Fish Stick Jesus

Fish Stick Jesus
Psalm 98


Jesus in a fish stick. Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich.

Increasingly, God has been foregoing traditional theophanies, or conventional methods of communication, and has instead been revealing himself in kitchen mistakes. In November of 2004, Fred Whan, an Ontario man in Kingston, after burning a fish stick at dinner, found the face of Jesus on his fish stick. A year later he took it out of the freezer and put it up for auction on eBay.Earlier that year, Diana Duyser of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, declared she had found an image of the Virgin Mary on her burnt grilled cheese sandwich. She, too, auctioned it off, selling it for $28,000. In her eBay ad, she wrote: “I would like all people to know that I do believe that this is the Virgin Mary Mother of God. That is my solemn belief, but you are free to believe that she is whomever you like.”

What do we make of this? Has God abandoned his usual means of revelation and finally come to us in what we all really understand ... food? Or have our imaginations run away with us?

Reactions to the images have been mixed. Some have poked fun at the images found especially in the “miraculous” food items. Ken Schram of Seattle with some aluminum foil made a number of other images on grilled cheese sandwiches. These he hoped to sell, the proceeds to benefit Toys for Tots. Among his creations were a sandwich with his own image, one with Elvis, and another with the image of President Bush burned across its surface. Dan French of The Examiner, also commenting on the images, writes that it seems that “God has a plan for me, and that plan is to sell you his mug in my beer mug for four grand!”

No matter what you think about these “miraculous” images, these latter-day theophanies do point to a yearning in our culture to find Christ in everyday, ordinary things. We’re all looking for the same thing, some faith-worthy sign to give us at least a fleeting clue on how to live our best lives and be our best selves in a confused and disoriented world. The problem here is that these cheesy images also pose a real danger to our faith. How in the world do you lift up a God worthy of praise and thanksgiving when you’ve just found him on a fish stick? Where are my faith and my praise for a transcendent God when that God is not much more than a commodity on eBay? After all, a God we have to save from the garbage disposal or that emerged from a mistake in the kitchen does nothing worthy of praise. Thanking a God we can sell or own or that we can reproduce with cleverly wrapped tin foil is a waste of our time.

Psalm 98 calls us back to worship, thanksgiving and praise. In this Psalm there’s not even a hint that we should look for God any further than the songs of praise and thanksgiving that God has given us to sing. This Psalm tells us we should praise God because God does not forget his love and faithfulness. We are loved by God!

We as people love many things that do not love us back. We love our cars and our homes. We love food or entertainment. None of these things can return our love. We love a God who loved us first. Scripture tells us: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). God’s steadfast love and faithfulness last through all generations. It is no accident that the psalmist ends the psalm, “For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.” We give God thanks and praise for the sole reason that God loves us so much. God went into death itself to claim us as his own. God loved us before we even began to love him and for this he deserves our thanks and praise. God is all around us!

Finally, we give God thanks and praise because Jesus Christ’s face is found, not on the burn marks of a baked piece of fish, but in the marks of life in the faces around us. “We are his people” and as his people, we discover Christ’s presence in the faces of the people with whom we live and work, and those with whom we don’t live and work — the needy, the marginalized, the less fortunate, those in prison, those on welfare, those who live in rich houses or cardboard shacks, those who are different from us, those who live in freedom and those who live in the shadow of tyranny. This is most significant. For in this the baked fish stick challenges us. We need not look for Christ in a piece of baked fish! It should not be easier to see Christ in a fish stick than it is to see him in the faces of our neighbors. If we long to see Christ, we need only to look around us. Christ is with us in the faces of our neighbors. In the people who do what Christ does for us as they care, provide, love and keep us safe. And in the people we are called to be Christ to, doing the same for them.

God asks for our song of thanks and praise. And God deserves it. Because God has defeated the sting of sin and death for us! Because God has not and will not forget his love and faithfulness to us. And God surrounds us with people who reflect his face and presence! So don’t be looking for God in these foolish places like fish sticks and grilled cheese. Find God in the faces of those around you. And, on this day when we celebrate our music ministry, listen for God in the song upon our hearts.
Amen!