(2 Kings 2:19-22, Job 6:6-7; Colossians 4:2-18)

[HOLD UP SALTSHAKER] Recognize this? Right, it’s a saltshaker, about half-full of salt. I’d be willing to bet that most of you have one at home, and a box or two of salt besides what’s in the shaker. It’s just common, ordinary stuff. Would you believe that this is one of the driving forces of history?

Well, the journalist and writer Mark Kurlansky would, which is why he wrote the book Salt: A World History. Granted that this is the same guy who thought it would be a good idea to write a children’s book about cod, it still tells you something about the historical importance of salt that he could spend 500 pages writing about it. He may overstate his case—I doubt, for instance, that the destruction of the great kingdom of Poland was due to German production of sea salt—but there’s no denying that he’s right about the importance and value of salt in the ancient world. For our culture, too much salt is the problem, but that’s an issue peculiar to our modern era; for most of human history, the problem was not having enough. To the Romans, salt was so valuable that they paid their soldiers’ wages partly with salt—since their word for salt was sal, they called this the salarium, from which we get our word “salary.” And one of the justifications Thomas Jefferson used for the Lewis and Clark expedition was a mountain of salt which was supposed to be somewhere along the Missouri River.

So why was salt so valuable? Well, there were a number of reasons, as there were a number of important uses for salt. First off, it was one of the primary means of preserving food. If you were rich enough and lived close enough to the mountains, you could have ice packed down from the peaks and use that to keep food cold, but that wasn’t available to most people. In some parts of the world, meat would be smoked to help preserve it, but smoking wasn’t (and isn’t) sufficient by itself; foods could also be dried, but for many foods, drying and salting went together, while others were salted without being dried. Salt was valued because it preserves other things of value—namely, food.

Second, connected with this, salt was seen as a purifying agent; that’s reflected in our passage from 2 Kings. The water at Jericho was bad, and so the crops didn’t grow well; the tradition was that when Joshua cursed the city after its defeat, that he had cursed the water. When the people of the city brought their plaint to Elisha, he purified the water by throwing salt in it. Now, this is clearly presented as a miracle, not as a mere chemical reaction—this is something the Lord has done; the salt is symbolic. Nevertheless, the symbol was of great importance, as the Hebrews took symbolism much more seriously than we do, and accorded symbols a much greater degree of significance; it was through the salt, and the act of throwing it in the water, that the Lord purified the water.

Third, salt gives flavor; it’s the most basic of all spices, because it not only gives its own flavor but intensifies other flavors, bringing them out. Thus Job asks, as he protests both the terrible things which have happened to him and his friends’ insistence that they must be God’s judgment on him for his sin, “Can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt?” This is a rhetorical question, an appeal to a proverbial truth, and the expected answer is, of course, “No.” No, you need salt to bring flavor to food. (You might be thinking we’ve taken poor Job just a little out of context here, but not really. We’ll come back to him later.) Without salt, food doesn’t have the taste, the savor, that it should have—it’s too bland, even tasteless.

Now, we might add a couple other things to this. One, though it’s not exactly what you’d call a use of salt, we know that salt causes thirst—that’s the reason for beer nuts. Salt attracts water; salty food pulls the water right out of the tissues of your mouth, so that you need to drink more to make up for that. The biblical writers don’t seem to have had reason to do anything with that fact, but they must have been aware of it. Two, salt is an irritant—if you rub salt in a wound, you increase the pain, as the salt goes to work on those damaged tissues. The bottom line here is that when you put salt on anything living (or recently living, like a dead fish), it doesn’t just lie there and do nothing; as one commentator put it, “Whatever salt is applied to, it invariably penetrates.” It’s active, it sinks in, it goes to work—to preserve, to purify, to dry, to flavor.

It’s in that light that we must understand Paul’s command to the Colossians: “Let your conversation always be filled with grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” He first says this very straightforwardly—“Let your speech always be filled with grace”—but maybe that feels too generic, it’s not vivid enough, so he follows it up by saying the same thing another way: “Let it be salty.” Now, Paul didn’t invent that image; in secular writers of the time, for speech to be salty meant it was witty and entertaining, not boring or insipid—it had a zing and a kick to it. Here, of course, the salt is not wit, but grace, and so we need to consider what that means.

First, grace should be a purifying influence in our speech. When the people of Jericho told Elisha that the water was bad, he told them to bring him a new bowl full of salt, and he threw salt in the water to make it pure and wholesome; and grace should have the same effect on our speech. The thought here is the same as Ephesians 4:29, where Paul writes, “Don’t let any unwholesome or corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may give grace to those who hear.” Let the salt of grace purify and preserve your speech, Paul is saying, so that nothing which is unwholesome, nothing which would tend to tear other people down or lead them into sin, corrupts your words. Only say things which are appropriate to the people you’re talking to; give people the responses which will build them up in Christ, and do so only in ways which will give them grace. If your words won’t give others an experience of the grace of God, then be quiet until you can say something that will.

It’s worth noting that this reflects back to some of the things Paul said to “put off” back in chapter 3—“anger, outbursts of temper, malice, slander, abusive language, and lying.” None of these build people up, or attract them toward holy living; they’re destructive, tending either to batter people down or to undermine them and destroy their foundation, bringing them down from within. Just as important, they don’t build us up, either; these ways of speaking teach us to view those around us not with the eyes of God as people to be loved and cared for, supported and encouraged, but with the eyes of the devil as competitors and challengers to be beaten and humiliated—and that’s destructive to our spirits. Anger is sometimes appropriate, but even then, if it’s left unchecked, it’s terribly corrosive; malice, hatred, abusive language and lies are pure spiritual poison. The salt of grace works against them, cleansing their toxic effects from our speech.

Of course, that’s not the only effect of speech salted with grace; it doesn’t only purify our words, it also purifies the lives of those with whom we speak. This isn’t just a matter of not saying bad things which will hurt people, it’s also about taking care to say things which will give them grace and build them up. Graceless words drive people away from God; grace-full words draw people toward him. Grace-full words, words of love and forgiveness, compassion and understanding, give hope; graceless words that cut and condemn and belittle give only despair. Grace-full words give people the energy to attack their sin and the hope of victory, where graceless words take away hope, driving people to give up and give in. As such, to speak without grace is the most counter­productive thing we can do; if we want people to grow, to address the sin issues in their lives and overcome those things which hold them back, we need to set aside temper and all such things, and seek to give grace to those who need it. Yes, that means offering it to those who we’re sure don’t deserve it, but as God says, that’s why it’s called grace.

That’s not just a matter of what we say, either; it’s also a matter of how we say it. Salt doesn’t only purify and preserve, it also gives flavor, making food palatable. As Christians, the dominant “flavor” in our speech should be the grace of God. This goes beyond our words to our tones of voice, facial expressions, body language, and so on. If our words speak grace, but everything else communicates anger, disappointment, or judgment, the effect will be graceless. Sara will tell you that this is an area in which I can speak from experience, because I’ve had to learn the hard way; people need to be able to feel grace from us before they’ll be able to hear grace.

This is particularly important for those times when we need to confront people with their sin and challenge them to change. Most of the time, people don’t want to be corrected, and most people don’t take it all that well when you tell them something they don’t want to hear. And yet, Paul makes it clear in chapter 3 of this letter, verse 16, that this too is part of our responsibility to our brothers and sisters in Christ, and one which we need to be faithful to exercise as part of loving them with the love of Christ. If we’re going to be able to do that—not just effectively, but at all—then we need that savor of salt, the savor of grace, in our words if we want them to swallow what we have to say.

