134 What Lefse Teaches Us About Faith

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “What Lefse Teaches Us About Faith”, originally shared on July 26, 2021. It was the 134^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Lefse is a Norwegian flat bread made from potatoes. It’s poor people’s food. It’s often made at Christmas time, but today we’re celebrating Christmas in July. Our family is making lefse and in the process we’re going to learn what lefse teaches us about faith.

   My family immigrated to the United States from Norway in the late 1800’s. They brought their experience as farmers, they brought their language, their clothes and some basic tools. And they brought their food.

   They settled in a part of Wisconsin where the weather was similar to that in Norway, next to a large body of water (Lake Michigan), where there were other Norwegian families, and they bought a farm.

   My grandmother on my father’s side of the family told me that she remembers the day when she was a girl that the family decided that they were Americans, and they began switching over to speaking English.

   But her mother continued to pray in Norwegian because, she said, she wasn’t sure that God understood the new language as well as he knew Norwegian. 😊

   The food that they ate here was largely the food they grew here, but they maintained the customary foods of Norway as well.

   One of them was lefse. Lefse was a food that pointed to something, something of their identity, and their soul. It was and is for many Norwegian Americans their soul food.

   Lefse is more than what meets the eye. It doesn’t just fill the stomach. It feeds the need to remember who we are and how far we’ve come.

   In our text from the Bible for today, John 6:24-29, the crowd of 5,000 people have had their fill of the loaves and fish that Jesus miraculously provided for them. Now they want more.

   All they can see is the loaves, though. They can’t see what they represent. What they mean.

   Here’s what happened after Jesus had left the hillside where the crowd had been fed and traveled across the Sea of Galilee, partly on foot in Jesus’ case, to Capernaum, the hometown of Peter’s mother-in-law and a home base for Jesus and the 12 disciples when they were in the area, with John 6, verses 24-27:

²⁴ So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus.

²⁵ When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” ²⁶ Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. ²⁷ Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” 

   They walked there but took the boats back? The feeding of the 5,000 must have been a disruption in the fishing day. That’s pretty understandable. How did they know that Jesus had gone to Capernaum if they didn’t see them leave? It’s a big Sea of Galilee, ringed by small villages. Word travels fast.

   And when they find Jesus, they start by making small talk. When did you come here? They were cool.

   Jesus knew their motivation. They traveled that distance because they thought Jesus would be passing out free food again.

   But Jesus had resisted that temptation before, and he had just resisted their attempt to take him by force and make him their king, a king like King David.

   Jesus gets right down to business. He tells them, flat out, that eternity is more important than time. He tells them to work “for the food that endures for eternal life”, and there is actually no work to be done for it. The Son of Man (who Jesus is) will give it to them.

   Jesus is telling them that eternity starts right now. That God will give them faith: a living relationship with the one true living God. Jesus is God.

   All they saw was the free food, not reality to which the miracle points, not the person giving it to them, standing there, right in front of them.

   Lefse is not just potatoes and salt and a few other things. For those who share a history and a family connection, it points to something else.

   Lefse pairs well with lutefisk, a Norwegian delicacy universally loved by all Norwegians. OK, that isn’t true. Lutefisk and lefse are so bound together that they could be spoken of in the singular. They are Norwegian soul food. Every culture has some food that was eaten when there were no options, and now is eaten with pride. Scottish people have haggis, African Americans have chitlins, and Norwegians have lutefisk and lefse. 

   A distant relative, I think she was my dad’s second cousin, was the first in our extended family to return to Norway. Sally and James and I were the first with the family name to return, and that was after 125 years.

   When she got to Norway, she wanted some genuine Norwegian lutefisk and lefse. She went to a nice restaurant and was surprised to see that it wasn’t on the menu. She figured that, well, it must be so commonplace that every restaurant serves it. It doesn’t need to be on the menu.

