I ate a whole can of olives the other day. Is
that bad? It doesn’t seem bad. They’re fruit, right? I’ve never heard anyone
refer to olives as fruit, but they're plants and plants are generally good for
you. They are very salty, which I think might not be good. Salt is one of those
things they used to say was good for you and they even handed out salt tablets
to athletes. But then I think they said it was bad for you and everyone was
trying to cut down on salt. But now I don’t hear so much about salt anymore. I
think its maybe bad but not as bad as, say, eating nothing but fast-food all the
time. Compared to that, eating a can of olives might even be kind of good for
you.
One would think so anyway.
I can’t keep up with this stuff, to tell you
the truth. When I eat I have to look over at my wife and say, “Is this bad for
me?” She seems to know about these things.
Take bread for example. Years ago bread was
fattening and a thing you had to watch out for. But then everyone said it was
red meat you had to avoid. Red meat would clog up your arteries. So bread wasn’t
that bad. But then suddenly they said meat was okay as long as you avoided bread
completely. And there were those diets where you ate no bread at all or anything
even remotely resembling bread.
So bread has been sometimes good and sometimes
bad for us. I don’t mean white bread, of course. I think white bread became bad
for us sometime back in the 70s and has remained bad ever since. I think it has
stayed bad the whole time. That’s okay because Jeanene got me used to wheat
bread years ago, and now white bread gives me the creeps. The way you can roll
it into little balls and it turns a kind of gray if your hands weren’t all that
clean. I never liked that about white bread, even when I was a kid, even before
it was bad for us.
Anyway, it seems to me that a guy ought to be
able to eat a can of olives and it not be all that bad for him. Not with all the
white bread and fast food and sweat shops overseas and the horrible stuff
they’re putting all over the internet.
But none of this really matters because when I
ate that can of olives, it wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it was going to
be, so I probably won’t do that again anyway.
When it comes to food, I should probably just
move my fork slowly toward things and watch Jeanene for cues. She could give me
a nod or or a wince or a strong, stern shaking of the head. Then I would know
what things are currently bad for me because, like I said, somehow she just
seems to know this stuff.
I’ll tell you another thing I can’t keep
straight is the Church. And I went to seminary and even graduated from it. I
don’t know how you non-seminary folks are keeping up with what’s good and bad in
church.
I remember when I was a kid and taking care of
your Bible was a good thing. You got a Bible for a present or something and you
wrote your name in it. And you never put things on top of it because that didn’t
show respect. And you kept that Bible for a long time because that was YOUR
Bible. You kept it for years and it would get all worn and everything, which you
were sort of proud of because it showed you were reading it.
But then there were new translations coming out
every month or so, and Bibles got cheap to buy and you can even get them in
grocery stores now. And also some people said that if you were too devoted to
one copy of the Bible it was its own kind of weird idolatry. So now people can
pretty much do whatever they want to their Bibles. Toss them around. Lose them
and just buy a new Bible. Whatever.
And I remember when all we sang in church were
hymns, except at church camp where you could sing all these other cool songs
with guitars around the campfire. And then some people started singing some of
the campfire songs right in church, which seemed okay. But then others said it
wasn’t good because those camp songs supposedly aren't as theological deep and
sound as the old hymns. But then the people who liked the camp songs said that
they are mostly made of words right out of the Bible, so you can’t exactly say
they shouldn’t be sung in church. And then the hymn people grumbled, and the
campfire people grumbled, and this is the truth - I don’t know what we should or
shouldn’t be singing in church if anything.
To be honest, I don’t think anyone knows quite
what to do in church anymore. For years church people told us that homosexuality
was evil and not just a sin but a very bad sin. They had us all scared of
homosexuals, that we might even become one or something if we were around them.
And you just assumed that the Bible was chock-full of commandments about
homosexuals and them even going to hell for being that. I mean, you just assumed
that because the church people were so sure of themselves and talked about it
like it was a fact.
But then some people started reading the Bible
very carefully, all the parts people said were about homosexuality. And some of
them said, “Oh shit! The Bible hardly says anything about homosexuality at all.
And what it does say is pretty hard to understand.” So those people said we
should just leave homosexuals alone and let them come to church and let their
relationships be between them and God, like all relationships are.
But now, see, the ones who thought
homosexuality was a really bad thing were getting tired of the changes. It
seemed like you hardly heard a hymn in church anymore, and people were dressing
sloppy on Sundays, and women were preaching, and you could hardly find a King
James Bible anywhere. So I think they just decided to dig their heels in on this
whole homosexuality thing. And it became like a religious war, and it’s
gotten so bad that even the Episcopalians are fighting over it. And that’s scary
because you expect the Baptists will make fools of themselves over stuff like
this, but we’ve always counted on the Episcopalians to keep their wits about
them and be careful and never ever allow themselves to get so divided over
something that they might actually split their church in two.
I mean, the Episcopalians can be kind of stuffy
and all, and who knows what the hell they’re doing with all the chants and
walking up and down the aisles before church and what with the banners and all
the different colors all the time. But my goodness, they’re the smartest ones of
all of us, and if they can’t figure this homosexual thing out, what hope is
there for the rest of us?
And all the while people who aren’t in the
Church are just standing there watching it all, and they have no idea what all
the fuss is about and neither do a lot of us who’ve been in the Church all of
our lives. We don’t know either.
Maybe in a few years the Church will be all
busted up and the only thing left will be people gathering in small groups here
and there, and it might not be anything like it is now.
That’s what Jesus was saying with that stuff he
said about the wineskins. How the truth about God cannot be held in old
wineskins because they will just burst. And sometimes that’s what happens with
the Church. It bursts like a dried-out wineskin and you have to find a new
wineskin.
And it’s always hard for the church people who
live in a time when the wineskins are bursting. It’s hard on that generation,
but there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing at all but just wait and try to
be as true as you can and keep your eyes open for what comes next.
rlp
Mark 2.22 - And no one puts new
wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine
is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins."
