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1963 was the first year that President Khrushchev allowed foreign visitors back into the then-Soviet Union. I travelled there in a group to visit the Orthodox Church. There had to be some slightly cloak-and dagger arrangements for this. And some of us were propositioned over our hotel bedroom telephones by ladies of the night, who could well have been agentes-provocatrices. But, despite restrictions, and through the courtesy of our secretly sympathetic official Intourist guide, we met the Orthodox Patriarch in Moscow, and were made welcome at the churches and a monastic seminary that we visited. As you can imagine, the odd glass of vodka was sometimes part of the hospitality.

But it had to wait till my wife, Susan, and I visited Russia more recently, before the dreadful onslaught on Ukraine, for us to experience the traditional of welcome at a Russian family house, namely bread and salt: bread as a wish for prosperity and salt as protection from evil. Bread and salt: not exactly tasty, but highly symbolic. The bread was rough – as rye bread usually is. And the salt was very salty, as salt generally is!

As we heard in the Gospel, Jesus told his followers that they had to be salty, and reminded them that if salt loses it saltiness is isn’t much good for anything. It difficult to imagine un-salty salt, and of course Jesus was making a point in his frequent picturesque and hyperbolic way. If you’re going to be a Christian, he was saying, then you’ve got be a Christian, and behave as a Christian, with all that entails.

St Mark, the author of today’s Gospel, has clustered together a batch of Jesus’s sayings he remembered or had had reported to him. They are salutary for all of us as we try to live salty Christian lives. I’m going to take them one at a time, but in reverse order, and then come back to the salt.

Jesus said:
If your hand causes you to stumble [that is, commit sin], then cut it off’. [Similarly, ‘your foot’. Similarly, ‘your eye’.] It’s better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, foot, hand, than two and be ‘thrown into hell’.
There are fundamentalist Christians who take the words of the Bible literally. But I’ve never heard of any taking these sayings literally and engaging in self-amputations. Interesting, that: I can’t imagine why. More of Jesus’s hyperboles, of course. He’s saying to us: if any activity, location, inclination is causing you to sin, in other words, to hurt or damage other people or the environment, then avoid it, or remove it from your life. We must each work out what they might be for us, and especially, in our generation, I guess, in terms of damaging the environment or contributing to climate change.

Next, we have the dreaded millstone:
If any on you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung round your neck and you were thrown into the sea.
What Jesus is talking about is one of the actual Roman methods of capital punishment: a large round millstone was attached to a criminal, who was then thrown into deep water. And the sin Jesus refers to in this connection was causing a Christian ‘little one’ to stumble. ‘Little ones’ could refer to children, but it’s not the usual Greek word for children. Here, the word is ‘mikron’, micro-people, which could refer to lesser people, in other words, Jesus’s disciples. Of course Jesus is exaggerating again with his millstone, but it’s his warning against causing children or other Christians to waver in their faith or their faithful activities. It’s right, that we should be challenged in the content of our faith, of course, to develop a more intelligent and mature faith. But not to destroy anyone else’s faith.

But now we can turn to more cheerful matters. In contrast to anyone who causes problems for Christians large or small, Jesus said:
Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you are Christ’s will by no means lose the reward.

The Cathedral hospitality team may take this as encouragement to serve their usual refreshments after this service. I rather hope they do. But I would also like to think that we would all take this as encouragement for general care for one another in the Christian community. And indeed, I think it’s also a statement that anyone who cares for Christians in need of help will be rewarded, and there are some across the world who are in desperate need.

Jeremy Hunt, when he was Foreign Secretary, commissioned our present Bishop, Bishop Philip, when he was Bishop of Truro, to conduct a review of persecution of Christians across the world. Near the beginning of his Review, published in 2019, Bishop Philip quotes an editorial from The Times five years earlier:
Across the globe, in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, Christians are being bullied, arrested, jailed, expelled and executed. Christianity is by most calculations the most persecuted religion of modern times. Yet Western politicians until now have been reluctant to speak out in support of Christians in peril.

The Government’s own website on the subject of the Government supporting persecuted Christians opens with this:
The charitable organisation Open Doors has estimated that more than 365 million Christians face levels of persecution and discrimination worldwide because of their faith.

The internet abounds with stories of individual Christians persecuted for their faith in overt and subtle ways, and about the work of specific charities like Open Doors in relieving suffering of those persecuted or in prison, and of their families.
Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you are Christ’s will by no means lose the reward.
So this kind of work is as true cup of cold water as ever there was, and a good example of the last of the items from the Gospel – remembering that I have taken them in reverse order.

The disciples report to Jesus how they had tried to stop someone, not of their group, who is using the name ‘Jesus’ as the name by which to cast out devils in people. And Jesus’s response:
Do not stop him . . . . Whoever is not against us is for us.

The injunction is not to be possessive about Jesus. At its most simple, our net can be cast wide in terms of those who share the mission of Jesus and do things in his name. Denominational identity needn’t come into it – we can be as ecumenical as we can be when it comes to care for the wider community. Here in Winchester, there is Christian Aid Week and the foundation of the Trinity Centre, the Churches Night Shelter (now called Winchester Beacon) and Emmaus.

Much of the caring in these places is probably now by people who may not have the name of Jesus paramount in their thinking. So we can cast even wider still the implication of ‘Whoever is not against us is for us’. Whenever caring work is carried out without selfish motive, and by individuals or organisations of any religious background, Jewish, Muslim or whatever, and indeed by secular organisations too, it is the work of Christ, and the work remains totally valid as outworkings of Christian love for people dispossessed in one way or another.

So there we are. There is much salt that that has not lost its saltiness. The name of Jesus, or rather all that that name stands for, has the potential for powerful action in compassion and care for one another within the Christian community here and at its widest. And in its potential too for our shared responsibility for working with others, particularly but not exclusively other Christians, for bringing refreshment to the needy and for protection of ‘little ones’. Probably no literal self-amputations are called for, but we mustn’t lose our saltiness.

And, with a bit of luck, it will be coffee and biscuits after this service, and not bread and salt.