Evotional.com - Mark Batterson

So we're having dinner last night. Great meal. But the corn was absolutely tasteless. Lora checked the corn can and it said no salt added.

Hold that thought.

Then I read an article in Fast Company about one of the most innovative chefs in America, Homaro Cantu. The article said, "Cantu and his passel of wacky young chefs are coming up with fresh ways to tweak the restaurant's wildly innovative menu at a rate that would make a corporate creativity consultant lose his lunch."

They have weekly brainstorming sessions where they dream up new ways of cooking and serving food. Let's just say that they use everything from a Class IV laser typically used for surgery and liquid nitrogen.

Cantu is a rebel chef "who loves to challenge a diner's assumptions about how food should look, taste, and feel."

You've heard the phrase test kitchen?

Cantu has taken it to new extremes. They have a "quirky lust for the unexpected--the desire to push the culinary envelop by combining flavors, texture, and temperature in previously unimagined ways."

For example, they serve donut soup. It tastes exactly like the inside of a Krispy Kreme donut. One chef is experimenting with how to cook ice cream so it becomes powder when you eat it. Another chef is trying to fry ketchup so it's cuttable. And Cantu is experimenting with edible menus.

Diners are asked to "abandon their preconceptions about food." Cantu and his rogue chefs are even experimenting with utensils! Who said a spoon or fork is the best utensil with which to eat?

So what makes Contu such a remarkable chef? He combines the fresh and the familiar. Cantu is all about "imagining starlingly original ways of presetnging and reconstituting food." It is all about "the deconstruction of a comfortable, memory-evoking food and its resurrection in a totally different presentation."

So what's my point?

This is our task as preachers! We are spiritual chefs aren't we? We are dieticians who must create fifty-two meals per year. And that spiritual diet must not just nourish. It must taste good.

My modus operandi is simple when it comes to preaching: say old things in new ways. I want to deconstruct comfortable truths and resurrect them in ways that make people think in new ways. Isn't that what Jesus' parables do? That is what creative incarnation is all about. That is at the heart of hermeneutics and homiletics.

Maybe we need to approach preaching with the same level of intensity and ingenuity as Homaru Cantu?

Think of preaching on a spectrum. A saltless can of corn on one end. Homaru Cantu on the other. Where are you at on the spectrum?

We need to salt our preaching. We need to add flavor to our preaching. We need to give as much attention to our menu as a master chef.

What did Jesus say in Matthew 5:13?

"You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor?"

Pass the salt.