PROCESSED FAITH

American cheese is very un-American. Yes you read that correctly, American cheese is about as un-American as you can get. America is the land of opportunity; it’s the land of self starters with original ideas. America has even been called the “great experiment.” What is the experiment? Can you put a whole bunch of people from different races, backgrounds, and beliefs together in one place and have them get along and actually be successful? Although we have had our share of bumps along the road, I think we would have to say that so far the experiment has been producing good results. One thing about America is that it has never been boring; it has never been a copy of something else. That is why American cheese is un-American. If you were to read up on your cheeses you would find that of all the major cheeses that we consume, American cheese is the only one that is processed, some would say it isn’t even a real cheese; it’s made in a factory. It is complete and utter garbage in my opinion. I love cheeseburgers but the cheese has to be something else than American cheese. I personally think the name should be changed because it is so bad it is an insult to our great country. It is unoriginal, boring and bad for your health. American cheese though is just a symptom of a larger problem, and that is processed foods.
When I refer to processed foods here I am talking about how industry takes natural good foods and puts in additives and preservatives to make the product look better and give it a longer shelf life. Processed foods do provide convenience and if you are in the middle of nowhere it does help the food last longer. The problem though is that is destroys the true taste of the food, and it puts chemicals in your body that medical research has shown to be harmful to you. Processed foods also contain a lot of salt and fats to make up for the loss of taste in the pure product, hence the obesity problem in America and the rise of diabetes. The biggest problem though in my opinion is not the health issue; everybody is going to die of something some day whether it is processed food or stepping in front of a bus. No the biggest problem with processed food is that it is boring and unoriginal, two cardinal sins in my book. This boring and unoriginal processed movement has taken over just about everything, from the supermarket to a lot of so called restaurants. Many restaurants today do not make their own food, they just mix together some ingredients they got out of cans at Costco and then heat them up and serve them to you as if they made it. All I can say is boring! My purpose here though is not to take on the processed food market but to talk about another thing that is sometimes processed, and that is our lives.
In particular I am addressing our spiritual lives. The basis of our spiritual lives as Christians is the Word of God and nothing else. The Bible is the Word of God in its pure form without any additives or preservatives or other stuff to make it taste or look better. From the Bible we get God’s grace and love and forgiveness and salvation through the Gospel. We also get all of our doctrine that teaches about who God is and what he has done for us and how he expects us to live in response to that. Doctrine is extremely important but it needs to be doctrine that is drawn from the pure Scriptures. Unfortunately people want to process the Word of God to make it look better to people, to keep people coming back to hear it and they want to add stuff to it thinking it will go down a little easier with people in our world. There is a huge demand for this so there are many out there willing to provide it. The original food, the Bible gets thrown to the side.
What do I mean by this? People have always wanted to modify what Scripture says because they are afraid that it might offend people, so they change the word to fit what sounds good to most people. They take out the things it says about sins that we like or lifestyles that are popular. People also like to add things to the word and make it address issues that it doesn’t like politics or bizarrely enough, what you should eat. The result is a processed faith that doesn’t resemble what the Bible teaches at all and gets in the way of providing the necessary spiritual nourishment that we need. One of the biggest culprits of this movement, although certainly not the only one, has been the modern Christian bookstore which at this time is by and large going out of business thankfully. It has provided books to Christians written by athletes and business people who teach their philosophy and lifestyle instead of what Scripture teaches. It has also provided the jewelry and t-shirts and other stuff that Christians are told that a good believer should wear. They have also been the leading promoters of pre-formatted one size fits all church programs. Just buy our DVD and you don’t have to read the Bible, we will tell you what to think.

The result has been disastrous. Cookie cutter Christians who dress alike, vote alike and quote their favorite authors and teachers more than they quote the Bible. It has also produced churches which have nothing original about them, they are just knocks offs of another popular church in another city. It is the spiritual version of obesity and diabetes. This processed Christianity is killing the church in America. So maybe it’s time to get rid of the all the additives and preservatives and go back to the original source. My family has slowly been making the transition from processed foods to fresh ingredients. As we have made that transition we have been pleasantly surprised to find that the food tastes better, we don’t eat as much and we feel better. Our taste buds have also been revived and we are experiencing new things in natural flavors. We rarely eat at fast food restaurants and have stopped eating at some other restaurants after we discovered that they were just heating things up. It’s time to do the same with our spiritual lives. It is time to go back to the Bible alone. When we do we will find that there is no Christian look, there are no Christian politics, and no Christian food among other things. It is time to stop consuming processed Christianity. It is time to stop doctoring the Bible to make it less offensive or more inviting and just let it speak for itself. When you do you will find that you will be closer to God and you will experience him in ways that you never imagined.

