The cost of chicken
Ihave often joked that my belt is a fence around a chicken graveyard that is under constant expansion. Being a pastor for 38 years, it was usually thought that eating chicken was part of the job. Many a pastor has sat at a table of fried chicken and all the “fixins.” I do love fried chicken, and I especially miss my grandmother’s home-made, skillet fried chicken. It’s just too easy to go buy the chicken already fried, isn’t it?
Many years ago, our youth were preparing chicken to be smoked and used as a fundraiser through donations. I was amused, because one of the girls grabbed her first raw chicken half, and said, “Ewww, what is this?” I said, “You’ve never seen a raw chicken before?” “No!” she said. “Do you eat chicken at your house?” “Yes, but it comes already cooked.” I realized that her parents did not even buy raw chicken cut up and ready to be cooked but simply bought prepared chicken from the store or restaurant. What a change from my childhood.
I grew up when chickens ran around houses and yards waiting their turn to become food. When a chicken meal was on the menu, one was selected and killed either by ringing its neck or cutting off its head. Then the real work began to clean the chicken, cut it up, or cook it whole. It’s still that way in many places today.
We have gone from live chickens to store bought whole or cut up chickens, to boneless chicken cut up or traditional bone-in chicken already prepared, to buying the chicken already cooked, boneless or bone-in. I have some who married into our family that need their chicken to be boneless. It’s like they were never alive if they don’t have bones in them.
I can only imagine what many believers in churches today would do it they had to take, for example, a live lamb, kill it, roast it and eat it. The Passover lamb was carefully selected, and after spending days with the family, was killed and eaten by the family. The costliness of sin was clearly demonstrated in the requirement of the lamb’s death.
The costliness of our sin was demonstrated when the Lamb of God was chosen before the foundation of the world to die in our place, for our sins. Let us not live with a packaged, sanitized view of Jesus’ sacrificial death, but understand that for our sakes, Jesus lived, suffered, died and rose again.
