Recipes

Sunday, April 25th, 2004
Second after Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Psalm 15



O LORD, who may abide in your tent?
Who may dwell on your holy hill?

Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
and speak the truth from their heart;
Who do not slander with their tongue,
and do no evil to their friends,
nor take up a reproach against their neighbors;
In whose eyes the wicked are despised,
but who honor those who fear the LORD;
who stand by their oath even to their hurt;
Who do not lend money at interest,
and do not take a bribe against the innocent.

Those who do these things shall never be moved.

Over my last couple of years in college, instead of working on papers or reading as I should have been, I spent some time perfecting what I thought ended up being a really really good and simple recipe for chili: 3 cans of red kidney beans, 2 lbs of ground beef, a chopped onion, a couple of packages of chili seasoning, 3 cans of either diced tomatoes or whole tomatoes that I then cut up with a knife. A small can of tomato paste. 2 cans of water. And this is important: for the water you need to use either the cans that the beans or the diced tomatoes came in, not the tomato paste, otherwise that wouldn’t be enough water.

Mexican food, or in light of the past year’s education on TRUE Mexican food, Tex-Mex food, is virtually unknown in Spain. Or at least it was in 1985 when I was there.

The city I was living in, Oviedo, Asturias, gets an amount of rain comparable to Seattle, I suspect, though I’ve not actually gone out and confirmed the statistics. It is on the northern coast of Spain, where the mountains that run all along the coast block the cool moist air coming off the North Atlantic from crossing down into the heart of the peninsula. That is why the central part of Spain is so famously dry. I’m not really sure why ‘the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain’ was even used in My Fair Lady, except perhaps for the fact that it rhymes so well. But the fact of the matter remains: Oviedo is a cold, wet city.

I decided, on one of those cold winter days, to prepare my Chili for the youth group from church. ‘The Youth Group’ meant altogether 8 people, counting myself, Dennis and Judith Hale’s 3 daughters, and 4 Spanish youth. Between us, the ages ranged from 14 to 30. There were a few hurdles to jump. You couldn’t easily find canned beans, much less red kidney beans, or packaged chili seasoning. So I had to soak the beans overnight and then cook them. I had to concoct the chili seasoning from available ingredients. Cayenne pepper, paprika, cumin, a pinch of oregano, some crushed red peppers … a few other things, I can’t remember exactly what else went into it.

The day came and I put the beans on a slow boil. I browned the beef and chopped the onion, added the seasoning to the beef first – that was a key step – the beef gets the seasoning, not the broth. I mixed them all together and then … well, then I had to run out on some errand or other … I think it may have been to deliver the weekly newsletter/bulletins to the post office as part of my duties as a Journeyman. It ended up taking much longer than expected, MUCH longer.

Suppertime had been set for mid evening, actually much earlier than true suppertime in Spain, but I rushed home and walked in the door and knew as soon as I did that something was wrong.

If you’ve ever burned beans you know what I’m talking about. There’s very little, if anything that can be done to correct, recuperate, or cover up the fact that there’s a layer of burned beans at the bottom of a pan. Truth is, the taste of burned beans spreads through the whole pot. It ruins the whole thing.

The point of the story is this: recipes don’t always turn out the way they are supposed to. We may follow them step-by-step, but there’s no guarantee that some unforeseen event or variant factor in the equation ends up giving us a pot full of something not worth eating.

Psalm 15, our text this morning, and part of our responsive reading, is a feel-good short list … a recipe, if you will, of what in one way is a comforting Psalm, but it is a challenging one as well. It is a list of what David seems to have thought would make sense for God to require of us. It’s not as short as the recipe found in Micah 6:8, which, very succinctly, says do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God, but it is a recipe nonetheless.

David seems to be saying, “If you do this, these things, if you DON’T DO these other things, God will smile on you and bless you.”

It seems simple enough: black and white, decisions, choices, option A or option B. Go, no go. Yes. No. Period.

