Jeremiah spoke next, publicly addressing the officials before the crowd: “God sent me to preach against both this Temple and city everything that’s been reported to you. So do something about it! Change the way you’re living, change your behavior. Listen obediently to the Message of your God. Maybe God will reconsider the disaster he has threatened. – Jeremiah 26:12-13 (The Message)
I love peanut butter. I am guess that is not exactly a radical statement, but one of my favorite snacks is a spoonful of peanut butter. It might be put on a sandwich or a banana, or sometimes just a straight spoonful. Many years ago I switched to eating natural peanut butter, looking to only buy types primarily made from peanuts and not full of ingredients I can’t pronounce. In those days it was hard to find many choices, so most of the ones I found were made of peanuts, sugar, and salt. When I first started making that shift, it was out of health concerns. I did it despite feeling like the natural peanut butter tasted like chalk. It was bearable but not nearly as good as what I was used to, let alone the annoying texture and the oil separating.
These days I can usually find quite a few brands of natural peanut butter in most grocery markets. The ones I get are made only of peanuts. Every so often, though, the store is out of my usual brands and so I pick up something different. A few months ago I tried a bite of conventional peanut butter, and was overwhelmed by its sweetness. It tasted more like candy than food – and not in an enjoyable way at all! The chemical smooth consistency felt off-putting as well. This past week, then, I grabbed a jar from a brand I had not tried before. When I took a bite, I almost choked on how salty it was. I’ve had to bury the peanut butter in other flavors to make it bearable. The ingredients were just peanuts and salt, something that a decade ago I would have thought of as bland, but not now. I’ve grown used to the taste of peanut butter made only from peanuts, so that all of the added things that I once thought enhanced the flavor now seem overwhelming and distracting. I don’t really like having sugar or salt added at all.
What I take from this is how much we are capable of changing. Most of us tend to take our taste, and the foods we like or dislike, as givens. They might change slightly, but really most of us (okay, at least me) tend to assume that we like what we like and don’t like what we don’t like. Sure I am up for trying new things that I don’t know yet if I will like them, but I don’t expect that my opinion of familiar foods will change. Yet obviously they do, and in fact I even managed to teach myself to like something I did not initially like, without noticing that I had done it. Our perceptions really can confine our sense of reality to what we already expect, but our perceptions are also capable of change.
So often the prophets call on the people to change their ways, and the people cannot imagine a different way of doing things. Their perceptions of what is possible confine their ability to perceive God and God’s ways. It takes the uncomfortable commentary of the prophets to give the people an opportunity to reconsider what is possible and be open to changing their ways. Even so, we continually fall back into our familiar habits. It takes the transforming power of the Holy Spirit to truly be moved into new ways of being and make changes in our life. Yet in Christ through the Holy Spirit, we are changed into the likeness of God. Generally it is slowly so that we cannot even notice it, but it does happen to us. This is part of the Good News of Christ.