What do you believe in? Can you articulate a statement of faith?
This is the central question of This I Believe. It is an international organization engaging people in writing and sharing essays describing the core values that guide their daily lives. Over 125,000 of these essays, written by people from all walks of life, have been archived on their website, heard on public radio, chronicled through their books, and featured in weekly podcasts. The project is based on the popular 1950s radio series of the same name hosted by Edward R. Murrow. I would encourage anyone to read or listen to these gems.
While I have really enjoyed most of them, one of my favorites is by Jason Sheehan. While people always swing for the fences when they share their creed, he went much closer to home. It makes me cry every time I listen to it. He really gets me in the gut. In short he writes about his belief in barbecue. To him barbeque is, “soul food and comfort food and health food, as a cuisine of both solace and celebration.” But his belief is not small or trivial. He goes on to say:
I believe that barbecue drives culture, not the other way around. Some of the first blows struck for equality and civil rights in the Deep South were made not in the courtrooms or schools or on buses, but in the barbecue shacks. There were dining rooms, backyards and roadhouse juke joints in the South that were integrated long before any other public places.
I was thinking about this idea of barbecue driving culture this week as we start the book of Vayikra in which we outline many elements of the sacrifices of the Tabernacle. Sheehan says:
When I’m feeling good, I want barbecue. And when I’m feeling bad, I just want barbecue more. I believe in barbecue in all its regional derivations, in its ethnic translations, in forms that range from white-tablecloth presentations of cunningly sauced costillas, to Chinese take-out spareribs that stain your fingers red, to the most authentic product of the tarpaper rib shacks of the Deep South.
There are many expressions of barbeque. Similarly, in the Mishna in Zevachim teaches that there were six reasons to offer a sacrifice:
- (1) for the sake of the sacrifice for which it was consecrated
- (2) for the sake of the offerer
- (3) for the sake of the Divine Name
- (4) for the sake of the altar fires
- (5) for the sake of an aroma
- (6) for the sake of pleasing God, and a sin-offering and a guilt-offering for the sake of sin.
The Hebrew word קרבן (korban), usually translated as “sacrifice” or “offering,” comes from a root meaning to draw near. Other peoples of the ancient Near East made sacrifices to propitiate their gods; the startling shift in ancient Israelite tradition was that sacrifices were understood not as a way of “paying God off,” but as a mode of drawing-near to God.
The ancient sacrifices were, like Sheehan’s vision of barbeque, a way to get close and draw near.
Sheehan’s faith is compelling because it is so visceral. He closes his piece by writing:
I believe — I know — there is no such thing as too much barbecue. Good, bad or in-between, old-fashioned pit-smoked or high-tech and modern; it doesn’t matter. Existing without gimmickry, without the infernal swindles and capering of so much of contemporary cuisine, barbecue is truth; it is history and home, and the only thing I don’t believe is that I’ll ever get enough.
While it can be hard to relate to the sacrificial world of the Tabernacle and then the Temple, as we see in Vayikra, I want to channel Sheehan’s excitement for barbeque. It really draws me near.
Said to Myself 