Good Barbecue and a Good God

Good Barbecue and a Good God--February 12, 2019

"Praise the Lord!

 Praise the Lord, O my soul!

 I will praise the LORD as long as I live; 

     I will sing praises to my God all my life long.

 Do not put your trust in princes,

     in mortals, in whom there is no help.

 When their breath departs, they return to the earth;

     on that very day their plans perish.

 Happy are those whose help is in the God of Jacob,

    whose hope is in the LORD their God,

 who made heaven and earth,

     the sea, and all that is in them;

 who keeps faith forever;

     who executes justice for the oppressed,

     who gives food to the hungry.

 The LORD sets the prisoners free;

    the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.

 The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;

    the LORD loves the righteous.

 The LORD watches over the strangers;

    he upholds the orphan and the widow,

    but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

 The LORD will reign forever,

     your God, O Zion, for all generations.

 Praise the LORD!" [Psalm 146]

Let's talk about barbecue for a minute.

There are all sorts of variations on doing barbecue the "right" way, both around the world and even just within the United States.  You can have Carolina style pulled pork, or Kansas City style with beef.  You can have Caribbean infused jerk-style, or Memphis-style ribs.  Barbecue can mean a dry rub of spices, or a gooey sauce that drips onto your plate (and shirt).  It can skew spicy with heat, sweet with honey or molasses, smoky with hickory wood in the fire, or tangy with a heavier vinegar taste.  And if you are passionate about such things, you will likely consider one way to be the most authentic, most definitive style of barbecue.  If you bring me a plate at a picnic and say to me as you offer me a bite of your sandwich, "Mmmm, this  sure is some GOOD barbecue!" I'll learn quickly what counts as good barbecue to you.  I'll learn, by the examples you put in front of me, what you believe makes "good barbecue" good.  Even for something as familiar to Americans as summer grilling season is, we can each have rather different pictures, different competing definitions, of what "good" looks like, even if they all require a stack of paper napkins at the end.

All right, are we OK so far?  Can we all nod our heads in agreement that there are different (sometimes very different) pictures we carry in our heads when we talk about what makes good barbecue good?  And can we grant that one person may have a rather different working definition of why this plate of barbecue over here is good, and why that plate over there doesn't fit the same definition?  Good--because now we have to talk about what makes God "good," too.

I'm willing to bet this is a less easily asked question.  We tend to just assume we all know what "good" looks like when it comes to God.  You know... good.  But, we don't often stop and listen to the way the Scriptures themselves actually sketch out what God's kind of goodness looks like.  And because we don't actually listen to the Scriptures, we will instead substitute our own working definition of "goodness" and assume that God's kind must be the same as ours.  And this, it turns out, is more dangerous than assuming a Carolina-style BBQ restaurant will be the same as a Tex-Mex food truck's menu.

I have this sneaking suspicion that we all, to some degree or another at some time or another, just assumed that God's kind of goodness is reducible to "pleasant things happening to me" or "becoming prosperous" or "God doling out gold stars for good behavior to promote better morals." Plenty of religious-sounding voices out there can make it sound like God's "goodness" is when you get the promotion at work (as though the other people, who didn't get the promotion, don't also want to be able to provide more for their families), or that God's goodness is on display when your football team wins, when you get a good parking space, or when the Dow closes at an all-time high.  God's "goodness," according to popular piety, is when "our side wins," and of course also when "their side loses," and when things favorable to me happen.

But that ain't God's flavor of barbecue.  And it sure as heaven ain't God's kind of goodness.

See the Scriptures themselves, like the powerful words of Psalm 146, have a particular angle, a certain flavor, if you will.  And when the psalmist starts holding up examples of what makes Yahweh ("the LORD," the particular name for the God of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam) so good, the poet talks especially about how God cares for people on the margins. Not "people just like me." Not "mainstream, everyday folk," and not at all the "great, powerful, successful ones."  When the Bible talks about what God's goodness looks like, what it tastes like, it holds up the ways God takes care of the people labeled "the losers" rather than the prosperity of the "winners."  The Scriptures celebrate how God cares for "the Other," not "me and the people just like me."  What makes God worthy of praise, in other words, is not the days when the stock market closes at a new record high, but the way God provides for foreigners, the elderly, and the children with no families.  It is the way God is kind and does right by the so-called "nobodies" that makes for God's flavor of goodness.

I am convinced more and more that a great many of the ways we are divided from one another in this day and age is that we live with competing (and often with only a small amount of overlap between one another) visions of what "good" looks like.  There are voices that can only imagine God's "goodness" in terms of what is good "for me" or "for people like me."  There are folks who imagine that God's "goodness" is reducible to an increase in my take-home pay, or a higher GDP, or having bigger and bigger piles of money.  And then there are these minority-report voices, like the psalmist here, who says, "No, that may be someone else's definition of what 'good' looks like, but it isn't the way the God of the freed Hebrew slaves defines 'goodness'." It is tempting--damnably tempting--to see goodness only in terms of what will help me acquire more, what will protect me-and-my-group, what will keep "our" resources for "us" and win compared to "those people" and "their side."

And I suppose you are free to operate with such a definition of "goodness" if you are determined to do so.  But let's be clear--that isn't how the God of the Bible defines goodness.  What makes the living God good is the way God tends to the needs of the folks "with their backs against the wall," to borrow a phrasing of Howard Thurman's.  What makes the God of the Scriptures worthy of praise is the way divine care is provided for the ones on the margins, the ones we overlook as "other," the foreigner, the widow, the orphan, the prisoner, and the bowed-down.

Over against the self-centered saccharine sweetness of the "Me-and-My-Group-First" mindset which is so popular these days, God's flavor of goodness may well be an acquired taste.

But... it is a taste worth acquiring.  

"Taste and see," says another poet, "that the LORD is good."  The LORD, the God who cares for migrants, for retirees on fixed income, and for children whose parents cannot hold them in arms tonight, this God is good indeed.

Good Lord, be your own good self and pour out provision and protection on those who are most vulnerable.  And as you do, give us your own definition of goodness to see the world by.