Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another. I love to eat.

Breakfast and dinner especially, lunch is usually just a fuel stop, but at least once a week I try to eat a big goopy breakfast with eggs and pig-products and toast and grease, and dinner, dinner has always been far more than supper in our house. One of the commitments that Deb and I made years ago was that except in the most remarkable of circumstances we would eat dinner together and we have. Through the highchair years, through the sports events and kid activity years – often dinner was just a drive-through burger or a post-game pizza, but we didn’t eat alone, even when it meant eating at quarter of ten at night when the meetings were over and the pools and ballfields were emptied - and even now, especially now, the dinner table is the place where we sort things out, reminding each other of commitments and obligations, it is the place where, in Brian Wilson’s words about his room, we “do our dreaming and our scheming . . . laugh at yesterday”.

And I mention that because meals are important in the Bible, they were not just fuel stops, they were not scattered and random, they were the centering point for families and friends, it was understood – long before the Thursday night in the Upper Room – that the table was a place where the soul as well as the body was nourished with seasoning.

And salt, of course, of course served as the primary seasoning.

Jesus talked a lot about salt and the various gospels give us these salt sayings in different places and circumstances and some scholars feel that it was just one saying of Jesus that has been inserted carefully by the authors of the gospels in different places, but I have always felt that Jesus spoke of salt the way that I speak of sports: continually and casually as a common ground of understanding among the people to whom he was speaking.

For Jesus loved to be at the table, to speak and listen and ponder and laugh, these are the sacred things that we do at our tables, the ones in our homes and this one in our worship place.

Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.

The call is clear, we need to be the seasoning, we need to be the flavor of the world, we need to live life – fully and abundantly – so that others can live.

There is no room in the Christian life for boredom and cynicism, no room for bland words that don’t offend or blander lives that don’t inspire, no room for merely repeating common wisdom and street corner philosophies, we are called to proclaim that Christ lives and because of that we need to live with the knowledge that we too shall live, that this world, with all of its beauty and all of its horror, is not the last world and that the pain and suffering that we go through, even the heart-wrenching death of a loved one is never the last word. We are called to be salty people who are alive with joy and love and forgiveness and enthusiasm in all of the things that we do.

In other words we are called to be salty people, adding flavor to everything we do, every relationship we enter into. But salt wasn’t only a seasoning, it was also a preservative.

And we are called to be salty people who preserve those things which need preserving. Just as the salt in the ancient world kept the meat from decaying, so we are the ones who have the responsibility to preserve the sacred things from decaying around us. The world into which Jesus sent his disciples was a world of unprecedented wealth and luxury and overwhelming boredom and weariness; a world not terribly different than ours, filled with political corruption, violent hatred based upon religion and ethnic background and the gap between the wealthy and the poor grew larger and larger.

They were sent, as we are, both to bring flavor and to preserve life, a seasoning and a preservative that comes from God. And then comes the warning, for if we don’t keep ourselves salty how can we hope to keep others seasoned and preserved?

Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.

And where do we find our salt?

After we have sprinkled our enthusiasm and love and joy over others and we are running on empty, where do we turn for refreshment and replenishment?

Or as one poet puts it – and you had to know this one was coming - how do we search for our “lost shaker of salt?”

Well the answer is here at this table.

There are so many dimensions to this table, to this sacrament, we speak of remembrance and communion and hope and they are all met here, but there is yet another: for it is here that we begin to understand providence, it is here that we are strengthened in the soul – by the food and the words and the companionship – for the things that God is preparing us to do out there. Just as our dinner tables strengthen us not only by the food but by the dreams and fears and hopes and joys that are spoken of and by the sacredly precious people with whom we eat; so this meal does for us in the invisible realms of God working in and through and with us.

Providence is a word that we don’t use much any more, unless we are traveling to Rhode Island, but it is at the heart of our understanding of God’s involvement with us in life.

It is a sense that in all of the things that we do, all of the things that are done to us, God is constantly working to get us into the path that we have been created for, to get us to place where we are meant to be.

This is different from those who say that all things happen for a reason and that God is responsible for them.

I’ve never been able to blame God for a newly found cancerous tumor or a plane crashing into a building or any of the natural or human disasters of life, I don’t think that God gives us pain and heartache to teach us lessons, but I have seen God at work with us as we suffer from natural or human disasters, bringing us hope and healing and guiding us back to that path that we are meant to walk, teaching us lessons about his providential care.

And that providential work of God’s is subtle and often silent and only the eyes of our souls can see it.

Consider the story of Esther.

It is great drama, sit down and read it sometime and enjoy the whole tale.

But for today, just consider how easy it is to see how Esther was used by God, positioned so that when the moment of providence arrived she was ready, as her uncle said to her back in the 4th chapter: “Who knows, perhaps you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

Her courage in speaking up for her people, at just the right time, turned the tide and saved that obscure congregation of Jews from extermination.

All of the experiences of her life up until then came together and she overcame the flock of butterflies in her stomach and said just the right thing to just the right person.

For most of us the stakes will never be quite that high, but be assured that there is someone out there – or someone in here – someone you know well or someone you’ve not even met, someone who needs you to speak just the right words at just the right moment, words that you have been groomed to speak by the experiences – good and bad – of your life, words that are strengthened by the power of God in this sacrament.

You are God’s act of providence in the lives of others.

And if you were to say, “don’t be silly those were Biblical times and God spoke more clearly and obviously to people then, we live in a age where God is rarely visible” I would say “exactly!”, for you would have hit upon the remarkable holiness of God’s providence, the remarkable holiness of God’s work in the book of Esther.

You see, in the entire book of Esther God is never mentioned.

Not once.

Yet can you argue that God wasn’t there just because he isn’t mentioned?

Can you not see God in the shadows, moving and protecting and ultimately using his people to season and preserve his people? Can you ignore the fact that those people knew who saved them and so they celebrated with praise and food and drink, with joy and affection and hope?

The providence of God comes to us through each other, through the people that God has given us and in the days of crisis and sorrow and failure we find who the people are whom God has prepared to save us, we find who the people are for whom God has prepared us to be the tools of salvation.

As we live we see those who need us to be the providence of God, the hands and hearts and voices that protect and comfort and love those in need.

And here at this table we gain the strength and wisdom and faith and peaceful serenity so that we can be the “lost shaker of salt” for those in need and for ourselves.

Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another