August 22nd, 2010
Thanks to everyone who made a financial contribution to St. Lydia’s in the last few weeks in an effort to help us close our summer gap. I am pleased to announce that we surpassed our goal, raising $3,176 big ones. We’ll finish our year strong thanks to your contributions,
If you are interested in making a gift, it’s not too late. Our budget for the 2010-2011 year is a little over $31,000, and we’ll be fund raising all year. We’re building St. Lydia’s together; click the yellow button on the right to donate.
Thank you!
August 19th, 2010
Adapted from Everyday Food
Serves 6
12 large eggs
Coarse salt and ground pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 red bell pepper, ribs and seeds removed, thinly sliced
1 green bell pepper, ribs and seeds removed, thinly sliced
1 medium red onion, halved and thinly sliced
2 ounces sharp cheddar cheese, shredded (1/2 cup)
2 ounces pepperjack cheese, shredded (1/2 cup)
The smallest can of chipotles in adobo you can find
1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Remove one chipotle pepper from can and
mince finely. In a medium bowl, whisk eggs with 1/2 teaspoon salt and
1/4 teaspoon pepper; add minced chipotle and set aside.
2. In a skillet, heat In a 10-inch nonstick skillet with a
tight-fitting lid, heat oil over medium-high. Add bell peppers, onion
and a little adobo sauce (optional: this will make it more spicy);
season with salt to taste. Cook, stirring frequently, until softened,
6 to 8 minutes.
3. Grease an 8×8 or 7×11 baking dish liberally. Place cooked peppers
and onions in the bottom, top with most of cheese. Add eggs and place
dish in oven. After ten minutes, remove and top with remaining cheese.
4. Allow to cook until center is no longer jiggly, about 30 minutes.
If edges get too brown, shield them with aluminum foil, leaving center
of dish uncovered. Slice and serve with salsa, black beans, tortillas,
and/or salad.
Note: Chipotle and adobo are both very strong and very spicy. If you
are hesitant about spice, do not add any adobo to the pepper/onion
mixture, and perhaps don’t use an entire chipotle pepper in the eggs.
It’s also advisable to wear gloves when handling the chipotle. If
that’s not an option, wash your hands thoroughly and often, and don’t
touch your eyes for the rest of the night.
Another note: If you want to make this on your stovetop, you can. Make
sure you have a lid that fits tightly on your skillet and, once your
veggies are soft, add the eggs. Cook, stirring with a heat-proof
spatula or wooden spoon, for about a minute until eggs start to
thicken. Sprinkle cheese on top, cover, reduce heat to medium-low.
Cook for 15 minutes. Allow to stand off heat, covered, for five
minutes before serving.
August 19th, 2010
by Scott Cairns
In the midst of His long and silent observation of eternal presence, during which He, now and again, would find His own attention spiraling in that abysmal soup, God draws up what He will call His voice from that unfathomable slumber where it lay in that great, sepulchral Throat and out from Him, in what would thereafter be witnessed as a gesture of pouring, falls the Word, as a bright, translucent gem among primal turbulence, still spinning. Think this is evening? Well, that was night. And born into that turmoil so bright or so dark as to render all points moot, God’s pronouncement and first measure.
But before even that original issue, first utterance of our Great Solitary, His self-demarcation of Himself, before even that first birth I suspect an inclination. In God’s center, something of a murmur, pre-verbal, pre-phenomenal, perhaps nothing more disturbing to the moment than a silent clearing of the hollowed throat, an approach merely, but it was a willingness for something standing out apart from Him, if nonetheless His own.
Still, by the time anything so weakly theatrical as that has occurred, already so many invisible preparations: God’s general availability, His brooding peckishness, an appetite and predilection–even before invention–to invent, to give vent, an all but unsuspected longing for desire followed by the eventual arrival of desire’s deep hum, its thrumming escalation and upward flight into the dome’s aperture, already open and voluble and without warning giving voice.
But how long, and without benefit of Time’s secretarial skills, had that Visage lain facing in our direction? What hunger must have built before the last repast? And, we might ask, to what end, if any? And if any end, why begin? (The imagination’s tedious mimesis of the sea.) In the incommensurate cathedral of Himself, what stillness?
What extreme expression could prevail against that self-same weight? And would such, then, be approximate to trinity? An organization, say, like this: The Enormity, Its Aspirations, Its Voice. Forever God and the mind of God in wordless discourse until that first polarity divests a shout against the void. Perhaps it is that first resounding measure which lays foundation for every flowing utterance to come. It would appear to us, I suppose, as a chaos of waters–and everything since proceeding from the merest drop of it.
So long as we have come this far, we may as well continue onto God’s initial venture, His first concession at that locus out of time when He invited the absence of Himself, which first retraction avails for all the cosmos and for us. In the very midst of His unending wholeness He withdraws, and a portion of what He was He abdicates. We may suppose our entire aberration to proceed from that dislocated Hand, and may suppose the terror we suspect–which lingers if only to discourage too long an entertainment–to be trace and resonance of that self-inflicted wound.
So why the vertiginous kiss of waters? Why the pouring chaos at our beginning, which charges all that scene with…would you call it rapture? Perhaps the dawning impulse of our creation, meager as it may have been, pronounced–in terms we never heard–God’s return.
Read at St. Lydia’s on August 15
August 16th, 2010
Read Emily’s sermon, “Fear and the Act of Making,” preached on Sunday, August 15, on her blog, Sit and Eat.
August 13th, 2010
Well…parts of it do, sort of, but not all the parts…
Help us get back in the black!
Making a Dinner Church takes a lot of things, but the main ingredients are 98% people, 103% God’s love and grace, and 5% real American hard currency. And though we’ve raised over $20,000 this year, we need just a little extra to get us through the summer season. $3,000 to be exact. That’s only 30 Benjamins! And we’re hoping you’ll help us raise it by August 20!
This beautiful new website makes it incredibly easy, using the fancy yellow paypal button right over there on your right that says “donate.” It will take just a few moments to give a gift to St. Lydia’s. Plus, our budget is so small that, no matter the amount of your gift, you’ll be a major donor! Bonus!
We’re making Dinner Church together from scratch. Whatever you can offer, it will make a huge difference. Please donate.
August 13th, 2010
Genesis 1:1-2:4
The first chapter of Genesis famously tells us the story of how God created the world in seven days. God is a distant and remote creator, speaking the world into existence out of a formless void. The narrative is concerned with ritual, formula, and order. The elements that will make up creation are separated and named, each day bringing creation closer to fruition. On the seventh day, God rests, observing the Sabbath. Finally, everything in creation is good.
This story of creation has a completely different style from the story we find in chapter two, of God making Adam and Eve. This God is anthropomorphized, walking in the garden, getting angry, different from the distant God of the first account. The two stories feel so different because they come from two different sources. God’s creation of the world is drawn from the Priestly source (P), the Adam and Eve story drawn from the more folksy Yahwistic source (J). For a recent post on this, click here.
-Emily M D Scott
Sources:
Blenkinsopp, Joseph. The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004.
August 13th, 2010
During August at St. Lydia’s, we’re reading the creation accounts found in Genesis chapters 1-3. Here’s some contextual information that will help you in your reading.
The bible is, in many ways, like a quilt. Spread on a bed, it’s beautiful, functional, and cohesive. But when you step closer and begin to investigate more, you’ll realize that skilled and knowing hands have stitched it together from a variety of different sources. Looking at the quilt, we might recognize that fabric from the same source (an old dress or dishtowel we’ve seen before) are used again and again in the quilt. But we also might find pieces that we’re not sure what to do with. We can’t tell where they came from.
In the same way, biblical narrative has been stitched together by authors and editors drawing from a variety of sources of literature. The stories that the writers of the bible are drawing from are ancient, and may be written down elsewhere, look a whole like something else that’s written down elsewhere, and were probably transmitted for many years orally before they were ever written down. The fact that the texts in the bible have been stitched together doesn’t make the bible “true” or “not true.” It makes it alive.
Further, many of the stories we find in the bible are myths. They are stories that are told about who we are and how we got here. Again, the measure for these stories is not “truth” or “fact” as we understand it. The measure is their effectiveness in helping us know who we are as a people and how we relate to God. Scholar John J. Collins writes, “Ancient myths are serious but imaginative attempts to explain life in this world.”
Looking more closely at the quilt that is the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible which convey the story of the prehistory of Israel) scholars have identified four different sources of material that’s being used. JEPD are a shorthand way of referring to the four sources: the Yahwist (J), the Elohist (E), the Priestly writer (P) and the Deuteronomist (D). The whole theory is called the Documentary Hypothesis.
Scholars go on for a long time about the way this different source material ended up in the from we found in the bible, but suffice it to say, it was a long and winding road, and the delineations between different sources are not always clear or clean cut. It’s not like they had a cut and paste button or something. But the different sources have different styles, and tend to name God in different ways (J calls God Yahweh, E calls God Elohim, for instance) so this gives us some clues.
