I had the privilege this summer to deliver the message to our congregation while our minister was away.  The following post is the first one.  I thought I would share it with my readers.  Enjoy.


This summer we will explore our senses. Today I was asked to talk about taste. I thought it would be an easy thing to talk about but I found it a very broad subject. There are five tastes bitter , sour, sweet, salty and savory. I thought perhaps I would discuss bitter versus sweet. But that is really self explanatory isn;t it? We know what it is to have a sweet life and what it is to have bitterness. We see it , we read about it perhaps we have experienced a little a of both in our lives.



In reading and preparing for this morning I thought more about my experience with food, what tastes I have come to enjoy and what tastes I am pretty sure I will never enjoy.

My culinary experience as a child was not wide ranged. I enjoyed peanut butter and jelly, mashed potatoes, pickles. Things that were crunchy but not necessarily nutritious. When I was very young we had a well meaning neighbor who dropped a dinner off for us. My mother was in the hospital so this neighbor brought over a tuna casserole. My father warmed it in the oven and scooped a pile onto my plate. Oh no, whatever that was sitting on my plate was doing things to my stomach I just didn't understand. I didn't eat it. As a parent I can now understand the frustration I am sure my father felt, being in a hurry to get to the hospital to see his wife, having two daughters who were turning their noses at a meal he was thankful he didn't have to prepare; but I held firm. WHen he dropped us at another neighbor graciously helping out, she greeted us at the door with small bags of chips. "Karen cannot have that," my father said," She didn't eat her dinner." I am sure a knowing look passed between the adults but it didn't matter. It is nearly 40 years later and I stand by that decision. So I guess you can say I was not hungry enough to enjoy what I thought would most certainly be bitter to taste.

My taste stayed simple over the years. I didn't experiment much. I didn't like strawberries for their texture and I didn't like fruit that was soft and juicy. I didn't eat tomatoes and I didn't even know what asparagus was. It wasn't until after college that I tried to be more adventurous. While living in New Jersey I met a wonderful young nurse who was from the phillipines. SHe introduced me to sushi and I never looked back. I realized how much I could be missing by not at least trying something new. When I moved to Tuscon I was introduced to Tex-Mex and a wonderful herb called cilantro. And another world opened up. Black beans and re-fried beans. The sweet , the salty and the savory! While living in MAryland a friend invited me to dinner at his home. His father, who was also from the Philipines made a chicken and rice dinner that I can still taste if I concentrate. Filled with garlic and sesame and soy sauce and not Uncle Ben's rice but a jasmine infused delight. What fun eating had become!

But I had not ventured into cooking. It seemed rather complicated. I was able to boil water and make spaghetti. I could cook some chicken and steam brocoli but to try anything fancy was beyond my scope. I had cookbooks. Betty Crocker and The Joy of Cooking. But where do you find exotic ingredients to make a recipe work? How do you prepare meat so it is tender and not tough and chewy? Cooking, it seemed was a lot of work.

It was many years later when I was a new mom. Drake was an infant. It was a cold winter and I was not used to being home with nothing in particular to do. Drake was a calm and easy baby, my how things can change, but he was and if I enjoyed shopping we could have hit every mall between here and New York. But I don't . So we got cable instead. And I discovered Food Network! I am a visual learner. Things come so much easier if I can watch it happen then copy it. In school I would read about a medical procedure but until I could see it in action it didn't make much sense and so it was with cooking! Oh the excitement of watching someone bring the food together step by glorious step! It opened my culinary curiosity. I learned to chop, saute, mince and sear. I started to describe food as creamy, succulent. I told people I was letting the flavors "marry" when I described my food preparation. I bought a fancy knife and saute pan. I discovered what a lemon could add to a recipe. I learned how to "zest" and I made fresh lemonade. What is sour when you bite it becomes sweet with a little effort.

My husband was very happy that winter. His taste buds had always been more adventurous than mine but now he was coming home to cilantro pesto pasta with shrimp, soy seared scallops and home made hot fudge. Even meatloaf became an occasion with thyme and bacon added to the recipe. Most dinners were successful. But even when they weren't he ate them. I learned that silence meant I had hit the joy button in his stomach and a polite, " This is good." really meant "you don't need to make this again" . And that is okay because it was and remains a learning process.