This, I think, is where Job comes in, as an example of how not to deal with people. He’s been living a godly life, and now he’s suffered more calamities and disasters than any one person should ever have to bear, he doesn’t deserve what’s happened to him—and when he opens his mouth to lament, to give voice to his suffering, his friends say, “Stop complaining, stop pretending this isn’t your fault, and accept that this is God’s judgment on you for your unrighteousness.” There’s no grace in their words—there’s no effort to address Job in the midst of his agony as a human being, rather than as an abstract theological problem—and so there is nothing in what they have to say which makes his disaster any easier to take. “Can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt?” No. Of course, there’s also the fact that Job’s friends were wrong, but his words don’t just apply to false counselors; can that which is unpleasant—namely, correction and rebuke—be swallowed without the salt of grace? Not easily, and sometimes, not at all.

Now, as we talk about this, we need to remember that salt has a sting to it, and sometimes people won’t react positively to that sting. There are those who are actively resisting grace, and so even if our speech is seasoned with grace, sometimes people will respond with anger, hostility and derision anyway—indeed, precisely because we’ve shown them grace. Most people don’t react that way most of the time, but there are always some who do; when that happens, the challenge is not to respond in kind, not to let our own tempers flare and our hurt feelings take over, but to continue to show them grace even when they clearly don’t want any part of it. It’s when we can respond in that way that we are most clearly showing the world the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who forgave his killers even as they were crucifying him; it’s in those moments that his self-sacrificing love shows through most clearly to the people around us.

This is our calling as Christians: to speak grace to those who need it, which is everybody. To speak grace to our brothers and sisters in the church, and never more than when they’re doing wrong and need to be set right; to speak grace to those outside the church, to a world that feels its need for grace but too often doesn’t want to admit that need, much less accept it. It’s to speak grace, precisely in those times and to those people that make it hardest to do so—because when we least want to offer grace is exactly when grace is most needed, and most real, and most truly grace. Grace by its very nature is undeserved, and so the fact that it’s undeserved is no reason not to offer it—rather, it’s the very condition which makes it necessary. Speak grace, because we too live only by grace; we too are undeserving, though we often find it easy to forget that uncomfortable fact. Speak grace, because it’s by the grace of God in Christ—and only by that grace, in the power of his Holy Spirit—that hearts are changed and lives made new.

(Leviticus 19:13-16; Ephesians 5:21-33, Colossians 3:18-4:1)

Last week, we spent some time considering what the life of Christ looks like in us, and how it begins with and grows out of his gifts to us—his word, his love, and his peace—which, as we allow them to fill us, change us, and change our motivations, so that we come less and less to desire those things which God does not love, and more and more to want to please him with our lives. We noted the fact that this is supposed to produce a change in our behavior, and you may remember that the things Paul emphasizes, the virtues we’re supposed to put on, all have to do with how we treat other people and how we relate to them. They’re all about living lives of love for the people around us.

Which we have no problem with, in theory; but Paul won’t let us leave it in theory—he applies it immediately to specific circumstances, to particular relationships. It isn’t just good enough to love “people” in general and show them compassion and grace—we need to live this way in the most intimate part of life, and so that’s where Paul goes in our passage this morning. He begins, logically, with the marriage relationship, and here I have to raise a quibble with the NIV. You see, the NIV introduces a comma in verse 18 where it doesn’t actually belong, right after the word “husbands.” This might seem like a really picky thing, but it isn’t. Listen to the emphasis. “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” What that says is, it’s fitting in the Lord for you to submit to your husbands, so do that. It’s an absolute statement. Take the comma out, and you get this: “Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord.” Now, “as is fitting in the Lord” doesn’t reinforce the first part of the statement, it modifies it.

In that culture, wives were subject to their husbands, at least legally—that’s the reality—and that wasn’t going to change in any great hurry. Paul, then, isn’t saying this in a vacuum, or trying to begin some new practice; rather, he’s addressing an existing reality in the light of the things he’s just been saying about how God calls us to live together. As a practical matter, in a world in which wives weren’t much more than property, what does it mean to live in a Christlike manner in marriage?

