On every summer weekend across the country, grills fire up and hot dogs blacken and burst. Beer tops pop, plastic chairs drag across cluttered patios and the intemperate laughter of revelers fills neighborhoods as America’s middle class sprawls undressed in the summer heat. As the hot dogs come off the grill, the immoral humor, the war stories, the vengeful diatribes and tipsy giggles subside as the concentration shifts to more immediate appetites. White bread, Pepsi and chips round off the menu piled on styrofoam plates. Eat, drink and be filled. 

Brothers and sisters, is this a scene we can be a part of? Can we, called to be moderate, quiet, and modest find anything here with which we want to identify ourselves?

I fear, while at our grills, we’ve participated and linked hands with the spirit of this carousing scene. The same essential ingredient, the same common substance, ties us inextricably to the American patio and its atmosphere of indulgence and excess. Look around. Look at the bottle in the meaty hands of that aging plumber with his sagging belly and bloodshot eyes, his two divorces, three DUI’s, the four months of delinquent rent. Not the Bud Light bottle, that red plastic one: Ketchup. The same bottle in the center of your kitchen table, within arm’s length of your children.

Pick up the bottle and look at it.

The Color

Historically Christianity has been wary of the color red. Harlotry, passion, flames of fire. Any of these representations alone should drive a Christian trembling to our knees. But set a bottle of blood red ketchup before an Anabaptist or American (let’s cast our net wide) Christian and unthinkingly, we put it on the franks, the fries, the tots—everything! 

The Excess

The number one weekend meal mistake? Too much ketchup! We move down the food line, slide a burger onto a bun. Talking and laughing, grab the ketchup and with a flatulent, rasping rip—so much ketchup! What about ketchup encourages such recklessness, such excess? Does the loud red color overpower the still small voice calling us to moderation?

Our Senses

God’s people must be discerning. We must taste, test and analyze (try the spirits) constantly. We would never imbibe excessive alcohol because it blunts our senses. And yet our eating habits reveal the carelessness with which we have become accustomed to interacting with the culinary world. As we eat, our tastebuds serve as our tongue’s conscience. But do we honor our tongue? Do we value its sensitivity? It seems we do not. Everything gets soused in ketchup, blurring our tastes and homogenizing our meals.

All the Spots

Do you really think Heinz examines each tomato, checking carefully for black or brown spots, diseased sections, worms, mildew, fungus? I assure you they do not. In fact, the ketchup bin is no doubt exactly where these contaminated tomatoes go. Slurried in the industrial blenders, who will ever know? Not you or your family. And this, precisely, is where the Devil wants you in relationship to American culture. Assimilated, blended. Where black spots are blurred and concealed by the “good”. This is how many once conservative churches justified television a generation ago. Sure, there’s some mold, some spots, but the content is mostly good…. And their children sat in the firehose of television programming presented exactly like that ketchup you just set on the table. No longer in a format that allowed evaluation, discrimination and selection, but blended into an unidentifiable paste.

Life is no party. If our Savior returned tonight, do you really want to meet him with a smear of ketchup in your beard or a dollop on your cape? 

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Wait, you say. This is absurd, ridiculous. It’s just tomatoes! 

But how much of our teaching on nonconformity is no more than what we’ve just subjected ketchup to?

Here’s what we do:

We find something that’s changed in the larger culture, something that’s different now than when we grew up. We spend time creating an imaginary flow chart demonstrating how this leads to this which leads to that, the chains of equivalence, until the slippery slope has steepened beyond the point of return. What our audience considered harmless when they walked through the doors this morning has now been shown to be yet another worm on Satan’s hook. While the thought still has momentum, we drive it home by lighting an emotional afterburner that will haunt our audience’s sleep. “Is that I’m Daddy’s Girl t-shirt you think so cute on your one-year-old going to be cute when she squeezes into a t-shirt when she’s seventeen?”

Small things do matter, and life does contain slippery slopes. But we must think well and critically about what really endangers us and what really doesn’t. If we raise thinking families who examine, as they should, the claims of our conservative sub-culture, the assertions we make will be increasingly scrutinized. They will look up from their Bibles and wonder: is this the way of Jesus or only an Anabaptist side show in the American culture war?

Pass the Ketchup while we visit about this.