It was around the same time my taste buds were trying to expand and reach out to new flavors, my spiritual side was calling out. I was working for a company that sent me from hospital to hospital to fill in where there was a staffing shortage. I enjoyed the experience and with each new town I found a new church to try out. I tried Lutheran, I tried Baptist, I tried some not so traditional. Some were engaging and welcoming and some not so much. In Georgia my good friend Paula invited me to church with her, a large congregational church that was welcoming and I enjoyed it. But in all these trips to church I never onced opened a Bible. I don't know why . I guess I didn't think it was necessary. Or perhaps it just seemed too large , too omninous. I had watched The Ten Commandments with my mother when I was young. I got the general jist. I tried reading the Bible once when I was in HS and I couldn't get past the Old Testmament and all the names and who was the son of whom so I gave up.

There was no Bible Channel to bring it all to life. The visual side of me just needed someone else to bring meaning to all the words.

I have Bibles. I have several. None of them are mine. I have my grandmother's confirmation Bible given to her on her confirmation day June 1914. I have my grandfather's Bibles. And a Bible given to my mother by her grandfather. But all of these are of sentimental value, they are worn and near falling apart. So the words sit unread. In 2001 I joined a congregational church and left the work to someone else. it's like eating out, you get the benefit of someone else's knowledge and experience and you walk away with a full belly. .

This past winter I attended a Bible study a friend was hosting. On the very first morning we sat in her comfortable living room surrounded by food she had prepared . Normally I would have been asking her about her food where she got the recipes how she prepared each item but it was her Bible that had me intrigued. It was huge! So much bigger than any of my sentimental Bibles and I thought this Bible study may take longer than I thought. When I asked her about her Bible she gave me a smile filled with joy, " it has an index" she said. " A what?" An index she explained so when she wanted a Bible verse she could look up a word and find a verse that might speak to her, bring meaning or understanding in a difficult time or express the joy in her life. She handed the Bible to me and I opened it. Nirvana! It had pictures! Photographs, maps, diagrams and an index. just like you would look up peppered flank steak in your cookbook you could look up "faith", which I don't necessarily recommend unless you have lots of time to burn. I had found my cook book Bible! I had found a version of food network for my soul! I ordered the same Bible. When it came my husband flipped through it. He stopped at Mathew 6:25, his favorite verse. "Therefore I tell you do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes?" Simple , to the point and how my husband lives. Being a man who prefers a recipe with less than five ingredients, one Bible verse pretty much sums it up.

Now it didn't seem so daunting. Finding a scripture was at my fingertips. "Gracious words are a honey comb sweet to the soul and healing to the bones." It is like having hot fudge at your finger tips, okay almost like having hot fudge.

We need to feed our souls just as we feed our bodies. We have to balance the sweet and the sour in life. Life is not full of all or one. There is a CHinese proverb that says " Sour, sweet, bitter, pungent must all be tasted." And it is true. We cannot appreciate the sweetness if there is not some sour or bitter along the way.

On my husband's 40th birthday I arranged a small dinner party. I prepared tyler Florence's horseradish crusted prime rib and Rachel Ray's "you won't be single for long Vodka cream sauce", which I can tell you from personal experience is true to its title. One of our friend's who was coming for dinner asked me a week or so before when I told her what I was preparing inhaled sharply and said " aren't you nervous it won't come out right?" " I simply said no. it was hard to explain the faith I had in Tyler Florence and Rachel ray and in Pizzeria Davinci should it all go wrong. (when in doubt , order out) And so it is in the journey we take with God.

Faith is not a sprint, it's more like a marathon. Just as you wouldn't crank the oven to 500 degrees in the hopes of roasting the chicken quicker. You don't just wake up full of faith. Faith comes in bits and pieces, it comes from following the words given to us. The Bible is our cookbook for life. It gives us the words we need to be successful, to be joyful. There are more than a hundred versus with the word joy in them. I didn't know this until I had an index.

And so we don't bite the lemon just because there is a promise of lemonade. We take the time to slice, juice, zest and add sugar. We follow the recipe with patience and the reward is sweet. Julia Child said " you don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces-just good food from fresh ingredients." And that is how we can live our lives. The Bible is filled with recipes to see you through the complicated and the trying. To find a joyful life you just need to take the time, follow the instructions and the rewards will be there for you to taste.

Amen