselves discovering, like Saint Paul, that ”we can will what is right, but we cannot do it.” (Romans 7:18)
Our understanding of surrender, therefore, should change and evolve, too.
You see, it’s not that surrender isn’t about forgiveness, it’s just more than that.
Surrender is an inner disposition, a spiritual posture.
It’s not unlike the way Jesus talks about the crosses that he and his disciples must carry.
If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 16:24-25)Now it is, of course, true that Jesus’ death on a cross is a catalyst for and a sign of the forgiveness offered by God to all people.
But, as Jesus reveals in these words from the Gospel, carrying crosses is just as much about how he lived as it is how he died.
Carrying the cross is a way of life that is deeply rooted in selflessness, in sacrifice, in love, in surrender.
If you ever start studying about how Christians understand surrender, you will soon find yourself reading memoirs and reflections written by people who are working the 12-steps of recovery and sobriety.
There’s something about realizing your old way of doing things has led to rock bottom that can really make you consider an alternative operating system.
Holly Whitaker is one such writer.
She addresses the evolution of her thoughts about surrender in her memoir “Quit Like a Woman”
Whitaker writes,
I’d always considered the word surrender to be blasphemous. Surrender was never a possibility to consider; it wasn’t something self-respecting, self-reliant folk like me do—we scheme around and bulldoze through whatever stands in our way. That all changed, abruptly, on that day in 2012 when I finally ran out of options and did the thing I thought I could never do—concede.Whitaker was struggling with depression, bulimia, and alcohol, among other things–but grief can take you to that moment, so can any kind of trauma–a job loss, a breakup, stress about money–anything that makes you feel like life is spinning out of control, slipping from your grasp, or shattering into a million pieces.
Experience shows that many paths have led people to the moment of surrender.
Considering this, Whitaker continues,
In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson says,…“The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.” It is entirely cliché, but this was exactly my experience. The moment I finally let my knees hit the floor was when I finally stopped playing at life, and every bit of good that’s come to me since then stems from this reversal of opinion on surrender. (The Power of Surrender — Center for Action and Contemplation)In much the same way, rockstar Bono describes his friend and bandmate Adam Clayton’s sobriety as “long obedience in the same direction,” saying, “I’ve had the honor of watching “surrender” work through this man’s remarkable life and times. I’ve watched this most elusive word become flesh in a series of good decisions that gave Adam back his life.” (Surrender, p. 540)
Surrender is long obedience in the same direction.
It takes our knees to the floor so that we stop playing at life and really live.
It becomes flesh, in us, through a series of good decisions.
It’s what Jesus is talking about when he invites us to take up our cross and follow him.
If you and I are to be useful and effective like the salt of the earth–if Asbury Church is going to make the lives of people all around us better–then we need to discover the wisdom, beauty, and power of surrendering ourselves to God’s love, to God will, to God’s grace.
We need to learn what it means truly to sing, “All to Thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Image: Dubravko Sorić SoraZG on Flickr, CC BY 2.0
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