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City Upon a Hill: Salt Better Have Savor

City Upon a Hill: Salt Better Have Savor

Last updated on: August 6, 2016 at 10:53 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

City Upon a Hill: Salt Better Have Savor 2016-08-06T22:53:27-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Houston will never be on an actual hill, but her closeup moment is coming.

They say the camera adds ten pounds, a situation I cannot afford just now. Worse, unlike radio, you cannot scratch your nose while on television. Everyone is looking at you ten-pounds heavier finger reaching up to scratch your ten-pounds-heavier nose.

As one cameraman warned me: “Everyone is looking. Don’t blow it.” This was not as calming as he might have wished. Too late to hide if you agree to be on television. Of course, sometimes we cannot help being seen. Pity the person who becomes a viral video based on a pratfall …shame without doing anything wrong.

In some situations, Christians end up in that situation whether we like it or not. Our televangelists and megachurch pastors sometimes forget this when they draw attention to us. The close up reveals our flaws, so we best minimize them. If everyone turns to look, you cannot just go ahead and scratch your nose.

Jesus warned his Apostles:

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

Jesus has just preached the Sermon on the Mount. Having given his followers and friends a teaching on the true nature of His Kingdom, He warns them the closeup is coming. At least for them, the closeup was coming. They were made salt, but that means they better not lose savor. They were a “city that was set on a hill.” If you are born in that city, if you light a light, then it might be seen for miles. You may not like it, but so it goes.

Everybody seems to be talking about the United States as a city on a hill. Of course, it cannot quite be true in the “Jesus” sense, because the USA is a country and not the church or made up only of His followers. However, the image works if it is suggesting everybody is looking at the United States of America: they cannot help it. We are the only global superpower, for good and bad, and our popular culture influences the world.

We better hope we are salty, like a good potato chip and not a crazy uncle’s Thanksgiving Day rant. We better hope our good works shine and not the other things we do. Thank goodness that for large periods of our history we were not in a closeup.

I am not any kind of historian. I do not even play one on television, but reading American history as a citizen has pointed out a few things that have held up over time.

The USA has not always been in a “city on the hill” moment. In 1776 we thought highly of ourselves, but we were safe to ignore and much of Europe safely did. When they wanted culture and to know the future, Americans themselves looked to Paris or to London: cities in a “city on a hill” moment at the time.

Great Britain herself, as the root of much of our political philosophy, did great good for us and some harm. Some of her saltiness needed to be trampled underfoot and was, but the good stuff (Locke! Shakespeare! Monty Python!) was very good.

Some Christians get the warning, some do not. John Winthrop was a pastor who warned his little colony and church plant:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God . . . .

Thank goodness my ancestors were (probably) already here in Virginia escaping the glare of the world that Winthrop (rightly) saw would descend on his project. Whatever those Reynolds were doing, they were not a “city on a hill!” Given our famly tendency to stir a fuss, thank God!

Winthrop was (rightly) afraid they would become a “story and a by-word” if they messed up and he might have been right. New England Puritans are not beloved. Read Scarlet Letter. Look what happened to Ann Hutchinson or Roger Williams as the persecuted became the persecutors. The British Empire, at times, a much bigger city on a much bigger hill was better off when the closeup came.

When I was in school, I was told that Augustine did some of his best work based on a misreading of Scripture. He thought the Bible directly told him to have “faith seeking understanding,” but his translation was bad and his proof text didn’t do what he wished. The good news is that we should have faith seeking understanding.

Blessed Augustine was wrong in his reading, but right in his goal.

Ronald Reagan did that as well. During the Cold War, he rightly pointed out that we were an example of liberty to those trapped behind the Iron Curtain. I had neighbors in college who could testify to this truth. We were examples and we helped them to be free.

He “borrowed” the Winthrop quote to make his point. Rhetorically it was wonderful, even if he misread Winthrop! In the Carter days, we needed his optimism. The exegesis of Winthrop was wrong, but the message was helpful.

There was a danger lurking in Reagan’s words. One might think America has been “in the closeup” since Winthrop. We might think we had some special deal with God as a new “chosen people.” This is heresy.

At the Christian school my dad started, I learned that America was my homeland and I should love her. I also learned we had made many mistakes: slavery, segregation, treatment of First Nations, and abuse of wealth. That did not make me love the country less just more sensibly.

I knew Americans who saw only the bad (common in the 1970’s) were out of balance and I loved Reagan for giving us the other side. He also cautioned:

Tonight, let us dedicate ourselves to renewing the American compact. I ask you not simply to “Trust me,” but to trust your values–our values–and to hold me responsible for living up to them. I ask you to trust that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries; the spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the Earth who came here in search of freedom.

We do have a compact with other Americans which as Lincoln knew made us indivisible after we made the (secular) agreement of 1789 and adopted our Constitution. We are in this together. I also know God is in charge of history and though His works are often inscrutable, His ways are always just. Mr Lincoln had this right. Mr Reagan saw us in 1980 as a Providential light of liberty and a refuge for immigrants from the troubles of the time:

Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely: Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain, the boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba and Haiti, the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.

Maybe.

We might doubt it at times as even in the Cold War, our closeup came and showed our lack of proper saltiness, but then we had Carter to remind us of this truth. Our schools were dominated by the bad news. I think Reagan’s rhetorical flourish is defensible in the context of the times. If made into a “providential view of American history,” as even he was tempted to do in his love for our nation, then it is wrong.

Reagan would have a good story here and laugh as he went off to help win the Cold War.

God help us if we were dumb enough to think that there was some kind of Covenant line from Winthrop to us. I say this because once I ran into an odd book: America’s Providential History. In addition to a racist reading of geography, don’t ask, the book seemed to make Americans into a covenant people starting with Winthrop and company.

How would that work? Were my folks in Virginia (who would have disliked Winthrop’s religion) part of Winthrop’s city? They would have hated that

We are a querulous breed. We left England to get a new start in Virginia and seceded from Virginia to get away from traitors.

What of the Quakers that came to Pennsylvania? They didn’t like Winthrop’s religion either. What about the Swedes in Delaware or the Dutch in New Amsterdam? Do the French in the Carolinas count?

We were thirteen states by the time of the Revolution and we had two compacts: the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of 1789. Our nation is exceptional at times (for good and bad), but we are not God’s Chosen People. Just now we are mighty and everyone is looking (our Winthrop moment). That has been true in the past: our Revolution spawned many movements, some good and some French. At other times, the constitutional monarchy in the United Kingdom was more inspirational to more people. After all, during our Civil War, few looking would have traded Victoria and her ministers for our situation.

So there it is. I have no desire most of the time to be a city on the hill. For Jesus this meant His friends had better take care. For Winthrop it meant that his Christian community had better take care. Better than looking back to some simple golden age that never existed, Winthrop looked to the Bible for advice about how not to blow our closeup. He said:

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make other’s conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. . . .

I do not belong in his church or live in his time. He wasn’t talking to me, but I think his general point is applicable. Christian leader, when your close up comes: be meek, gentle, patient, and generous. If we apply it to our nation, by way of analogy, then the advice still seems sound.

God help us to know that God deals with men not nations. God help us to recall His Providence is real, but hard to see. God help us to love our nation, but never to pretend we have some special deal with God.

And perhap if a nation can be in a “city on a hill” moment in Winthrop’s sense (not Reagan’s), then doing justice and loving mercy is not the worst advice.

This I know. If salt loses savor, or isn’t my critics who will do the tossing, but God. I better listen to my critics…at times even God blessed lands should as well.

God save this Republic.

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