Something has been bothering me lately. FOOD. I'm not hungry, nor do I have allergies, and there is very little that gives me heartburn. But, food bothers me. Or rather, our Western culture's attitude toward food. We worship food (foodistas, gormands). We take food for granted. It's always there. We don't have to look too far for it. We have an entire cable network dedicated to it. We have cable programs telling us about the 10 top places to 'pig out' on 4 pound steaks, 11 pound pizzas, buckets of ice cream (30+ scoops) and 3 pound burgers. We seek out the trendiest eateries with the newest 'fusion' cooking. We make chefs into celebrities. We spend big bucks buying the latest cookbooks or technical tomes, and then rarely open them. We through away tons of uneaten food because it isn't "fresh." We have "fast food" joints on every other corner competing for our business, offering to supersize and refill. For what? To stuff our supersized guts and satiate our need for more and more. Makes one wonder how much we consume or throw away could have been used to feed people who don't have enough to keep them alive.

Being on the cusp of postmodernism, I sometimes think that reading theology is hazardous to my mental health. It's come to the point that it has become very difficult to tell what is cultural and what is pure 'fact.' Sometimes I find my self asking, a la Pontius Pilate, "What IS truth?"
I hear a lot about "solo scriptura" and scriptural "inerrancy" but I have doubts that we neither mean what we say nor understand what we are saying. It is fairly certain that we really mean partial 'scriptura," picking and choosing those portions of scripture which appeal to our personal or cultural prejudices.
Take for example the current kerfluffle about sexuality. It seems to me that the NT passages we use to condemn homosexuals as 'sinners' contain other things such as greed, licentiousness, etc. which we never mention. I suspect that this interpretation is as much political as anything else.
We say that scripture is inerrant and THIS is what it means. Cultural? Political? I don't know. Myself, I believe scripture is inerrant but, and this is a great but, I just don't happen to know what scripture is being inerrant about in many cases.
So, how do I preserve my sanity? Well, how I've personally dealt with this insanity is to discard most of what I believed to be 'truth.' What have I retained? In brief, Jesus was born, He died, He was raised from the dead & He ascended into heaven, ushering in the Kingdom of God on this earth. Without these central facts, Christianity becomes nothing more than a nice worldview competing with other nice, and not so nice, worldviews. Just another philosophy of life. Just mental/philosophical masturbation. Certainly no 'truth' there..just opinion.

I was looking into the definition of "laity" and got to thinking about how meanings of words change over the years. The original Greek simply meant 'all of the people.' I'm no scholar so I won't pretend to know if this word was even used in New Testament writings or had any Christian meaning whatsoever. I don't know when the term even entered the Church or in what context it was originally used.
I do know that the term 'laity' and its derivative 'laymen' are used quite extensively in the Church today. I do wonder if the 'religious' context and the modern cultural context differ.
From my view from the pew (i.e., my opinion) I think that we in the Church have adopted have adopted the cultural definition, namely that the laity are untrained amateurs and that the clergy are the trained professionals. This is nutty considering that my denomination prides itself on 'solo scriptura.' From my reading of the NT, this definition and 'solo scriptura' don't coincide.
According to the Epistles, we are all ministers of reconcilliation and all have gifts for the building of the Church. With the modern definition, only the professionals do real 'ministry' and the laity confines is ministry to the 'non-spiritual' aspects of ministry. Gnostic?

I thought that blogging was a pretty simple matter. Just start writing whatever comes to mind. But, I'm finding that it isn't quite so simple. Stream of consciousness is not my forte. I tend to belabor an idea almost to death before setting it down in black and white. I've thought of many things to put in my initial post, but translating the thoughts into the written word isn't as simple as I thought.
So, if that's the case, why blog in the first place? After all, writing my thoughts in cyberspace might reveal myself as a fool, a poor confused soul, a "conservative" or "liberal," a religious fanatic or a heretic, and so on. Well, others' "good opinion" has never been a prime consideration of mine. As Popeye said, 'I yam what I yam."
Perhaps the reason I am blogging is that I hope that by writing down my thoughts I might be able to make sense of my life, what I really believe, and how I should live my life as a follower of Jesus. Yeah, that's the ticket. So, I'm just going to ramble on and, with God's help, try to make sense of my life in relation to my faith.