I hesitate to say that we as humans, whether we cook or not, would rather seek the simpler things in life, since there is so much evidence, to not say EXPERIENCE, that goes against that, but lets suppose that for the moment, that is the case, that if we all had a choice, we would drastically simplify our lives. If there are two lists of things to do, and one has 20 items on it and the other has two, how many of us would honestly rather choose the shorter list?

In the movie ‘Contact’, Jody Foster plays the role of a skeptic and an astronomer, and Matthew McConaughey plays the role of a former seminarian who winds up being the spiritual advisor to the president. At one point in the movie they find themselves having a discussion at a cocktail party about Occam’s Razor and the existence of God. Occam’s Razor is a logical principle attributed to a mediaeval philosopher named William of Occam, which simply (pun intended) states the following: one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything. Put another way: all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the likeliest one.

Likewise, we tend to do that … the simplest solution is the best one. So we go looking for short answers. That is why we find ourselves surrounded by a culture that relies on sound bites and bumper stickers to get the point across. We don’t have time to sit and talk things out. We don’t have time to waste on considering all the alternatives and options and nuances to a particular issue.

In our own experience here at Jerusalem, since … August, is it? We have had a committee meeting regularly to review and revise the constitution and bylaws of the church. Sometimes the meetings are congenial, the discussions flow smoothly and we breeze through the item at hand. Other times they are not so much. We have had our share of tense moments. There have been times when we would all rather be elsewhere rather than sitting downstairs on those hard metal chairs for two hours going over whether we should use one word instead of another, or use one phrase instead of another. Yet we keep coming back to it, because we understand the responsibility we have to address inasmuch as we are able, the issues that might come up with this family of faith today and in the future. It is a sometimes tedious task, and can be thankless, and isn’t without it’s moments of sheer discomfort. And yet, somehow, the meetings aren’t all about grammar, and phrasing, and nuance and the choice of words … the meetings are ALWAYS about the relationships of which the document speaks. The committee is trying, diligently and deliberately, to put down on paper what relationships are like and what relationships there are within this family of faith. The document is a reflection of that, but it is not that, the actual relationship.

My friend Jay Voorhees, a United Methodist Minister in Nashville, has an online discussion going on – it’s called a BLOG, and in it he’s been talking recently about how God relates to us – how he identifies himself – most often we find God’s self-identification in terms of relationship – ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ or otherwise simply in terms of being. How did God identify himself to Moses? I AM. Not “I am the God who created the heaven and the earth and all that is in it.” That does come, but it comes later. God's identity is centered not in God's accomplishments, but simply because God exists. Likewise, those of us created in the image of God must understand that a life devoted to accomplishment is to ignore the miracle that we simply are . . . we exist and reflect God in the world.

God’s primary mode of communication is through relationship, and relationship with HIM.

So what does all this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Does it mean that we should ignore the precepts listed in Psalm 15? Absolutely not. Does it mean that each of us, individually, need to seek out a relationship with the living God? Yes, and no.
Yes, absolutely, because God deals with us on an individual level. He knows us by name, he CALLS us by name. He knows us better than we know ourselves. But No, he doesn’t stop there. He also calls us to community. He calls us into fellowship with one another. He doesn’t call us into a life of isolation, of burying our faces in the Bible and getting lost in the minute details of academic study.

Last night after I dropped off Panuncio at the POV plant, I walked in and met a new friend, David, who was not here last year but was the year before. We sat for a few minutes watching television, and then he turned to me and asked me if I was the Baptist minister. I told him I was, and we quickly got into a discussion about the bible, and the different variations … the differing interpretations that different denominations take on it. One example he raised was of a faith that has calculated that the Kingdom of God actually arrived on earth in 1914. the calculation was made based on prophecies found in the book of Daniel.

I admitted to him I wasn’t familiar with those particular prophecies or with the fact that the kingdom of God has been present on earth since 1914.

What I DID tell him was that I believe the kingdom of God is present any time a kindness is done in the name of Christ and for the love of God.

God calls us to read the Bible in the light of Christ, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

So back to that list. Do those things, yes, don’t do the other things, yes, but when you do them, follow the lead of Paul, who described it so so well in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians. (read)

Lets pray.