Our lectionary reading from Ephesians this morning offers a healing ointment to a church that is sick and in need of salve, a word from which we drive our word “salvation.”

This morning I have before me some salves I grew up with: a bottle of iodine, a bottle of merthiolate, a bottle of mercurochrome. [It will not be easy to find these except by asking some of your older members if they still have any samples in their medicine chests.]

Here are their replacements today: bacitracin, neosporin. [These will be easy to find.]

We don’t have either mercurochrome or merthiolate because both these compounds contained mercury, one mercury and bromine (Mercurochrome) and the other mercury and sodium (merthiolate). The FDA has decided that things with mercury in them were not good for you, whic…