The Asian Heresies and The Superpower Sermon

Show Notes – The First Church of Lorenzo, Episode 2

Brothers and sisters, the doors are open and the sanctuary is not safe. Welcome to another episode of The First Church of Lorenzo, the only church that swears back.

In this installment we open with a cold, unfiltered rant that starts exactly the way it shouldn’t. Lorenzo declares he’s “done fucking with these Asians” after the YouTube algorithm serves him a serene, three-minute short about the “ancient” method of making soy sauce. What follows is a long, meticulously detailed, increasingly unhinged recreation of every loving, inefficient, mystical step in that video: harvesting soybeans, washing them in the clearest water you’ve ever seen, drying them under leaves, beating them into paste with a foot-powered mallet, sealing them in hundred-year-old clay pots with wax and paper, waiting an undisclosed but clearly sacred amount of time, filtering the final liquid through leaves and rice paper, and portioning the finished product into tiny glass bottles sealed with red wax.

By the time the video ends, Lorenzo has stared at the wall for fifteen minutes, watched it again with a scrutinizing eye, and decided the entire process is preposterous. He refuses to believe anyone in ancient China (or Cambodia, or wherever) ever looked at a soybean field and invented a nineteen-step, six-month ritual that somehow ends in soy sauce. The bit expands to traditional Japanese ink-making (another multi-year, multi-step process that yields a single brick of ink) and lands on the larger claim: we accept elaborate Asian origin stories without question because the culture is framed as mystical and serene, while we would never extend the same uncritical belief to Germans, Inuit, or anyone else. He calls the uncritical acceptance the real racism, insists soy sauce was probably invented sixty years ago in Hackensack by Procter & Gamble, and demands that listeners start examining these narratives with the same skepticism they’d apply to anyone else. The segment is pure First Church acid—detailed, repetitive in the best and worst ways, and deliberately radioactive.

At roughly the twelve-minute mark the tone pivots hard. After a brief church interlude, Lorenzo moves into a quieter, heavier piece about the superpower question men ask each other. The usual answers (super speed, flight, telekinesis, x-ray vision) are run through quickly. His longtime answer was disapparition from the Harry Potter universe—the ability to appear anywhere he could clearly envision, including bank vaults and a particular coffee shop near the Vatican. Age has changed the answer. The superpower he now wants is the simple, devastating knowledge, in the moment, that he is in the presence of a person for the last time.

This leads into a series of personal stories delivered with unusual restraint. He recounts his grandmother’s final visit while dying of pancreatic cancer: the cross-country drive that hit every Red Lobster on the route (the height of opulence for a Depression-era woman), the size-six jeans she bought with the tags left on so everyone would know, and the exact words she spoke while holding his hands in his living room before walking out without looking back. He talks about his friend Corey, who struggled with addiction his entire life and eventually died from the long-term damage of heroin; if he had known it was the final conversation, he would have stopped talking about “broads” and tried to break through. He mentions Bridget, a sweet ex he never properly spoke to at the end. He talks about his grandfather on the other side of the family, who descended into anger and died of a heart attack in a nursing home. He remembers a man named David who simply vanished from his life after a girlfriend conflict. In each case the regret is the same: the things that went unsaid because no one knew the moment was final.

The bit ends with Lorenzo acknowledging that the episode has become a genuine downer—something that was never the plan when he sat down to record—but standing by the usefulness of the imagined superpower anyway. Clear conscience, no stone left unturned, the ability to say everything that needed saying while there was still time.

Timestamps

0:07 – Opening church call: “Brothers and sisters, center is insane…”
0:23 – Welcome to the First Church of Lorenzo
0:31 – “The only church that swears back”
0:42 – Cold open: “I’m done fucking with these Asians, man”
1:34 – Reference to the earlier Season 2 Asian bit
1:43 – YouTube Shorts habit and the algorithm’s usual content
2:34 – Discovery of the serene soy-sauce video
3:05 – Detailed recreation of the ancient soy-sauce process begins
7:43 – Fifteen minutes of staring at the wall; “I’m not fucking buying it”
9:16 – “It’s fucking racism” inversion
9:52 – Parallel Japanese traditional ink-making video
10:18 – Conspiracy theory: soy sauce invented in Hackensack by Procter & Gamble
11:52 – “Thirteen steps in six months to make soy sauce? Go fuck yourself!”
12:09 – “This is the First Church of Lorenzo”
12:16 – Transition into men’s conversations and the superpower question
14:00 – Former desired power: disapparition
15:28 – New desired power: knowing you are with someone for the last time
16:21 – Grandmother’s final visit, Red Lobster pilgrimage, size-six jeans, last words
19:28 – Friend Corey and the conversation that never happened
20:50 – Bridget
21:13 – Grandfather
21:58 – David and the “I’m a phone call away” speech that was never given
23:33 – Acknowledgment that the bit became a downer
23:57 – “So end of the reading of the heresies”
24:03 – Closing and website plug

Visit the site. Right now it’s still lorenzosucks.com. The domain churchoflorenzo.com has been purchased; the redirect just hasn’t been figured out yet. Tell seven people about the podcast.

Music Credits
Holst, Gustav. Mars, the Bringer of War. Performed by the United States Air Force Band.
Copland, Aaron. Fanfare for the Common Man. Performed by the United States Air Force Band.