Bland

I'm going to date myself pretty hard here, but I tend to like to refer back to the Matrix as a pretty hot cultural reference.  I think that it's pretty up to date.  It isn't, mind you.  The Matrix was a long long time ago now, so long ago that we are dealing with flip phones as a pretty neat thing.  Now, if you haven't seen the film lately, you can be forgiven for not remembering the issue of tasty wheat.  Tasty wheat is a way of talking about food in the Matrix, a food that they all ate while in the simulation, but not outside it, obviously.  And they talk about all the various kinds of foods that they ate in the simulation, and what they tasted like, all the while eating the slop that they have to eat now, given that there is nothing left for them to consume.  All they have is the sort of amino acid, single cell protein thing that they can eat which has everything the body needs except flavour.

Now, I bring this up partially because I still feel as thoug the Matrix is a fresh happening film, but secondly because it reminds me of eating hospital food forever.  If you know hospital food, you'll know that it has one major thing about it that overshadows everything else, and that is that nobody likes it.  There are some exceptions, but pretty much everyone else is opposed to hospital chow, and all for the same reason.  Now, as you may know, I like spicy hot food, my wife likes sweet foods, the
kids enjoy mac and cheese, that's all good, and you can all pretty well find people who will fall in line with any of those tastes, some more than others.  Some people like salty snacks, some people like sweet snacks, all that stuff, but there is pretty much nobody who likes bland snacks.

And there's the rub.

The reason that even globally almost nobody likes hospital food is because of its inherent blandness.  There's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing right with it either.  It's  designed to be as inoffensive as possible, but that's its fatal flaw.  There's nothing in there to like.  There's nothing in this kind of food for anyone to like, so even though it's inoffensive, there's nothing there to set people on fire either.

Now, you can understand the reason for the Hospital to do this, because they have a lot of people to feed in a given day, and feeding them is going to be a big project, a big job, and you can't make food that will fit the tastes of all the people all the time.  So given that you can't meet those needs, then the next best thing you can do is to make the entire thing super duper bland, so that it never affects anyone negatively.  Now, my goodness, that works for the hospital because you're only going to be there for about three days, but we have a desire to do this with a bunch of things, including but not limited to the Gospel as well.  With the Gospel, you have something that you're trying to bring to the entire world, to an entire collection of people who aren't on the same page, and in doing so, you're going to end up with an issue where you are going to try to 'hospital food' the Gospel.  That is, you know that not everyone is in the same space about everything, and so we want to file off all the rough edges, sand them down, and make the pill a little less jagged, and a lot easier to swallow.

This desire is what drove St. Peter, when he went to go and bring the Gospel to the Jews.  This was his province, and in going out to those people who were keeping kosher, keeping the sabbath, all that, he wanted to make Jesus and his gospel as soft a landing as he possibly could.  And so, when he approached the Jews, he told them that since they had been keeping kosher this whole time, and they thought that it was important to keep kosher, then it was absolutely a requirement of the Christian faith to keep Kosher.  And to be circumcized.  And to keep the sabbath.  And basically to be fully and completely Jewish.  I can get what Peter wanted to do, he wanted to make the Gospel as easy to hear and to understand as possible, but in doing so, he empited it of what it was all about.  What makes Jesus so important, obviously, is his fulfilling of the law, and his accomplishing all things perfectly, thus being the full and complete sacrifice for our sins.  In doing so, he freed his people from the burden of keeping kosher, and of being bound to all the Old Covenant laws.  But Peter, for all his good intentions, was essentially telling the good people of the New Testament that what was most important was for them to keep doing what they were doing, and not to change anything.

And that's our approach these days too.  When we bring the Gospel message out to the world, we are keen to say to the audience that they should keep on doing whatever they're doing, and faith in Christ is something that just sort of slots in around where you already are.  Though this is well intentioned, it falls down on the problem that Christ our Lord, he has come to change people.  He has come to make us perfect as our heavenly father is perfect.

That brings us to the problem of the Good Shepherd.  The central problem and conundrum of the Good Shepherd is that he exists to tend sheep.  That's what he's all about.  He came to call his sheep by name, to bring them into his fold, to cherish them with his love, and to guide them always.  And why do the sheep need this?  Because sheep are notoriously bad at making good decisions, and will tend to wander far far way from safety.  They'll follow each other, even into danger, because they need to follow something.  They crave it.  On their own, they are defenseless in the face of a cruel
and uncaring world.  That's the major problem that faces us as sheep, you know.  The fact when we end up in troubles, it's almost always because we have made decision that have brought us into those difficulties.  We are the architects of our own disaster, we are the masters of our own destiny, and we tend to follow each other to destruction, into dreadful decisions and situations that hurt us and damage us, because we are prone to wander, and we can't take care of ourselves.

Nobody wants to hear that about themselves.  Nobody wants to think of themselves as sheep, as herd animals that wander all over the place.  We all want to think of ourselves as being bold and confident, as being people who can figure our lives out, who can wander away from the shepherd, and follow other sheep, because they know where they're going, right?  And somehow, we are perpeturally surprised when we wander into the jaws of waiting wolves.  What good does it do to tell someone to keep on going the way they're going, to not change a thing, if they're moving rapidly towards complete destruction and ruin?

Well, here we are.  Here we are, and we are moving towards the truth of the Gospel, and that's what Paul brings forth in the reading from Acts from Sunday.  He says quite clearly that he is interested in not shrinking from the full Gospel, not hiding from what it actually says, but in bringing it forward in its fullness.  I know it's tempting to bring the Gospel to people as though it doesn't say what it says, to tell them that it doesn't matter if they sue each other, or if they hate their neighbors who were asking for it anyway; we want to tell people that it doesn't matter if they live their lives in sullen anger and fear, as long as they add Jesus as a rider at the end of that, then it's all good.

But it isn't. The fullness of the Gospel tells us that we are sheep, and we are in need of a shepherd.  It tells us that we have wandered far away from where we know we should be. It tells us that we are likely the authors of our own destruction, and that we will perpetually follow those who seem to know where they're going even though they're no smarter than us.  It tells us that we're a long way away from being perfect, and that we hurt others by what we do.

In other words, it tells us the truth.

So what we need to do more of is to be in the business not of conforming Christ to people, but in conforming people to Christ.  I talked about the tasteless hospital food right off the hop, and it's worth considering here once again - that what we find is if we make the Gospel message bland and palatable for everyone, it will be loved and cherished by nobody.  The Gospel fullness, that we are weak sinners who need salvation, that we are people who require help and aid, that Gospel message is one that if you present it to people, they may not believe it, but they ought to at least see in it something worth believing.  They may look at it and wish they believed.

And that's the beginning of faith. The barrier that a great number of people have is that they've been given a version of the faith that says nothing whatsoever, that cannot move them, tastes like nothing, and that they spit out because it is neither hot nor cold.  We ought not be surprised that people reject this crude image of Christian faith, but it is up to us to replace it with what the Christian faith actually is. 


“It is the dogma that is the drama -- not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death -- but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?: Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster