It’s not the Plot of The Silence of the Lambs. It’s an Everything but the Kitchen Sink List.
Psalm 40, 54 • Psalm 51
Job 29:1, 31:24-40 • Acts 15:12-21 • John 11:30-44
In Acts today we hear the Apostle James, prompted by the testimony of Saints Paul and Simeon concerning their great success in converting Gentiles to Christ, to recommend that the Jerusalem church go easy on those Gentiles in requiring adherence to longstanding Jewish dietary law.
Nonetheless, the Gentiles are to be warned against “foods polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, from what has been strangled, and from blood.” This may sound like slasher film/orgy gone wild, but it’s all about kosher meat handling rules (that not too much later were largely ignored by virtually all Christians).
“Food polluted by idols” generally referred to livestock that was sacrificed in pagan worship and which was not, as is widely assumed, burnt to ashes, but rather retrieved partly singed, for resale in the marketplace by the priests as revenue for their temple.
“Strangled” and “from Blood” refers to animals not killed by slitting the throat and letting the blood drain out. After skinning or plucking, freshly slaughtered livestock and poultry were often coated in coarse salt to leach out any residual pockets of blood, even if it did dry out the meat almost to the jerky stage. This is why unlike here in the more enlightened South, for Jewish New Yorkers and boiled-dinner New Englanders like myself, brisket has meant pot roast long simmered in the hopes of making the meat chewable again.
And the exhortations against “Sexual Immorality” is thrown in for good measure by elders wanting to control “impure thoughts” at any time. (Curiously, this foreshadowed the sayings of the Sisters of Notre Dame who otherwise did not have a meat policy, except on Fridays.)
I came across a fundamentalist Bible commentary on today’s reading that advised truly faithful Christians not to dine within Indian restaurants because the food is likely being served in close proximity to images of Hindu deities. (But that take-out was OK because presumably the demon power diminishes with distance.)
Perhaps the statues of the “Lord who overcomes all obstacles,” Ganesha represented a foreshadowing of the Gospel of Prosperity, which would perhaps explain the enduring use of all those Red Elephant avatars in electoral cartography even now.
Written by Tony Stankus
Tony Stankus, now 69, is the first librarian at the U of A to have been promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor. He became an Episcopalian at age 66 since he could nether resist the transcendent joy of its liturgies nor the warmth of its priests and people.