Break-freaking-through!

I really struggled with the lectionary text last week, Luke 17:5-10:

The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ The Lord replied, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea', and it would obey you.
"Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here at once and take your place at the table'? Would you not rather say to him, 'Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, 'We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'"

Part of why I struggled with it is because it didn't seem to fit with where the text had come from or where it was going.  I apppreciate a flow to the narrative, and this whole section titled "sayings of Jesus" just really doesn't seem to go with the preceding parables, or even the story about the ten lepers that follows.  I was smelling an argument for Q, and I hate Q.  I don't believe in Q. To put it bluntly, I think that Q is, as a professor of mine once said, "a figment of the scholarly imagination."  I tend to believe that people wrote what they said they wrote.

And besides: Luke seems to be a fairly smart dude.  Even if he stumbled across some document that had a bunch of random "sayings of Jesus", are we to believe that he just randomly crammed them in somewhere that made no sense whatsoever, because he didn't have a better idea of what to do with them?  Like he or anyone else didn't give the final draft a once-over before shipping it off to Theophilus?  I think not.

Life In A Northern Town

♪ Ah-heya ma ma ma, into the night-ahh
Hey ma ma ma, hey-ay-ay-ay, ah ♫

Ahem.  Anyway...

Today was the local town festival celebrating our Scandinavian heritage, complete with lefse, scalloped potatoes, lefse, brats, lefse, tacos (??), lefse, rommegrot, and oh yes, lefse.  Apparently I am a natural at lefse-rolling, so I was recruited to help with this task as a part of the live lefse-making demonstration.  The advantage of this, of course, is that when the demonstration is done for the day, who are still there helping get to eat what's leftover.  And it's amazing. 

(If you don't know what lefse is, think about dough roughly the consistency of sugar cookie dough, only made with potatoes.  Roll it into a ball...mmm...slightly bigger than a golf ball, but nowhere near the size of a tennis ball or baseball.  Now, with a rolling pin, on a very heavily floured surface, roll it out into a circle 14" in diameter.  Then fry it up on a griddle - careful, that thin it goes really fast! - then spread butter on it, sprinkle with sugar, and fold it in half, then half again, then one more time so it ends up being kind of cone-shaped.  Enjoy.)

Now for the rommegrot: you know how there are signs at amusement park rides saying things like, "Pregnant women or people with heart conditions should stay off this ride."?  Yeah, there should be a sign like that at the rommegrot booth: "People being treated for high cholesterol or who have any desire to not die from a heart attack in the next hour should not eat this."  It's basically heavy cream, whole milk, butter, sugar, and enough flour to hold the whole thing together in kind of a warm, soupy, pudding-like consistency.  Spoon it out into a bowl, pour melted butter over it (no, for real), and then cover it in cinnamon sugar.  Lord, have mercy.  It's good, but the experience is sort of ruined by the fact that you have no option but to contemplate your own mortality whilst eating.  I suppose if you live in Scandinavia near the Arctic Circle and need a ridiculously high caloric intake just to stay alive during the winter, then perhaps it serves a purpose. 

St. Jerome

So, as a part of my aforementioned efforts to "get along" with the saints, I've taken to having these fabulous women pick out for me a yearly "patron saint".  It's really a matter of stepping out in faith for me, and trying to find out if I feel like I'm worshipping mortals, or just more fully engaging in the commuion of the saints in which I profess to believe.  I'm not sure how they do it, whether it's out of a hat, or some random number generator, or some sort of prayer scenario, or what.  But hey, even casting lots is Biblical, so method doesn't really matter to me. 

What matters is the two that they've picked.