For the key to understanding this, turn to Ephesians 5, which was written about the same time. This is one of those passages where translation is a real problem. You see, first, that “submit” there in verse 21 isn’t a separate verb—it’s dependent on the command in verse 18 to “be filled up by the Spirit.” Paul says, be filled with the Spirit instead of wine, and then starts listing what goes along with that: “speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and praising God, giving thanks to God the Father for everything, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

And second, the sentence doesn’t stop there. There’s no verb in verse 22—it just continues, “submitting to one another in reverence for Christ, wives to husbands as to the Lord.” Now, the grammar lesson might seem to be a bit much, but it’s really very important. You see, what the world has in mind when it thinks of “submit” or “be subject” is one person bossing another around—I tell you what to do and you do it, and that’s that. It’s a one-way street. What Paul means is something very different: all of us as brothers and sisters in Christ are supposed to submit to one another as part of being filled up by the Spirit; we’re called to mutual submission in Christ.

Now, if we are, all of us, to submit to each other, rather than just some people submitting to other people, then clearly submission doesn’t mean just doing what you’re told—that would be hard to sort out. So what does it mean? Well, flip over a bit to Philippians 2, where Paul writes, “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” As the ultimate example of this attitude, Paul points to Christ, who had more right than anyone to insist on his own way and his own prerogatives, but chose instead to give them all up and accept crucifixion. It seems to me that the command to submit to each other doesn’t mean that we have to do whatever anyone tells us to do, but rather that we don’t have the right to dominate others; we can’t insist that we are more important than they are. Instead, we should be willing to let others be more important, we should be ready to let others have their way, and we should be as concerned for the good of those around us as for our own good.

It’s in that context that Paul turns to address wives and husbands. Many argue that this is a special case, that mutual submission is only the rule outside of marriage, and that inside marriage submission is a one-way street. The reason I’ve usually seen offered for this is that Paul doesn’t go on in either of these passages to tell husbands to submit to their wives, and that therefore this must be a special duty for wives, not husbands. On first read, that makes sense; but if that’s the correct reading of these passages, then what do we make of the fact that Paul tells husbands to love their wives, but never tells wives to love their husbands? Clearly, he doesn’t mean that wives don’t need to love their husbands. This suggests—especially in light of the command in Ephesians to mutual submission—that he doesn’t intend submission to be just one-way, either; after all, one element of loving another person is being willing to put them and their will and their good ahead of ourselves and our own. Rather, it seems likely that Paul emphasizes submission to wives and love to husbands for some other reason.

The reason, I think, is the cultural situation he’s dealing with, which enshrined the legal superiority of husbands over wives. Husbands had, at least in theory, absolute power over their wives—and, for that matter, their children; and we all know what absolute power does: it corrupts. It corrupts those who wield it; it also corrupts those who are under it. Paul’s driving concern, then, is to address both halves of this relationship and tell both husbands and wives how to deal with the situation as Christians. The key principle here is that this should be all about Christ, and doing what pleases him (which includes not submitting to things which clearly do not please him); along with this, we see the truth that greater authority doesn’t mean a greater opportunity to get your own way, but rather a greater opportunity to love and serve. “Husbands,” Paul says in Ephesians, “love your wives as Christ loved the church.” How did Christ love the church? He laid down his life for the church. That, and nothing less, is the standard.