THE HABOOB FROM HELL

Throughout the years of living and traveling throughout the country I have experienced some very interesting weather. A week or so ago though we had a storm here in Phoenix that some people have called a hundred year storm, meaning you only get one like that every hundred years or so. The city of Phoenix basically lies in a bowl in the middle of the desert. Most of the time that just means we get some really hot days like 115 to 118 in the summer. Phoenix is basically known as a hot and dry place which is it is most of the time. I say most of the time because we have a thing here called the monsoon season. Now when I think of monsoons I think of Southeast Asia and places like that, but certainly not the hot dry desert of Arizona. So I was surprised when I moved here and found out about it. Now admittedly our monsoon season is nothing like those in other wet places in the world where it rains for days and weeks on end. Our monsoons come out of nowhere packed with rain that falls for 5 minutes or so and then is followed by a huge wind bringing dust and dirt. Usually the whole event takes 15 minutes and then you go outside and start to clean up the mess it left. These dust storms are called haboobs. The one we had a week or so ago though was the Haboobs of all haboobs. When it arrived it was daylight and the sun was brightly shining. I live in the very southeast corner of Phoenix bordering the city of Chandler so my house was one of the first ones hit. My neighbor took pictures of it coming and they are amazing. At 7:23 you see it looming in the background of a beautiful sunny day with everything at peace. One minute later it is looming over my house like an angry monster looking to devour everything. One minute after that the sunny day has become pitch black the trees bowing in the wind and things flying through the air, absolutely terrifying. The storm went on for over an hour without letting up. The aftermath thankfully to my house was just a lot of dirt and dust everywhere. In other places there were trees down, power lines taken out and people without electricity. Overall for such a monstrous storm it did very little damage. The images of the storm though are other worldly. I spent that storm in my office working and watched it at times through the front windows of the church.
Yesterday we had another haboob, this one not near as bad. I was home and saw it coming and took several pictures which I posted on Facebook. Although it was a minor storm compared to the monster it was ominous watching it come. Here is my best description of it. The sun is shining and then you start to see a brown cloud in the distance. You walk outside and realize it’s not a cloud but a haboob. As you are watching you realize that it is taking in everything. You look to the right and to the left and it takes up your whole view. Suddenly the wind picks up, and your phone rings and it's someone you know telling you to be prepared that a haboob is on the way. You say, “Yeah I know, I’m watching it.” By this time the cloud seems to be right in front of you and the palm trees are bending and the dust is starting to fly, so you step back into your house and watch it through the glass. In ten minutes, it’s gone. It’s an amazing thing to watch, exciting and yet terrifying at the same time. Watching the one yesterday got me to thinking though. Is this how the end of the world is going to be like? Many people in the last few weeks have told me they have also thought about that. It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer of course. I do know from what Scripture says that one day the end is going to come.
As a Lutheran I don’t subscribe to a rapture or to anything everyone read in the Left Behind series of books that came out many years ago. Although I will have to say unlike so many of my fundamentalist friends who do hold to those teachings I actually read all of the books of the Left Behind series. I found them poorly written and a horrible twisting of Scripture, but I gutted it out and read the whole series just so I could tell my fundamentalist friends that I had read the whole thing when they hadn’t, so there! Actually I love my fundy friends and look forward to spending eternity with them in heaven, where I will jokingly keep pointing out how wrong they were. As a Lutheran I believe that Scripture teaches that Jesus will come back someday, I don’t know when and neither does anyone else, and the end of the world will happen. Scripture tells us it will come when we least expect it and it will be sudden. Jesus even told the people to look up when the end came because their redemption was drawing near. I thought about that as I looked up at the haboob the other day. Is this how the end is going to come, with Jesus in the front of a storm gobbling up everything? That would certainly be a scary sight. And yet from what I read in the Bible I am not afraid of the end of the world. No believer in Christ should ever be afraid of the end of the world; it just means we are going home to be with God. So many church leaders though try to scare people with this, they write books, do movies that lead people to fear the end. As a believer in Christ I look forward to the end, I know where I am going because of Christ’s death and resurrection. I once said in a sermon that to try to scare a Christian with the end of the world is like trying to scare an overworked guy with the fact that vacation might be coming next week.
I don’t like the Haboobs we experience here because they are a pain to clean up after, so the fewer of them the better. At the same time I look forward with great anticipation to the final great Haboob that Jesus will bring. In the words of John from the book of Revelation, “Amen, come Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.”

