First, there are drinks — generally juice and water — before the meal, while the food finishes cooking.

Next, everyone sits down for the main meal, which usually features meat but in a supporting role, and includes at least one good salad. For example, today there was a kind of picadillo with ground turkey and summer squash, boiled peeled potatoes, a salad with chopped tomatoes and lettuce in vinaigrette, and a salad with small-diced cucumber, mint, and cooked whole grains in vinaigrette. All were delicious.

After the meal, there’s dessert. Today was ice cream (raspberry swirl) and fruit (watermelon pieces), which is also typical.

After dessert comes coffee or tea, little cookies to nibble (today’s were homemade miniature bars with chocolate, walnuts, and marmalade over pastry), and conversation.

If one is willing to assume that all the desserts and drinks are storebought, then it’s not actually that much work: prepping the main course beforehand, making the salads and starch in the half hour before serving, and preparing hot drinks while everyone relaxes after dessert. Nor is it overly expensive, given the cheap cost of fresh produce here in Israel. The result is really lovely, though: a relaxed, extended meal with good, healthy food and congenial conversation. Honestly, it makes me wish I had more chances to be a hostess. Which is entirely up to me!

Read this, an account of an incident at the screening of “Expelled” which was linked by a friend as being hilarious (which it is . . . if it’s true).

Now read this, a retelling of the same incident from a different perspective.

When I put the two accounts together and try to reconstruct what probably happened, everyone involved looks like an idiot or a jerk. This is why I more or less try to avoid questions of evolution/creation/intelligent design/whatever as thoroughly as possible: they bring out the worst in people, allowing them to mock and denounce and foam at the mouth over something that has absolutely nothing to do with the daily lives of most of the people who get outraged about it.

(Yes, I am sensitive to issues of academic censorship and the tendency of some fields to criticize people who approach the subject matter from a different perspective. But you don’t see nationally released documentaries about the hostility of historical-critical methodology in Biblical studies to literary criticism.)

((I am aware of the mild irony of this being my first blog post in ages, given . . . everything else that’s been happening. I’ll be posting about “everything else” at some point, I imagine.))

Black rice is, as far as I can tell, a name that encompasses a few different kinds of rice, including the “forbidden rice” that’s in vogue in some stores. I bought mine for cheap at the local Chinese supermarket, but I’ve also seen it in the bulk bins at places like Whole Foods. I based the pudding on a traditional Thai rice pudding that can be eaten as breakfast or dessert; a good recipe is here, though I tweaked it a bit myself.

In the end, the results were superb. The black rice had a fragrant scent and a subtly chewy texture, the coconut milk infused it with flavor and richness, and the sweet spices rounded out the flavors without overpowering them. It had all the unctuous comfort of traditional rice pudding, with a more interesting texture and a wonderfully enticing aroma. Plus, it’s vegan and high in fiber and nutrients.

The color is amazing; it comes out a deep, velvety purple that looks like no other natural food. Sadly, I didn’t have a chance to photograph it before everyone dug in.

Thai Black Rice Pudding
(serves 10-15 as a dessert, fewer if it’s a main breakfast dish)

2 cups dry black/purple rice
2-3 cans coconut milk (13.5 oz each)
3/4-1 cup brown sugar (palm sugar or demerara would be even better!)
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp cardamom
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
toasted slivered almonds or sesame seeds (optional)

1) The night before (or several hours before), rinse the rice and soak it in lots of water.

2) Drain the rice. Put in a medium-size pot with 2 cups water, and bring to a boil. Cover, reduce to low heat, and leave it alone for 20-30 minutes, until all the water is absorbed. The rice should be tender inside but still a bit chewy on the outside.

3) Mix in 2 cans coconut milk, 3/4 cup sugar, vanilla, cardamom, salt, and nutmeg.

4) Simmer for another 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the rice is quite soft and most of the coconut milk is absorbed. If the pudding gets too thick, add more coconut milk; I used an extra half-can.

5) Taste for sweetness and mix in more sugar as necessary. Serve hot or cold, optionally sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds or slivered almonds.

A blessed Lent to all who celebrate it.

Ash Wednesday is an important day for me.

This was the first Christian liturgical holy day that I ever celebrated,

back when I was in college.

I still remember the overwhelming feeling inside me,

while I walked home afterwards.

I could feel the ashes on my forehead:

marking me for God,

and reminding me of my own need for repentance.

That day taught me the importance of embodied worship,

in a powerful and personal way.