Throughout the Pentateuch, you’ll notice that there are often two stories interwoven into one account. For instance, there are two versions of the creation story which we’ll explore, and two versions of the flood story that have been intertwined. The mountain where God is revealed to Moses is sometimes called Sinai or Horeb, depending. Just as in a quilt, these repetitions and variations are not inaccuracies or mistakes, but acknowledgment of the diversity of traditions of the stories we tell to make sense of our existence.
-Emily M D Scott
Sources:
Blenkinsopp, Joseph. The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004.
August 13th, 2010
For 18 people:
24 oz of quinoa
2 15.5 oz cans of black beans
5 avocados
4 green bell peppers
2 limes, juiced
(optional: a little olive oil – maybe 1/2 cup?)
Quite simply, prepare the quinoa, then dice the peppers and avocado into 1/2 to 1/4 inch pieces. Mix everything together in a bowl, then start praying and eat!
A guess at 3-4 servings:
4 oz of quinoa (or so)
5 oz of black beans (though a whole can would be fine, it would just make it more bean-y)
1 avocado
1 green bell peppers
1/2 lime, juiced
(optional: a little olive oil – maybe a few teaspoons?)
August 10th, 2010
For 18 people:
12 pounds vine-ripened tomatoes, peeled, juiced and seeded, chopped
32 oz V8 (approx 1 cup for each cup of tomato juice from the tomatoes)
5 cucumbers, peeled, seeded and chopped
5 red bell peppers, seeded and chopped
5 red onions, chopped
4 small jalapenos, seeded and minced
1 head of garlic, minced
1.5 cups extra-virgin olive oil
5 limes, juiced
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
3 teaspoons toasted, ground cumin
6 teaspoons kosher salt
1.5 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
(optional: 12 tablespoons fresh basil leaves, chiffonade)
For 3-4 people
1.5 to 2 pounds vine-ripened tomatoes, peeled, juiced and seeded, chopped
6 to 8 oz V8 (approx 1 cup for each cup of tomato juice from the tomatoes)
1 cup cucumbers, peeled, seeded and chopped (essentially 1 cuke)
0.5 cup red bell peppers, seeded and chopped (though 1 whole pepper is fine)
0.5 cup red onions, chopped (though 1 whole onion is fine)
1 small jalapeno, seeded and minced
1 medium clove of garlic, minced
0.25 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 lime, juiced
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
0.5 teaspoons toasted, ground cumin
1 teaspoon kosher salt
0.25 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons fresh basil leaves, chiffonade
A few things:
To start with, process the tomatoes. Take the green stem off the top, and cut a small (1/2 – 1 inch) cross on the bottom of the tomato. Throw it into boiling water for 15 seconds (until the skin begins to peel back), then take it out with a spoon and plunge it into cold water for at least a minute. (You can do this in batches, depending on how much boiling water you have.) When cool, the skin should rub off with your hands. Use a knife to remove the stem center and a little bit of the core (the stuff where the stem comes out), and then squeeze the tomato over a mesh strainer on top of a bowl. (You’re trying to get all of the juice out while catching the seeds and stuff.) When the tomatoes are all mashed, they’re ready for the next step. Once you’ve isolated all of the tomato juice (you can kind of rub the seeds over the strainer and that releases more juice into the pot…), double the volume with V8. This liquid is the base of the soup.
With all of the vegetables (including the “processed” tomatoes), set aside about 1/4 of them and chop them finely. With the remaining 3/4, cut them up roughly and toss them into a blender or food processor with some of the liquid. Blend until pretty smooth. Once you’ve blended all of the rough-cut vegetables, mix in the rest of the ingredients (the other liquid ingredients and the spices) with a whisk or in the food processor. (A stick blender works really well here, but only if you have one!) Finally, stir in the finely chopped veggies; these provide a little more interesting texture and a bite here and there with a singular flavor. If you have time, let the soup sit in a fridge to marry the flavors. Then, serve and eat with friends!
August 9th, 2010
During the summer at Lydia’s, we’ve been reading parables. The parable of the weeds and the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30), the parable of the mustard seed (Mark 4:30-32), the parable of the fig tree (Luke 13:6-9) and the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).
What are parables, and how do they work?
A parable is a particular kind of story. “Parable” is from the Greek parabole, means, “something cast beside.” They’re stories that take things and throw them together in ways that confuse us.
Parables are not allegories in which each item in the story has a particular meaning. There’s a long history of interpreting parables as if they were, but parables are much more complex.
Parables almost always have a moment of surprise, a moment of turning the expectations of the listener upside down. And that is why they are so infuriating. They don’t offer answers, but only provoke more questions.
Parables relate truths that we can’t fit into regular language. They disrupt our ways of thinking and, as one commentator puts it, “our doubt around their application teases us into active thought.” Parables ask us to stretch our minds.