   So, when the waiter came over, she said, “I’d like to order lutefisk and lefse”

   At first, the waiter pretended that he couldn’t understand her. Then he acted like he didn’t know what she was talking about. Finally, he literally turned up his nose and said, “We do not serve lutefisk and lefse in this restaurant, madam. Lutefisk and lefse is poor people’s food.”

   These days, I’m told, it’s served in many restaurants in Norway around Christmas time. Lines of people stretch around the block waiting to get in.

   Well, he was right. Our ancestors were poor. They ate what was cheap and plentiful. Norway is a rich country now, largely due to North Sea oil, but it was a poor agricultural country for much of its history. Even during the Viking era, if you asked a Viking what he did for a living, he would say “I am a farmer”, which he was most of the time.

   Our ancestors dried codfish and cured it in lye so that it would keep over the winter. Often it was stored outside the house in the snow.

   It would be brought in and boiled to reconstitute it into an almost jelly-like consistency and served with the lefse, whose main ingredient is potatoes, which were also plentiful. Lefse is a flatbread. I describe it to my fellow Californians as being like a potato tortilla.

   We ate lutefisk and lefse every Thanksgiving and Christmas when I was growing up, alternating at my two sets of grandparents’ houses.

   My grandmother on my mother’s side of the family had a little bit of German in her family, and she liked to put caraway seed in her lefse. When I was young, I preferred it that way, so I make some of our lefse that way, too.

   Step one in making lefse is to make some coffee.   

   Then we boil some potatoes, add sugar, heavy cream, salt, and butter, let it sit overnight in the refrigerator, then roll it out in very thin sheets and bake it on flat metal lefse grills, moving it on and off the grills with flat sticks.

   One of the best things about making lefse is giving it away. Norwegians who merely smell lefse are transported to another time. I’ve seen Norwegians get quite emotional, for Norwegians, over a piece of potato flatbread. It connects them to something larger than themselves.

   But lefse will only stay fresh for a day or so in the refrigerator, and for a month in the freezer. I’ve pushed the limits in both cases, but those limits can only be pushed so far. I’ve seen lefse develop green mold if not eaten soon enough, and even freezer burn.

   This passage from John 6 concludes with verses 28 and 29.

²⁸ Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” ²⁹ Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” 

   The way to perform the works of God, Jesus says, is to have faith, to believe, in him whom he has sent: Jesus.

   Miracles point to the way things God made them to be, that human beings messed up and continue to mess up from the beginning of Creation, and they point to the future, when God will restore everything and there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

   Meanwhile, Jesus points to the greatest miracle, the restoration of a relationship with God that is what we call faith.

   Jesus is more than what meets the eye, and his miracles are signs that point back to Creation and forward to restoration, but the crowds don’t see it. They just see a free meal.

   They want bread, but they only see the ingredients, not what they mean.

   They didn’t see the signs that God showed them.  They didn’t want to know what they pointed to and go there. They just wanted the bread that spoils.

    Do you keep extra food at home in case of power failure? Do you keep food for an emergency like an earthquake?

   Do you keep food that lasts forever? Jesus? A living relationship with the one true living God? The Son of Man will give you this food. It doesn’t cost any money. Jesus has paid the price with his blood.

   What work we do, what it is of ourselves that we give away, comes in response to the heavy lifting that Jesus has already done for us at the cross. We are moved to repent, to live in God’s reign now and forever. Eternity begins now, in this life. It means a new life. We are made a new Creation.

   As I’ve said before, faith is like a beard; if you let it grow it becomes the first thing people notice about you.

   I started growing this beard seven years ago this November. But it didn’t grow because of something I did. It grew because of something I stopped. I stopped shaving.

   Lefse is not its ingredients. It is a food that points us Norwegian Americans to our past and to our present ancestral cultural heritage. But lefse will spoil.

   Jesus is not our ancestral cultural heritage. Jesus is not what we define or control. Jesus is our present and future reality. He gives us himself. He is the food that endures for eternal life.

   What must we do? Stop resisting the eternal love of God and be a new Creation. Walk away from your old life without God. Open your heart and receive God’s transforming gift of faith. Accept that gift today.