It taught me the significance of letting our own bodies proclaim Christ.

So it’s in the context of that experience

that today’s Gospel reading seems a bit ironic.

Jesus says:

“And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites,

for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. . . .

But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face,

so that your fasting may be seen not by others

but by your Father who is in secret.”

So we just heard that passage together,

and most of us are about to receive the imposition of ashes.

And a smudged black cross on your forehead

is pretty hard to keep a secret.

So this is one of the challenges of Ash Wednesday:

harmonizing this historic practice of the church

with the exhortation of scripture.

And today, the approach I would like to take is the question of community.

Community.

We’re used to many elements of the liturgy being communal.

We recite the Nicene creed as a community:

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty.”

We make our confessions as a community:

“We confess that we have sinned against You, God.”

But in the litany of sins that we’re about to recite,

that “we” might begin to feel a little uncomfortable.

Suddenly our sins aren’t just the generic “thought, word, and deed.”

They’re painfully specific.

We’ll confess our “prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.”

We’ll repent from “our dishonesty in daily life and work.”

And I’ll be honest with you:

while I do try to be rigorous with my Ash Wednesday self-examination,

there have been parts when I’ve thought,

“Nope. I really haven’t done that particular one.”

Have you ever felt that way, too?

It’s easy to acknowledge the trivial sins we’ve committed,

like saying something rude to another driver,

when meanwhile we rest comfortably in the knowledge

that at least we haven’t committed the really bad ones.

That kind of attitude is why Jesus called those public penitents “hypocrites.”

They pretended to repent for sins,

without ever thinking that they’d done anything that bad.

But if you think that this Ash Wednesday service is harsh,

try listening to Yom Kippur,

the Jewish Day of Atonement.

In one of the key parts of the liturgy,

Jews attending the service pound their heart with their fist.

They confess to a host of sins, together.

[pound heart] Ashamnu — we have been guilty.

[pound heart] Bagadnu — we have betrayed.

[pound heart] Gazalnu — we have stolen.

[pound heart] Dibarnu Dofi — we have spoken slander.

On and on and on.

You say the confession –

“we have done this” –

whether or not you’ve stolen, or betrayed, or committed any of the other sins.

In this way, it’s like our Christian service.

The point isn’t just to think about how we messed up individually;

it’s to confess the wrongdoing of the entire people of God.

If any one of us is guilty,

then all of us are guilty as a community.

And in that light, I want to think about the ashes

that are about to be placed on our foreheads.

Those ashes are the burned remnants of last year’s Palm Sunday branches.

And that fact is a reminder to us.

On Palm Sunday,

the people of Jerusalem united as a community to welcome Jesus.

But just a few days later,

they would unite as a community to condemn him to death,

No one person was singlehandedly responsible for that death,

but it happened because of all their choices together.

And today,

we will wear the reminder of those choices.

We wear a reminder that because we, humanity, killed Christ,

each of us shares responsibility for that death.

See, our culture is oriented toward individualism:

we like to think that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,

that we alone control our world.

But responsibility is not always individual,

and some of the most terrible crimes in history can’t be pinpointed on one person.

They can be crimes as dramatic as genocide and war,

or as quiet as someone dying alone and unloved in a nursing home.

We pray about these wrongs sometimes,

asking God to help the homeless and the hungry,

but praying is easier than thinking about our own responsibility.

If any one of us is suffering unjustly,

then all of us are guilty as a community.

And it’s tempting, sometimes, to think that these issues are secular concerns.

It can be tempting to label them as problems of modern society,

far from the faith life that we think that church should address.

But that’s not the Biblical view.

The alternate Lectionary reading for Ash Wednesday comes from Isaiah 58.

You didn’t hear it read earlier,

but I’m going to read a few verses from it now.

Isaiah starts off like the gospel reading:

“You serve your own interest on your fast day,”

he says.

“Such fasting as you do today

will not make your voice heard on high.”

And what follows is so relevant to us

that I don’t need to translate it at all for the “modern audience.”

“Isn’t the fast I choose:

To break the chains of wickedness,

to untie the ropes of the yoke,

to set the oppressed free,

and to tear off every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

to bring the poor and homeless into your house,

to clothe the naked when you see them,

and to not ignore your own flesh and blood?”

The issues that Isaiah raises are still true today.

Systematic corruption and oppression of the weak.

Children going hungry while others eat to excess.

Bitterness that splits families apart.

Homelessness.

Poverty.

They’re the big problems of our world,

and Isaiah calls for us to wrestle with them.

