The Provision of Christmas
Speaker: Jeff Ell
Scripture: Matthew 2:9-12
The Provision of Christmas (MP3)
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The Protection of Christmas
Speaker: Jeff Ell
Scripture: Matthew 2:1-15
The Protection of Christmas (MP3)
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The Preparation of Christmas
Speaker: Jeff Ell
Scripture:
Luke 1:39-45
Luke 2:25-32
The Preparation of Christmas (MP3)
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The Five “P”s of Christmas
Join us for a 5-part series during the Christmas holiday:
The Promise of Christmas
The Preparation of Christmas
The Protection of Christmas
The Provision of Christmas
The Praise of Christmas
Venison Virgin
If the bodies of the approximately three million white-tail deer harvested annually in America were to be laid end to end, the column would stretch from New York to San Francisco. If we added in the elk, antelope, moose, mule-deer and black-tail deer, we would be well on our way to a complete round trip. Yet in spite of these amazing numbers, the vast majority of Americans have never intentionally killed something for food, or for that matter, ever even seen it happen.
The closest the average person gets to a real kill is a glimpse of a carcass lashed to a car top on the interstate. Or perhaps while hiking this autumn they will hear the echo of a gun shot in the mountains. With each passing year, our culture drifts further from personal knowledge of where our meat comes from and how we get it. We forget that even our grannies knew how to wring the neck of Sunday dinner.
I think sometimes that it is our sterilized existence that has made us sterile; made it easy for us turn away from conflict, robbed us of passion; and caused us to kneel before stainless steel altars bleached clean from anything that might offend.
So I wonder. Is there a place for hunting in our world? A place to vicariously gain a deeper appreciation for sacredness of blood? What are the consequences, especially for young men, of this disconnect from hunting? I wonder if mooring ropes that once tied us to our ancestors’ knowledge of sacrifice and death are now entangled in something even more gruesome?
Perhaps we have become like the man who fell into the river while trying to run out of the rain. We have succeeded in avoiding the drops of guts and gore. But we have fallen head-long into a river of factory grown meat that is executed by hired guns, and then butchered by our surrogates.
Our hands are clean, and we politely grimace at the sight of road kill. But our hearts have forgotten ancient truth, and we have lost the ability to correctly appraise the value of blood.
___________
I’m an adult-convert to hunting. Like ninety-five percent of Americans, I didn’t 
grow up in a hunting culture. I grew up in a world of curbs, carpools, standardized tests and weedless lawns. But all that changed when we moved out to the country and pioneered a church where some of our congregation lived in trailers on gravel roads, where one of our older members got her buck every year.
Eventually I succumbed to the culture and found myself in the new hunter safety course. I got a license to kill. For the first five seasons the deer had nothing to fear. I stumbled through the woods, sat up wind on the edge of fields, and followed week-old tracks. But with each meatless season, I learned a little something.
Then on a clear October evening, I sat quietly shivering in the brush next to a meadow. A fawn came out to feed, followed by its mother. The doe walked toward me, lifting her head to listen and sniff the air every few steps, but the breeze was in my face. I squeezed the trigger, she kicked and thrashed for a few seconds and then lay motionless in the grass.
I lost my venison virginity that night and shouted for joy, my rifle held above my head. I carefully tore out the tag on my license: the first big game badge on my way to rural manhood.
I stayed in the brush for a good long while, remembering the safety course instructor’s admonishment to wait before approaching a kill. I took the time to recall the field dressing diagram in the manual: a cartoon deer with cuts along the dotted line marks in its chest and anus. I thought about finding a friend who would gut her for me.
It was getting dark when I walked out into the clearing. The eyes of that doe looked tender. Big doe eyes with long lashes that would never again blink at her little orphan. I rolled her onto her back, my hands trembled as I unsheathed the knife and slipped it into her pure white belly.
Since then, I’ve killed dozens of deer. My finger has pulled the trigger, and my hands have been warmed by internal organs. I’ve felt the texture of lungs (if you must know, it feels like unset Jello mixed with shredded pineapple). I’ve held a heart in my hand. It’s tight, pure muscle, like a strong man’s bicep. The liver feels like a giant leech, porous and slippery. I’ve been up to my elbow in the cavity of a body.
Since then, I’ve also become a better butcher. I’ve learned not to nick the stomach or bladder. I’ve learned to drag the deer to a slope because it is so much easier to spill out guts when gravity is on your side. Also, if you can, try to cut all the way through the sternum, that way you can slice the esophagus close to the tongue. And remember, some states require that you leave the genitals on when you’re transporting the animal. Don’t worry, you can cut them off when you get home and feed them to your dog.
Don’t run to your freezer and toss out your red and white protein just yet.
_____________
Before I was a hunter, I read about our slaughtered Lamb and imagined His blood over the door of my life. I prayed over the Lord’s table and heartily sang about a fountain filled by severed veins washing away sin in a crimson flood. But I sang and prayed without personal experience. Killing connected me with truth in a way cellophane wrapped cutlets could not.
If you’ve kept your vow never to eat anything with a face, I respect that. But understand that vegan philosophy doesn’t mesh well with Biblical revelation. No amount of revisionist scrubbing can clean the Old Testament fingers that point at a bloodied Messiah. The Lord God skinned an animal to clothe the first couple in furry bikini bottoms. Abraham walked between slabs of sacrifice, and Solomon slaughtered 142,000 animals to dedicate the temple.
Jesus ate lamb and fish. He knew sacrifice was messy. He knew blood was sacred. He knew that Larry and Bob types can’t atone for humanity.
It’s not just the weight of revelation that makes it so very difficult for me to embrace a meatless lifestyle, it’s the hypocrisy. Vegan royalty preaches green dogma from organic towers, but their voices are drowned out by the cries of millions of unborn Abels buried behind their lines. Hyper-masticating hipsters rarely see past their vanity rims and walk away from the contradictions of their split tongued prophets.
Call us rednecks, that’s fair. Label us Neanderthals, that’s OK too. We have our own blind spots that need correcting. But if you wear leather or eat flesh, then don’t think me or any other hunter barbaric or evil. I can’t speak for the others in my endangered tribe, but on that night I clumsily stuck my knife into the flesh of a warm mammal, it deepened my understanding of The Sacrifice.
___________
Hunting advocates have been attempting to spread their sport to women and minorities. But the profile of a hunter remains as cliché as ever: a white male with a blue collar job. He owns a pickup and lives outside of the city limits and suburban sprawl. From man caves in Paleolithic France until today, little has changed. Males in general seem to be fascinated with killing.
With every passing year, the pool of young men who would have grown up to be hunters shrinks, while the average age of the remaining hunters rises. It’s the inevitable confluence of increased urbanization, factory farming, and a screen-oriented generation. There is little hope that our cultural disconnect with hunting will turn around anytime soon.
Still little boys play politically incorrect games like cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers. They turn sticks into guns, and stones into hand grenades, and their mothers can’t stop them. Young men play Halo and blast each other with paintballs. Seems that killing is embedded in Nimrod’s nephews. Killing has become a game; little is sacred in that world.
Yet the taking of human life wounds the soul. My old friend’s eyes still fill with tears when they tell me their stories of war. Maybe its why some of the men and widows of previous generations more correctly appraise the price of human blood. Maybe it’s why they don’t play shooter games.
This is the essence of conundrum, there is no middle ground between gaming screen and the killing field; no safe, legal place to shed blood and smell its sacredness. No place for our children can learn that when you pull the trigger in the real world, there is no reset button.
____________
It was hot this summer, and one July night I fell asleep under an air conditioner. The coolness and rush of air induced dreams of antlers dancing above the brush, coyotes running in fields, and camouflaged friends leaning against pickups. I dream often of the hunt.
If I were born a thousand years ago, I would have danced in the firelight and jabbed my spear into the smoke. I would have slapped my painted hand on the wall and drawn exaggerate pictographs of my trophies antlers. If I were born two hundred years ago, I would have disappeared over the Cumberland Gap. I would have left my family to poach the vast hunting grounds on the other side of the Appalachians.
Alas, I am a modern man, born too late as some would suggest. So now the hunting license has become my passport to the old world and visa to antiquity. A seasonal portal where I can step back in time and follow a fading trail where Gore-Tex, Vibram, buckskin and feather meld on ancient path.
Any day now a breeze will fall from the north, the leaves will turn, and the killing will begin. I will change. My pace will slow, and I will walk toe to heal; the leash of connectivity will go slack. I will crouch, listen, and sniff the air. I will look at nothing and watch everything. I will fade into the forest and become a wisp of a man drifting through the mountains. I will gently squeeze the trigger.
