Wor­ship at the Med­ford (N.J.) Meet­ing start­ed this morn­ing with queries for the upcom­ing “Salt and Light” gath­er­ing of world Friends. Med­ford is send­ing a del­e­gate to the Kenyan event, and in prepa­ra­tion they’re read­ing the queries from the Salt and Light mate­r­i­al dur­ing the month of March, along with some pas­sages from the Gospel of Mark(“Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his salt­ness, where­with will ye sea­son it? Have salt in your­selves, and have peace one with anoth­er.” http://​bible​.us/​M​a​r​k​9​.​4​9​.​KJV). I spoke in wor­ship to a recent omis­sion of salt.

A Sat­ur­day rit­u­al in the house­hold is morn­ing pan­cakes. One of the boys likes choco­late chips in his pan­cakes; anoth­er likes vanil­la chips; I myself like blue­ber­ries. What all the pan­cakes have in com­mon is salt: just one and half t‑spoons in the mix­ing bowl is enough to trans­form the batter.

A few Sat­ur­days ago I for­got the salt. The results looked like pan­cakes but when we bit into them we knew they weren’t right. Rather than give them up, we poured them extra-heavy with syrup. Enough syrup masked the bland taste­less­ness of the pan­cakes – the emp­ty form of these almost pan­cakes – and allowed us to eat it.

How many of the reli­gious bod­ies descend­ed from Mark’s ear­ly gospel have masked our salt­less­ness (or a fear of it) with extra heap­ings of syrup? Cer­tain­ly, the cur­rent fash­ion for charis­mat­ic preach­ers and praise rock bands can act as a kind of mask­ing syrup. But there’s all sorts of ways of com­pen­sat­ing for miss­ing salt.

As Jon Watts and Mag­gie Har­ri­son have been remind­ing us though the http://​www​.clothey​our​selfin​right​eous​ness​.com project, ear­ly Friends opt­ed for spir­i­tu­al naked­ness: peo­ple gath­er­ing with­out props or dis­trac­tions, one-on-one and togeth­er wait­ing for the Holy Spir­it to lift up and gath­er the wor­ship. The salt is the Liv­ing Spir­it, here to guide, direct, com­fort and scold. In the qui­et of a Friends meet­ing you’ve either got it or you don’t. We’re work­ing with­out nets and there’s not much room to hide. The ques­tion fac­ing the par­tic­i­pants in Kenya – and the gath­er­ers in every Friends meet­ing­house and church in the world – is whether we have the salt.

There are many types of mask­ing syrup. Even once-radical Friends have found ways to side­step the salt ques­tion, pre-empting the emp­ty naked­ness of our wor­ship with caus­es, busy-ness, his­tor­i­cal fes­tishism, etc. When Friends gath­er in Kenya, I hope they will ask one anoth­er about the salt, the Liv­ing Spir­it. Maybe they can bring back a re-appreciation of naked­ness. For the good news is that Jesus is always ready to bring salt to the sim­plest of meals: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” (http://​bible​.us/​R​e​v​3​.​2​0​.​KJV).

Embed­ded Link

Wel­come to the World Con­fer­ence of Friends 2012 Website

The largest world­wide con­fer­ence of Friends since 1967 comes togeth­er from 17 – 25 April 2012 in Kenya. The theme is Being Salt and Light — Friends liv­ing the King­dom of God in a bro­ken world. One thous…