From the marriage relationship, Paul turns to the relationship between parents and children, and you’ll notice that here he moves from the word “submit” to the word “obey,” clearly indicating the shift to a truly one-way responsibility and a fixed hierarchy. Mutual submission doesn’t mean we all have to do whatever anyone tells us to do, but yes, when parents give orders, children are responsible to obey them. I want to point out here, though, that all through this passage, as he addresses different groups of people, Paul directs his comments to them—for instance, his comments about wives are addressed to wives, and his comments about husbands are addressed to husbands. This might seem obvious, but we often tend to read them the other way around—as if Paul had written, for instance, “Husbands, your wives are supposed to submit to you as to the Lord”; we focus on what others are supposed to do for us, rather than on what Paul commands us to do. Verse 20 isn’t addressed to parents, to use as a stick with which to beat our chil­dren, but to the children themselves; yes, we need to teach our children to be obedient, but you know, the reason really isn’t “Because I say so.” It’s not because I say so, it’s because God says so, and because I in my place am trying to do the best I can to teach them to do what is wise and good and pleasing to God.

Which means that the real burden here (as earlier) is in the second command, not the first; and given that the legal power and authority was vested in fathers, the command is to them: “Don’t provoke your children, lest they be disheartened.” If the command to children is “Obey your parents in everything,” then the command to parents—and particularly fathers, whose legal authority over their children was literally unlimited and unrestrained—is, first of all, “Don’t presume on this.” Some would look at the command to children and take it as license to give any order they pleased, but Paul will have none of that; instead, he says, you must take it as a responsibility, to be sure that the orders you give are fair and appropriate, for what is best for your children, and in line with the law of Christ, which is the law of love. Your concern must be, not that you get what you want, but that you give them what they need, so that they will not lose heart—or faith.

Finally, we have directions given to slaves and masters—most of them to slaves, presumably because there were many more slaves than masters in the Colossian church. If you were here when we started this series by looking at Philemon, you may remember that slavery in the ancient world was a very different thing from slavery in the American experience, because though slaves were property, everyone acknowledged that they were still fully human, and needed to be treated as such. You may also remember the way in which Paul undermines the class distinction of slavery in that letter by teaching Philemon, and through him the rest of the church, that he needs to view Onesimus no longer as his inferior but as his brother and equal in Christ.

Here we see Paul making the same point to those in the church who are slaves: what really matters is not that they belong to another human being, but that they belong to Christ, and it’s really him they’re serving. Their call just happens to be to serve Christ by obeying their masters, remembering that anyone who does wrong will receive the punishment they deserve—whether a slave or a slaveowner; neither would be able to use their status as justification or excuse, because there is no partiality with God. Just to drive this home to slaveowners, Paul reminds them as he reminded Philemon that this is what really matters for them, too: they belong to Christ and are called to serve him, and thus in truth, they and their slaves share a common master who will judge them both together on that common ground.

It’s in 3:17 that we see most clearly the governing principle in our passage this morning, in the command to “do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him”; in verses 18 and following, we have the specific application of that principle to whatever forms of service or obedience we might find ourselves required to give. Wives were expected to be subject to their husbands—so do so as is fitting in the Lord, as part of the mutual submission which all of us as Christians are to render to each other; husbands, you remember that part, too, and love your wives with the love of Christ. Children must obey their parents—yes, but do so as your service in the Lord, not simply because human authority requires it; and though this isn’t put in so many words, parents, you remember that you give orders to serve them and the Lord, not yourselves. Slaves (and in our day, employees), obey your earthly masters, yes—but do it for the Lord, knowing that’s really who you’re serving anyway; and masters, remember that you, too, have a Master in heaven—in fact, the same Master—and treat all those who work for you accordingly.

In other words, what Paul’s talking about here isn’t prerogatives and hierarchies and what we have the right to expect from others; he’s calling us to serve others in the name of Jesus, as an expression of the love of Christ, in humility which seeks to put the good of others first. It’s not a hard thing to understand—it’s very simple, really. It’s just hard to do, because that’s not our normal reflex, it’s not what comes naturally to us. But that’s what it means to follow the Son of Man, who came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. And so Paul says, yes, we’re all called to serve others, no matter our position; and however we’re called to serve, whomever we’re required to obey, we need to do it, and to do it in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Whatever your work may be, do it as service to the Lord, knowing that your just reward is in his hands.