Sermon: Saltiness - A Reflection on Mark 9:38-50

I come from a family of good cooks. My grandma, perhaps like your grandma, was the best cook in the world, and my Mom makes perhaps the finest Spaghetti on the planet. Their food was awesome and now that I am the chef for my family I look at the stuff I make and wonder what went wrong. I have the right pans, sharp knives, a website with thousands of recipes, but at the end of the day stuff just doesn’t have the flavor like theirs did and even when I am following their instructions something is off. Perhaps it is experience. I try to make up for years of experience feeding families by watching cooking shows on TV. I am not sure it is working but I have been learning a lot. I have figured out that the thing my Grandma used to do with the Pork that ended up in the single greatest edition to the culinary world, something called John Mazetti, was called braising, yet when I do it is awful. Thanks to the TV chefs I know that you can add heavy cream to scrambled eggs and you shouldn’t leave them on the fire for too long but I never saw any heavy cream in my Mom’s fridge and her eggs were incredible. I guess in the cooking world know-how, gadgets, fancy pots, and stuff like it doesn’t stand up in the end to someone who has spent years and years putting flavor into their food. I would trade my German knives and my Calaphon pots for whatever mojo Grandma had to spare.

Seems to me that I am not the only one my age who is searching for the flavor and is not finding it. I have friends who fancy themselves fine cooks but opening cans, boiling water, and store-bought gravy does not a good chef make. I may sound like a snob and I am willing to entertain that for a minute, but I am afraid that kids are going to grow up thinking that Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese, and Hot Pockets are wonderful and are afraid or worse never exposed to flavor of Blue Cheese. The palate is equipped for Blue Cheese. It is out there. Some people hate it and I am fine with that, but I love it and when I order a salad that is what I will be ordering. When restaurants do not carry Blue Cheese dressing, as one I recently regretted going to failed to do, because “it is too strong” a little part of me dies.

This is making me hungry so I will get to the point. Today’s reading is the culinary manifesto of the Gospel. Jesus in what amounts to just a verse blows the lid off the flavorless, the bland, the Mac ‘n Cheese and creates a standard for us based in Salt, creates a standard built on the idea that in order to live in this world we must be like Salt - we must taste like something. It is for this reason that I have begun to ask myself could I pray “Lord, I want to be like Blue Cheese.”

“Lord, I want to be like Blue Cheese, I want to be like Pineapple, I want to be like the Habenero pepper. Help me Oh Lord because today I don’t taste like anything.” The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a strong flavor and as someone who seeks to live in the example of Jesus I too need to be more like Blue Cheese, more like Salt than the comfortable, the universally accepted, the friendly Wonder Bread. The Gospel is an acquired taste – to live it, to consume it, to marinate in it – means that in the great Pot-Luck that is this world, when the party is over there is going to be a whole lot left in your casserole dish when the others have been picked clean. Not everyone is going appreciate the flavor with which you live your life. Not everyone is going to appreciate the ingredients or the manner in which you cultivate the Saltiness of your life. I think that is the subconscious in the words of Jesus when he tells us that in the living of our lives a sinning hand or eye is worth losing in order to insure or maintain the relationship with God. Few folks are going to hear that and not recoil. Cut off my hand? Pluck out my eye? No thank you. Jesus sets up such an example for us to see that the life we live must be about something. What else could serve as a sufficient reason to pluck out your eye? I pluck out my eye, lop off my foot because the life that I seek to live in Christ is so important to me that I would rather live this life without then mortgage my relationship with God. Jesus is laying the framework for the destruction of the flavorless life, the one where faith and action, faith and life have about as much continuity as true Italian food and the Olive Garden. Jesus is telling us that the life that we live must be in line with the faith that we have (this is how you build flavor) but if you lack flavor, if you would rather stay bland so that you could hide on any table without offense, then you miss out on something – the Salt – the taste of a life built on a relationship with God.

Jesus doesn’t want you to cut off your foot. Jesus doesn’t want you to pluck out your eye. But Jesus does wants you to know that it would be better to lose that foot or lose that eye than lose the life spent in relationship with God. This is the Gospel of Blue Cheese. This is the Gospel of Salt. Salt is the flavor, salt is unmistakable on the palate and as we live our life with our relationship with God as the main ingredient we discover that over time the flavor begins to develop and as it is with strong flavors soon enough the way you seek to live out your faith - you become an acquired taste.

See flavor can grow stronger and stronger, and like the difference between my cooking and my grandmas it takes living, it takes experience to cultivate the strong flavors that become the cornerstone of any life of faith. Like my Mom who cooked without a timer telling when the Chicken was done by the way it smelled, you don’t start off learning to cook that way – how could you know what perfect chicken was to smell like? It is only through doing it over and over it is only through practice, experience that your flavors, your faith develops and you can live into the bold flavor that is our faith.

You know this thing about growing in faith, moving from bland to flavorful, is not happening overnight. It is going to take a lot of a lot of things including prayer so I thought I would end my sermon today with a prayer like we do with the children’s message - you repeat after me. Alight, let us pray…

Dear God
I want to be like Blue Cheese
I want to be like Liverwurst
I want to be like Habanero Peppers & Listerine
Like horseradish & Garlic
Like Tabasco & Cough Syrup
Like a Salt Water Popsicle
Help me O God, in this world of Wonder Bread & Pop Tarts
To taste so strong
That the world will need a drink of water
When it gets a load of me.
Amen.