I’m back--in a place that has become home to me--the quiet streets here have created a grid-like maze amongst the literal mountains of snow that pile outside our front doors.
I’m back in the common rhythm of my life, and even though I’m sure my absence has been clear to many (anyone can be famous in a small town), my experience felt very full to be enveloped by a community of the Grunewald Guild, a place where art, faith, and community intertwine. There I worked alongside other artists as we together kept this community of retreats running and worked on our own personal art projects.
I had dreamt of this time to spend a few weeks cultivating more of my skills as a ceramic potter--and I have come away with over 100 mugs, bowls, and jewelry pieces to show for this work. But...I built all of these fragile pieces far away from this home of Valdez.
So I found myself asking a few necessary questions to deal with as I packed up these clay pots to be mailed to Alaska:
If all my pottery breaks or it all gets sold, what is left?
What do I have to show for this time being an artist? Am I only my production?
Would I feel empty if all these mugs are crushed and broken?
Would all of this time have been a waste?
If all is lost, what is left?
I asked myself these questions in hopes that I would not wallow but instead recognize all that this time to create art has been:
-a time away from my rhythm as a pastor
-a time to solely focus on producing art
-a time to solely focus on producing art
-getting to play creatively with clay
-improve my pottery skills
-develop my own pottery voice
Even deeper than that, I was given the chance:
To love something that is breakable.
To create something fragile and delicate.
To build something that can die and crumble.
To love anyway.
Destruction or breaking cannot touch love + grace.
Breaking does happen to all of us AND love and safety can be intentionally created even when things are broken.
In the Gospel we hear today, Jesus tell us that “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”
We need salt to survive: we use salt to make our food taste good and to preserve meats. We use salt soaks in wounds to draw bacteria out of the body, to get rid of pesky wine stains, to safely put out grease fires. The average human adult needs around 6 grams of salt as part of their essential diet.
We are called to be the salt of the earth.
Not the gold of the earth, not the mansions of the earth---we are the salt of the earth--we get to be the cheap stuff that everyone has a carton of in their kitchens, or the very expensive vials that were skimmed off of sea water off the coast of Japan. Or Himalayan pink sea salt put in a grinder that is sold at Food Cache/Costco. Take your pick, but you get to be the salt of the earth.
God believes that we are essential to creating a life worth living. We are called to be as common as table salt; we are called to notice how our lives taste good and we are called to help clean the wounds of this world.
But Jesus asks us an important question in this Gospel: “if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”
So what if we are broken? What if we have lost our saltiness?
What if we have lost the essence of what makes us the salt of the earth?
What if we as a church have become too palatable or too weak that we no longer stand for anything?
These are important questions to ask ourselves, the same way I am asking myself how I am going to cope with having broken pieces of my created pottery.
And guess what? I picked a few of my favorite mugs to put in my luggage for safety and turns out, one of them did break. Delicate pieces made out of love do break, even when we do all we can to protect. But just because it's broken doesn't mean it cannot be mended or that all of it's worth is gone.
The truth is, there is brokenness everywhere in our world. And oh do we need that brokenness to be mendable.
Our politics is broken; our leaders choosing to feed into fear to continue the shouting matches across difference. Our world is broken; children are still being detained at our border and people who have been deported to their home countries are being murdered and assaulted. Our world has billionaires that have multiple homes while thousands of people slip into homelessness. People are broken--we are broken. We focus on judging other people for their wrongdoings rather than looking at the ways we are a part of the brokenness of this world. We as the church too often remain silent or distant when we see the hurt right in front of us.
We are called to to speak about the ways we are broken and take actions to once again be the salty grace all over our communities.
What does it mean to create something that is breakable?
We love it anyway. We repair the broken parts of this world.
We find our way back to being the God-flavored salt of this earth.
