pound cake

 

Recently, Sean of the South commemorated Pound Cake Day, which took me back years and decades. It tapered off, but when I was a freshman at Florida, 1953-54, mama used to bake a poundcake and it would arrive as a large package in the mail, to my joy and that of our small group of Bay High 1953 classmates on our floor of North Hall, the freshmen "men's" dorm. As the saying goes, It's All Good, but my favorite was always the crust.

Pound cake was a tradition in mama's family anyway, my grandmother Gentry was famous among us for her sour cream poundcake, and we kept her proud of it. Its only competition in those years was her Japanese FruitCake. I need to get over to Pensacola at least one more Time, to stand there and reminisce with her and Daddy Walt, for whom my brother is named. 

Walter Henry Gentry. He was Walt, Walter Gentry, but Mamoo, which is what we called mama's mother, used to scream "HENRY!!" when she was frustrated with him. Remembering names, Mamoo had so many grandsons that she couldn't keep our names straight, and she used to call, out "Wilbur - - Bill - - Walt - - THING!" in addressing us. I was Bubba, but over the years it got to be "Thing." There was me, Bill, Chuck, Lowell, Walt, Paul, enough to be her pallbearers one day in February 1985. Daddy Walt was 90 when he died, I was 40, a Navy commander stationed in WashDC, and flew down for his funeral. When Mamoo died I was coming up on 50, the priest at Trinity Apalachicola. 

Time happens to us!

But poundcake. A most memorable poundcake in my life was baked by Ina, a Trinity parishioner - - she always baked one for our covered dish dinners, something extraordinary about it, and I always tried to make sure I got more than my fair share of one slice. 

Our most recent poundcake here, Linda baked for my 88th birthday, and I sliced it across to create three or four layers, then used various jams and preserves between layers. It also was extraordinary, and just a week or so ago we found a slice in the freezer, good as ever. Matter of fact, a slice of still-frozen poundcake goes real nice with a mug of hot & black, nomesane?

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Here's the gospel lesson for today, Friday in the Third Week of Lent,

Mark 12:28–34

One of the scribes came near and heard Jesus and the Saducees disputing with one another, and seeing that Jesus answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ —this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” After that no one dared to ask him any question.

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Matthew (22:34-40) and Luke (10:25-29) each use this little tradition or pericope quite differently, but Mark does the best job with it, and I like to wonder about Jesus saying, "You are not far from the kingdom of God," just what Mark had in mind by "the kingdom of God." In what I read as his "low christology" Mark has Jesus the Son of God as an apocalyptic prophet, as was Paul half a generation earlier: are we to understand Jesus here to mean that this "good scribe" would be saved into the imminently forthcoming kingdom of God on earth? Anyone can express their certainty about what was in Mark's mind, or in Jesus' mind, but it's a little puzzle and question that would make better Sunday school discussion than anyone's certitude. 

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But here's the OT lesson for day after tomorrow, the Fourth Sunday in Lent:

Numbers 21:4-9

From Mount Hor the Israelites set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

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This is a challenging commentary on our God of Grace that makes for good head nodding among the pious who think God is not capable of thinking to do evil to his people who sho-nuff got the punishment they deserved; but some of us are appalled - - although the story, to the extent there was a memory of folks in the wilderness being bitten by snakes, is an etiology to explain what happened. Moses and the bronze serpent? Gaze upon the bronze serpent and you won't die of your snakebite? Okay, I'm good -> it's another great story for discussion in adult Sunday school, but maybe not for a class of little children unless the idea is to really instill the fear of God in them. Did this event really happen as the Numbers author has it? That's not the question; the question is how we come out of this story seeing God and God's character? God isn't just the savior, seeing that the story has God sending the snakes in the first place as punishment in response to the Israelites' whining. What's the point of the story for us today? IDK, most of us, at least most Episcopalians, would not see the story as a deadly warning not to complain about God lest the complainer be smote; maybe most would just be appalled at the Numbers writer's understanding of God for whom, in our understanding, is a God of Grace.

Some in my Sunday school classes over the years would have astutely wondered where in the world Moses in the wilderness got bronze and how he could melt it to fashion a serpent; and would have perceived something about the chronology of the story's actual happening versus when it was told, and finally written down.

Enough. After all, my topic was poundcake. 

RSF&PTL

T88&c

image: pinched online sans permission. belongs to Getty