FINALLY A GOOD USE FOR CHURCH PEWS

From the last entry in my blog you know I am a foodie. I love to cook, I love to read about cooking and I love to watch others cook. I recently found a restaurant that makes a dish that brings back old childhood memories. I grew up on pasties. Pasties basically consist of pie type dough filled with things like meat and potatoes and some root vegetables. My mom grew up in Butte Montana where pasties are famous as the food that miners took into the mines with them. They kept well and they tasted good. My mom made them all the time when I was growing up. I thought everyone ate them so I was surprised after I left home that nobody seemed to know what a pasty was. Therefore I have always longed for pasties. I have even learned how to make them myself. When I found out that there was an authentic pasty place in Mesa well I had to go. I was not disappointed. They have taken the basic pasty and have found ways to come up with a variety of different favored ones.
I love this new place called The Pasty Company for a number of reasons. First it makes great pasties. They have the basic Oggie which is steak and potatoes, onions and root vegetables. I personally like the Lamb and mint which has lamb, potatoes, rutabaga, onion and fresh mint with a side of wine gravy. They also have Bangers and Mash. Secondly it reminds me of many of the pubs I spent time in when I lived in England. You can get Strongbow Cider, Franziskaner Hefe and even Oak Creek Nut Brown Ale from Sedona. Thirdly, well it has spunk, a little bit of rebelliousness with a tongue in cheek attitude about it. For instance since the owners are from Northern England you can get Car Bombs as a drink for 3$ or Skull Splitter Ale. Not to mention that happy hour is from 3 to 6 and 10 to close everyday and its happy hour all day on Sunday. How can you beat that? I have joked to my wife though that if we are going to keep coming here we are both going to have to get tattoos and some nose piercings to fit in better. The entire staff looks to all be in their twenties. They are all tattooed, pierced and have various shades of hair coloring and at first glance a hardness to them. You soon discover though that they are also very cheerful and warm to their customers. But there is an edge here and it is in the customers as well who are an assortment of people, many looking just like the staff, and still others from various walks of society, but there are no suits here, no ties. If you’re going to come here you better leave that at home. I love this place so much that I thought about writing Guy Fieri about it so that maybe he could come out with his Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives team and do a show on them. But then I realized this is not a Guy Fieri place. In fact if Guy were to walk through the door with his phony spiked white hair and sunglasses and over the top attitude he would soon be grabbed by the ear and shown out the other door and told to get lost. And it probably wouldn’t be the male six-four bartender doing the honors but the close to six foot female waitress wearing a t-shirt with some band’s name on it that no one over thirty has ever heard of. No this isn’t Guy’s place; no this is the land of Anthony Bourdain of No Reservations fame. Anthony would be loved here, he would be invited into the kitchen here, this is his type of place from the tattooed waitress to the Church pews for seating.
Yeah that’s right I said church pews for seating. The first time my wife pointed that to me I responded well finally someone has found a good use for church pews. Anyone who has spent anytime around me knows I hate church pews, at least in churches. I have led worship in a multipurpose room that looks nothing like a church for eleven years now and have enjoyed it. I am not a fan of the traditional church building. I figure why spend money on something you are only going to use a few hours on Sunday when you can spend money building something you will use all week. I really don’t have a good reason for my disdain, except well, other people’s attachment to these things. I grew up in a traditional church setting and I like most things about the traditions of the church. They provide stability and they keep things constant. The traditions also carry with them good practices that have endured hundreds even thousands of years now. I like things like times of prayer and good order and flow in the worship service. I am not against tradition in the least. I guess you could say I just have a problem with furniture. Well it is more than that. I have a problem with any tradition that has outlived its usefulness but people still keep demanding that it be kept because, well that is the way we have always done it. I have found that most church people have no idea for instance why we have pews, why we have flowers on the altar, why we have altar rails, why we have stained glass, why we have altars, or eternal lights. They could not tell you why those things exist, but if you tried taking them away they would throw a fit because it would be change.
Maybe that is why I like the Pasty Company, they are very traditional and yet living outside the box. Notice I didn’t say thinking. They are not just thinking outside the box, they are living outside the box. There is a big difference. They are making the traditional pasty and serving traditional English food, but they are doing it their way. They have invented new recipes; they have challenged the status quo. Most of all they are having fun serving food that I remember when I was kid. It’s a taste of my childhood with a twist. Jesus himself was a bit of an Anthony Bourdain. He spent a lot of time hanging out with the Pasty Company crowd and he loved them, and they loved him. Jesus was not concerned about furniture or a steeple, he was concerned about people. I think he would laughed at the church pews as well. Jesus isn’t concerned about what you are sitting on when he is talking as long as you are listening. Jesus interestingly enough provided meals many times with his preaching, and did much of teaching between bites as he was eating with the people. Maybe we should build a restaurant like the Pasty Company to have Church services in, but then I would want to get rid of the church pews.

