God is sticky.
Like climbing a pine tree and getting covered with pine sap that gets you all sticky so that you get stuck on everything else.
Or like roasting marsh mellows to make s-mores and getting that sticky melted sugar all over everything and getting stuck to everything.
Or like spilling honey, or molasses-the kitchen floor is never the same again.
Or like children gluing stuff together and glue getting everywhere, everything getting stuck together.
Like getting chewing gum in your hair.
Like a child discovering flypaper for the first time.
God is sticky. God pulls and holds all things together.
And Jesus is God’s stickiness, God’s fly paper, in all its stickiness.
It doesn’t take much to get stuck either.
Things like a simple cup of water.
If anything gets in the way of God’s stickiness it needs to be carefully addressed if something in the community isn’t working right it needs to become sticky again.
And we are God’s stickiness in the world, we are to be stuck to each other just like God is stuck on us. Be sticky, don’t lose that stickiness.
The Gospel lesson seems strange and disjointed today, but it is really stuck together really well.
It’s about God’s covenant, God’s commitment, God’s relentless tender mercy that never lets go.
Salt was an expression of God’s stubborn stuck-ness on us.
The ancient custom and liturgy of sharing salt with someone, of having salt with someone, is to be at table, at fellowship, in a relationship that doesn’t quit.
It’s like blood brothers on steroids and superglue.
The idea is that once we share salt with someone then that relationship is established and becomes the foundation for everything else.
God’s stubborn covenant, loyalty, is expressed and experienced in three ways in the Gospel lesson today.
The first is the story of the strange exorcists using Jesus name, God is experienced as being very open and generous to outsiders.
The second is the expression of cutting off hand and eye and foot. Many strange things have been done with this in the history of the Church. It isn’t about literally cutting off and arm, or eye and foot or about cutting people out of the body of the church, it is simply about addressing the dysfunctional dynamics in the community so the community can live fully again. God’s stubborn stickiness is expressed and experienced in being a community that values its cohesiveness as something precious that is tended to deliberately.
The third is in the faithful community itself being stubbornly committed to each other.
So having salt in one another is really about sharing God’s stickiness, being stuck to each other like God is stuck on us, and being sticky for the world so that the world itself is held and stuck together, being the glue that holds things together.
God is sticky beyond reason so we are sticky beyond reason.
Jesus is that sap, that marsh mellow, that glue, that honey, that molasses, that gum in the hair.
He just gets all over and into everything.
Have salt in one another.
Don’t let go.
Be stuck together like God is stuck on you.
Be sticky like God is sticky.