Improvisation: Good Food, Bad Faith

If you're reading this just because you like me but you happen to not care so much about Jesus, I'll start with the food for you. If you're reading this because you like me AND you like Jesus, feel free to keep reading after I'm done talking about cooking. I'd encourage you, though, to read the whole thing regardless. I mean, I wrote it. Come on.

Seeing as my husband and I are both poor grad students, financial aid doesn't come in until next week, and we desperately need to go grocery shopping, tonight's dinner was courtesy of let's-see-what-I-can-make-from-what-we-have-left. Lucky for us, it came out pretty tasty. Simple, but tasty.

Let's call it a creamy chicken and broccoli bake. That sounds good, right? Unfortunately, I completely forgot about pictures until we'd already started eating, so these are the leftovers. Sorry, it's not nearly as pretty as when I took it out of the oven. I know that it looks so tasty that you all want to run to the kitchen and make it right now, though, so here's the (super simple and very approximate) recipe:

Ingredients:
-8-10 oz. egg noodles
-16-20 oz. alfredo sauce
-1-2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (1 really should be enough, in my opinion)
-1 1/2 cups frozen broccoli
-1/4 cup onion, chopped
-rosemary and basil to taste

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cook noodles as directed; drain, set aside. Meanwhile, in large skillet, cook chicken breasts over medium heat, seasoning with rosemary and basil. Once fully cooked, remove chicken from skillet and chop. Pour sauce into skillet, add chicken back in. Add broccoli, onion, and more rosemary and basil to taste. Cook over low heat until warm. Pour noodles into 9x9 baking dish, then pour sauce mix over top. Cover with foil and bake for 20 minutes.

And thus concludes another successful experiment in cooking, where you can usually throw together things from your pantry that sound good and it'll come out pretty tasty. Within reason, that is. Adding chocolate to this mix probably wouldn't have been too good, despite the fact that I have perfectly tasty chocolate chips sitting in my refrigerator door, calling my name.

Which leads nicely to my theological thought for today. Yesterday, actually- this was an issue that came up during my Intro to the New Testament class yesterday morning. Pantries and refrigerators, on one hand, are full of all the random things that sounded good to you when you were walking through the grocery store with an empty stomach. They're designed to hold all of your miscellaneous ingredients until you decide to take a few things out, mix them up and eat them. The Bible, on the other hand, is neither a pantry nor a refrigerator. Its contents may vary from poetry to law, romance to mourning, but taking it as a whole there are themes that run throughout and everything contained within it is there for a reason. Those reasons are multifaceted in themselves, but that's a completely different post.

The point here is that the Bible isn't something we can pick and choose from. When we focus exclusively on one Testament or the other, or quote a single verse without giving it its proper context, we are effectively creating for ourselves a "canon within the canon," to quote my professor. And if we're honest, that's pretty much our tendency. If you think about the "Bible" that you carry around with you from day to day, the parts of it that you think about and live by, it's likely just the parts you like best. The parts that fit in with your view of the world and the way it should be. Thomas Jefferson, for example, literally took scissors to a Bible and compiled the parts that he thought were best, boiling the Bible in all its complexity down to a thin book of philosophy. What we do may not be as drastic as that, and you probably can't buy my mini-Bible on Amazon, but we do the same thing in spirit.

Now, I can't even begin to tell you how every verse of the Bible should be interpreted. Some (most) of it, I'm not even sure of myself. What I am sure of is that it at least needs to be acknowledged. When we cut and past the parts of the Bible that we like best, it stops being a living book that speaks to us and becomes instead our custom-made philosophy on life, telling us only what we want to hear. And that's not the Bible I want to read.