Pastor Fred

OF PICTURE BOOKS AND STAINED GLASS WINDOWS

My six year old son was looking through a book the other day entitled 100 Bible stories. It’s a book put out by Concordia Publishing House that in short form tells 100 of the most important Bible stories from both the Old and New Testaments. It usually has the story on one page and then on the next page is a picture of what is going on in the story. My son can’t read yet but he seems to understand the stories by simply looking at the picture, so kudos to CPH for the great artwork. The other day he came up to me and showed me the story of the fall in the Garden of Eden. He said to me, “God is mad.” I asked him how he knew. He said because Adam and Eve had sinned. He had gotten the whole story from the simple picture. He then proceeded to show me other pictures and tell me the stories that went along with them. I have to say I was pretty amazed. I guess I shouldn’t be that amazed though, telling stories by pictures is part of church history that gets largely ignored today. All you have to do is look at some stained glass windows to see it. Or I guess I should say you have to look at some old stained glass windows to see it. Most stained glass windows today are just some coloring and maybe some flowers or butterflies mixed in. They basically serve the purpose of changing the lighting in the church and making some feel like they are, well, in church. Old stained glass on the other hand told stories. They contained pictures of the Biblical stories that were very vivid. There was a reason for this most of people hundreds of years ago couldn’t read. They received the Word of God two ways, one through hearing it read and preached to them and two through the stained glass windows that they looked at during the church service. In those ancient stained glass windows they saw both the law of God and most importantly the Gospel of God. They saw their salvation in pictures every time they were in the church. It seems that people in the church never got tired of that, stained glass was a constant thing in just about every church that was built for hundreds of years. People were comforted looking at those pictures Sunday after Sunday. I don’t know for certain what lead to stain glass’s demise or the change of it into just different colors with worthless symbols in it, but I would venture to say it had to do with more and more people learning to read. It wasn’t needed as much anymore. Thankfully we still have picture books for kids.
Picture books for non-readers serve the same purpose. My son can’t read so he gets the Word of God one of two ways. He hears it read to him either in church or at home and he has books with pictures which he carries around with him. Like the people with their stained glass he never gets tired of it. One of the stories my son always goes to in his book is the death of Jesus on the cross. The cross is very important to him. He asks me all the time why Jesus died on the cross. I tell him a few different things. Number one I tell him because we are sinners Jesus had to die to pay for our sins. He struggles with that a little, so sometimes I just tell him because Jesus loves him, but still he continues to ask me. Like most people, I don’t like being asked the same question over and over again, so at first it bothered me that he asked me the cross question so much but then I began to slowly realize he likes hearing that Jesus loves him. He takes comfort in that fact that Jesus went to the cross for him. He likes looking at the picture, he likes hearing me tell him the same story of God’s love over and over again. Really he is like all of us. We like hearing that same story over and over again. It is why we read our Bibles; it is why we come to church. We need to hear that we are sinners in need of forgiveness, but more than that we need to hear that we are forgiven and loved by God. We need to hear that story of the cross and of the resurrection over and over again. It just never gets old. It never gets old because it is so important to us as people who one day are going to die and see our God. We like the story, because it’s a good story and it has a happy ending. Thank God for old stained glass and picture books.