No one of us can change them singlehandedly,

but when all of us tackle them –

young and old, women and men, just like the book of Joel says –

then our fasting and repentance can really be meaningful.

So where does that lead us?

My purpose today isn’t just to give you a big guilt trip.

I don’t want you to go home,

feel miserable for a few hours,

and go on with your life.

Repentance isn’t just about low self-esteem.

Joel makes it clear that the fundamental core of repentance

is the return.

“Yet even now, says the LORD,

return to me with all your heart,

with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

rend your hearts and not your clothing.”

All the fasting and weeping and mourning are just the surface layer.

They’re outward evidence of our hearts being broken with regret.

The really important thing is the return.

What Jesus didn’t see in those hypocrites –

and what Jesus wants to see in us –

is the return.

So as we enter into this season of Lent,

and as we enter into this litany of penitence,

I want to invite you to read these words from a different perspective.

Not just “how have I exploited others”,

but “whom do we, as a community, allow to be exploited.”

Not just “how have I showed a lack of concern for those who come after me,”

but “when have we, as a community,

ignored the future repercussions of our behavior.”

Not just “how have I been been prejudiced against those who are different,”

but “how have we, as a community,

reinforced the divisions that label some people as less valuable than others.”

And then –

knowing the full magnitude of our own sins,

the sins of individuals and of a community –

I invite you to listen.

How is God calling you to repent from those sins and rebuild what was broken?

How is God calling us to repent and rebuild,

and what place do you have in that movement of the body of Christ?

And finally,

I invite you to approach this painful, difficult, and dangerous task

with a spirit of hope.

Because the Easter hope that sustains us

is that God pairs every challenge with a promise.

The failed challenge of the old law

paved the way for Jesus’s promise of undeserved redemption.

And the Lenten challenge of reflection, repentance, return, and rebuilding

paves the way for a promise as well.

The promise is that when we do return in repentance for our sins,

then we can once again join God in building the Kingdom of Heaven.

And then, Isaiah says,

“our light will shine in the darkness,

and our night will be like noonday.

We will rebuild the ancient ruins;

we will restore the foundations laid long ago;

we will be called the repairers of broken walls,

the restorers of streets where people live.”

There are many broken walls in our community.

There are many streets where people are afraid to live.

So in humility, let us come before God in penitence,

asking to be shown the way to restoration.

Let us pray.

Oh Lord, the God Who Sees,

we ask that you see and hear our prayers of repentance today.

Grant that the ashes on our forehead would be a sign of penitence,

not of pride.

Give us eyes to see those wrong actions we have committed,

as individuals

and as a community.

We come before you knowing the seriousness of our sins,

but trusting in the hope of your forgiveness.

In Christ’s name,

Amen.

Back? Good. So, before heading to class this morning, I read that, and naturally I had to go listen to the song. However, I was already running late for class, so I had to shut my laptop halfway through the song and head off. I’ve done this many times before, as my computer generally takes the “sleep” command to include a “pause” command, and doesn’t restart songs or movies automatically when I open up the computer.

I went to class. I arrived late, as the professor was already talking. I opened my computer. And the song started to play. I quickly slammed shut the laptop to get it back to sleep, but it wouldn’t stop playing. With the computer completely closed and supposedly shut down, it still kept playing, all the way to the end of the song, and I couldn’t do anything except blush profusely and apologize.

Afterwards, a guy from the class walked up to me. “Portal, right?” I blushed again and nodded, then asked if he’d read xkcd. “Yeah, I just did,” he said. “There aren’t that many xkcd fans here.”

I smiled, then. “It’s true.”

• Semester ended, with all my work turned in on time. (!!!)

• Flew to Israel. Celebrated Christmas in Haifa at an Arab Anglican church. Actually a really lovely service.
• Got quite ill with sinusitis, and thus was grumpy, sick, and/or in bed for most of the next week and a half, while the family visited Beer Sheva, Jerusalem, and the West Bank.
• Returned to Haifa, got antibiotics, and largely recovered.
• Had foodie adventures, including a wonderful co-op at a local kibbutz (8 kinds of dates! amazing blends of spices! local honey!) and a fabulous Moroccan restaurant.
• Flew home. Possibly caught another cold from the jerk next to me who wouldn’t turn off his cell phone while the plane was moving.
• Started classes. Lots and lots of original languages this semester, it looks like.

One day, between Christmas and New Year’s, we were driving by the Sea of Galilee just before sunset. The sky glowed in shades of rose and peach and gold. An enormous flock of little birds, silhouetted in black, flew over the water — swooping upward then falling downward, fluttering about playfully while remaining a cohesive whole. As I watched them, I thought about Matthew 10:29, the promise that God watches and remembers each sparrow’s fall. I usually visualize it as a single sparrow, but in that moment, watching all the birds together, I shivered at the thought of God watching every flicker of those hundreds of wings.

Happy new year.

But for now, I only have one specific thought: I don’t know how I got by without Amazon “Look Inside.” It’s like Google Books, only much more comprehensive for modern books, and it allows me to search for keywords anywhere in the book. Which is pretty invaluable, or at least an amazing time-saver, when writing papers. You need the physical book as well, of course, but the combination of the two makes it so swift and easy to hunt down half-forgotten quotes or passages.

Mmmmm, technology.

Many of you may have heard of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old girl who killed herself after her “online boyfriend” — actually the mother of a slighted friend — wooed her and then spurned her, saying “The world would be a better place without you.”

We know the name (and address, and workplace) of the woman who incited her death, but faces no criminal charges, because bloggers uncovered it. In fact, the blogging world has blasted a near-unanimous burst of fury against her. For some examples, read the post where her identity was first uncovered.

Read through the comments, if you like. Here are some typical examples:

“I seriously hope Lori Drew kills herself . . . Good riddance to bad effing trash.”

“If I was Megan’s father I would’ve put a bullet in her head. This is a sickening story. How dare LORI DREW, A KILLER not even have an ounce of remorse.”

“Some anonymous douche said ‘Do you want to drive this woman to suicide as well? Would that be fitting?’ Yes. Actually, it would be VERY fitting. And I highly doubt that any of us on here would feel any sympathy for the poor wittle witch who’d driven a little girl to suicide ON PURPOSE and WITHOUT REMORSE.”

Maybe I’m overreacting; I spent much of the day reading and talking about Civil War rhetoric, in which supposed moral and religious leadership sanctioned cold-blooded slaughter because they were so convinced that they were the right side. Well, some of them were. Slavery was a terrible wrong, just like Lori Drew committed a terrible wrong.

But that doesn’t mean that we can adopt the exact same tactics. And the fact that so many people see absolutely no contradiction in inciting the death of a woman because she incited someone else’s death . . . it makes me shudder.

This is how the church went astray, how it so often goes astray even now. We forget that the law of love governs all of our lives, and that even while we work for justice and righteousness, we need to constantly question whether each action fits within that law.

As is so often the case, the historic peace churches provide some of the best lived examples here. After the shooting in an Amish school that left five girls dead, the response from the grieving community was simple. “The Amish neighbor came that very night, around 9 o’clock in the evening, and offered forgiveness to the family [of the shooter].”

Today, I took the dough and pressed it out on a parchment paper-covered cookie sheet, shaping a rough circle with a rim around the edge. Meanwhile, I sliced a red onion into thin slivers, sauteed it in rendered turkey fat* until it was soft and starting to caramelize, and added thin slices of bell pepper to sautee until they were tender. I covered the crust with sliced sharp cheddar, piled the bell pepper and onion on top, and sprinkled it generously with salt, pepper, rosemary, and thyme. Then into a 400 degree oven it went, until the cheese was melted, the peppers were beginning to crisp and brown, and the crust had turned a lovely golden-brown.

The result: savory, flavorful, gooey, crumbly perfection. Butter pastry dough really is a lovely thing. Next time, I must remember to photograph it before it gets devoured . . .

* – I am perhaps old-fashioned in this, but I love saving animal fat, on the infrequent occasions when I cook meat. It can be substituted for oil or butter for sauteeing vegetables, making a roux, browning lean meats, etc. Bacon/sausage fat adds smokey richness, and poultry fat (chicken, turkey, duck) adds a tantalizing savory flavor to any dish. It saves money, and you can get a surprising amount of it from a whole bird. I tend to toss all the scraps from a roast bird (bones, skin, fat, drippings, etc.) into a big pot with some water and chunks of onion and celery, simmer it for a few hours to get a good rich stock, then save the fat that rises to the top of the stock when it’s chilled.

1) Put all the ingredients in a largish pot.

2) Boil over medium heat, stirring occasionally to keep the bottom from burning, until the berries have all burst and the liquid is thickened. This will probably take 20 minutes or so.

3) Taste for sweetness, and add more sugar if necessary. Once the sugar dissolves, cool and refrigerate.