Fr Robert Hendrickson

For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.

Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.’

Dear Friends in Christ,

The two verses above are part of the Gospel today and point toward a call to Christians — to not see the world as the world sees itself. We are to see the world as Christ sees it, as full of people who bear the image of God.

Politicians so often find reasons to divide us from one another and to make us see one another as unworthy of love. We’re encouraged daily by our news media, social media, and more to not just disagree with one another but to hate one another.

Christ today asks us to consider that our compassion is to be extended to all people and that we who bear his name, Christians, are especially charged to witness to a love that does not know, respect, nor countenance barriers and divides between us. It is a radically different view of the world.

Our “saltiness” is his love. That is the thing which sets us apart from the world. When we lose the distinctiveness of that love we slip back into the divisiveness and divisions of the world. That love, for one another and for Christ, takes many forms that seem strange to the world.

Whether it is our worship, the ways we serve, the time we spend in prayer, the devotion we have in studying Scripture, the concern we have for the poor, and so much more, the way we are called to love shapes the way we live. There’s a distinctiveness that is increasingly unfamiliar and, yes, strange to our life together. It is our saltiness. It is what gives us a distinct difference.

There are always calls for the Church to be more relevant. This gets reduced to calls to make worship more accessible, music more modern, liturgical language more contemporary, and the demands of the Gospel less challenging.

Those are not the real markers of relevance though. The Church is relevant when it loves. We’re relevant when our life together so focuses, in all its strangeness, on the timeless love of God across millennia such that we can see Christ in the person in front of us. We are formed in its strange patterns to not see the world as the world sees itself but to see it as Christ blesses it.

A people who can see God in Bread can see Christ in the beggar. A people who pray to a God who takes the form of a baby can see him in the form of a migrant. A people who tells of a virgin birth can listen to the story of mothers struggling to keep their kids off the streets.

A people committed to all the strangeness of our faith become salt, a distinct thing, that preserves proclaims Christ’s love in its witness. In a world of bitter division nothing could be more relevant than a Church unafraid to love which seems stranger than ever to the world. That’s the unchanging call of Christ to the Church, it is and always has been the only thing that makes us truly relevant, that is our saltiness.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert