Why Should You Eat Pancakes

Some kind but unknowing person wondered aloud to me why we have to eat pancakes today. Can’t you, if you have insisted on observing Lent, which is its own unnerving curiosity, just sort of drift into it without all the hassle of either making pancakes yourself or going to church where someone will make them for you? The answer, of course, is How On Earth Could You Suggest Such A Thing? Pancakes are essential. Although I hear some transgressive people try to make it about donuts.

Really, Shrove Tuesday is as good a day as any for you to examine not only what you think about human tradition—measuring your own internal laws against those of other people—but what the church is even for.

Every church makes traditions. Every church has a jumble of things that have to be done in a certain way because they were done that way last week. The first time a jumbo screen went up in a warehouse and that skinny-jeanned, perfectly tattooed guitarist strummed those first opening notes, evangelicalism in America had itself a beloved tradition.

Tradition isn’t bad. It’s what we do. As soon as you do something a second time you’ve basically invented a tradition. I made Shakshouka on Ash Wednesday one year, and now I have to make it every year because some loud shouting voice inside me screeches that That’s What I Do. Did Jesus tell me to do this? Well, let’s not muddy the waters on that score just now.

Trouble arises, of course, when you cling so tightly to your tradition that it becomes stale and awful. You pry open the flour tin for the pancakes and discover that it is filled with spiritual weevils. We’ve Always Done It This Way means that no one shows up any more because it’s too boring for words. I should be allowed to make a pumpkin creme brûlée at Thanksgiving, instead of a pie, because Jesus did not die for the right of my whole family to eat pie on that day, he died for my sins. Which is what I get to repent of when I refuse to bend to the desires and happiness of my family, and what they need to do when they refuse to forgive me for trying something new.

Jesus likes you to struggle along in the smallness of your own daily existence. That’s where holiness is shaped by the hot fire of Christian love. Don’t knock the suffering prospect of facing something or someone that experience has told you will only end in grief. Are you dreading scraping pancake batter off of every surface of the church kitchen? Are you already overwrought about all the urns of coffee that have to be made? Do you know that you will definitely sin against your neighbor while you both try to make piles and piles of pancakes? Are you prepared, in advance, to be mean about the amount of sugar in the syrup? Has the ugliness of your soul already been on display through your short temper…I swear, today I am talking about you and not me.

One reason why you shouldn’t, if you can help it, hop from church to church to church is because God is interested in you, personally, becoming more holy. And the best way for that to happen is by letting other people see inside you. And that happens in the church kitchen when you make pancakes. If you never try to get along, if you refuse to let people see that you are a difficult person (sometimes) to get along with, you will have nothing to repent of the next day when you go to get that ash smeared on your forehead. Neither will you have the chance to forgive the person next to you who was deliberately unkind for reasons that you can’t fathom.

I mean, you can worry about all the big things that God is doing out there in the world, for his glory. You can be excited for God to use you in that grand new work to bring water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, clothes to the naked, teams of high schoolers to put roofs on all the schools and churches in the whole continent of Africa. You can ask for your big glorious purpose. You can search out your destiny.

But if you are doing all those things and shunning the tedious and upsetting business of working in a kitchen with ten other people you don’t like very much, you have not really considered what it is that Jesus cares most about—forgiving people of their actual sins, dragging them into eternal life when they would rather be looking over the grand vistas of their unconsidered souls without the pain of sin and shame that inevitably arises when they try to get along with Other People.

Fortunately for me, I like all the people who will jostle themselves into the church kitchen later today. And that’s because I have literally endured the humiliation of having to ask forgiveness from every single one of them. They have seen me angry and tired and borne with me anyway. And I with them.

See, the church is a body. That’s what Jesus calls it. When you cut part of the body off it hurts terribly. When part of the body isolates itself, the whole body becomes sick. Also, the body needs to eat pancakes, otherwise it will starve to death. And the next day it needs to repent of its sins, altogether, however uncomfortable that prospect is. And in the middle of it all, Jesus glorifies himself by making that body holy, which was the point.