My grandmother was a wonderful cook. She began serious cooking as a young adolescent when her mother died. Mammy had a third grade education, was the wife of a subsistence farmer, and had six children. She was no gourmet cook. She cooked ordinary country food: beans, potatoes, blackberry jam, biscuits, fried chicken, gravy. Yet her reputation for cooking food that both filled and healed has lasted in our community fifty years after her death. Not only that, Mammy knew what Jesus knew in today’s Gospel: people bond over food. Sharing a good meal is a great means of evangelism.
Soon after I was married and became Catholic I met Agnes. Catholic from birth, she grew up on the farm next to my grandparents farm. She told me an interesting story of my grandmother’s evangelism through food.
Agnes’ mother was often sick. She had six children, too, and often was not able to cook for them. When her mother had a “spell” of sickness, she would send word through one of her children. Mammy would then cook enough for both families each day for the noon meal and send or take it over to Agnes’s family. She remembered as children how she and her siblings didn’t mind their mother being sick so much, because Mammy brought such good food. “Her food just tasted different,” she told me. “It filled more than our stomachs. Your grandmother put something sweeter than sugar in it.”
That sweeter something was Mammy’s faith. She put love in her food. That was a bit of a risk for my grandmother, because in that community at that time, people rode masked in the night and burned a cross in Agnes’s front yard—because the family was Catholic. Agnes remembered the family’s terror when it happened. She remembered what her mother said, “Not all our neighbors would do this. Look at how Ella McDonald treats us. She’s a real Christian.” Agnes also remembered finding my grandmother and her mother sitting on the porch or in the kitchen in the afternoons, stringing beans together, laughing, talking, sharing their faith stories along with the goings-on of their families.
In today’s Gospel the scribes and Pharisees are upset with Jesus because he is welcoming tax collectors and other sinners. He is even eating with them! This is the beginning of Luke 15, an evangelist’s core chapter. Today’s reading contains two of the parables Jesus told the scribes and Pharisees to answer their complaints: the story of the lost sheep and the story of the lost coin. The third parable is the story of the prodigal son.
It is interesting to me that we have these readings today, right after All Saints and All Souls. On Tuesday we celebrated with heaven all those who have made it to be in the presence of God—saints in heaven. On Wednesday we remembered all those who are on their way to heaven—who are being purified now to be ready to be in the presence of God. Today we turn our attention to those who are not currently on the heaven path–sinners. God has a special place in his heart for them!
In Tuesday’s first reading we heard of “one-hundred and forty-four thousand” white robed citizens of heaven from among the Jewish people—who perhaps made it through being obedient to the Law—for being the good Jews Paul is describing in today’s first reading, “Circumcised on the eighth day, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrew parentage, in observance of the law a Pharisee…”
Yet today Paul goes on to say, “But whatever gains I had, these I have come to consider a loss because of Christ. More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
Jesus Christ is the source of hope of heaven—for first century Jew or Greek or 21st century active Catholic or active sinner.
Today we hear Jesus say, “I tell you…there will be MORE JOY in heaven over ONE SINNER who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.”
So today our readings lead us to conclude: Whatever rejoicing there is in heaven and within God over all the saints and all the saints-to-be, what makes God happiest is when a sinner repents.
While a sinner is, of course, someone who sins, and that is all of us, for now, let’s think of sinner in this context as someone outside the normal circles of religion. Think of someone who does not go to church, who believes things about God which are different from what we believe, who may not even believe in God. Then include people who break our moral codes: those who lie, steal, do forbidden sexual things, abuse spouse or children, choose drugs, etc.
How do you sit down with these sinners without becoming too much a part of their life and lifestyle? How can you be friendly and true friend—and yet remain true to your faith and its standards?
Try Jesus’ method: sit down together at the table and eat.
People bond over food. Try cooking AND sitting down to eat. I’ve cooked for the poor and for sinners, but I have learned that I am not doing what Jesus did unless I also sit down with them and eat. I need to be with them where they are. That includes getting to know their thoughts, feelings, concerns, and desires. It includes sharing my thoughts, feelings, concerns, and desires with them. It includes seeing both the sins and the beauty in them. It includes letting them see both the sins and the beauty in me.
There is a twist to the story of my grandmother. I’m pretty sure from other things I know about my grandparents, that when Mammy reached out to her Catholic neighbor she thought she was reaching out to a “sinner.” She did not see a Catholic as a Christian. She was evangelizing that family as she did many other people by bringing them to the dinner table and talking.
Mammy died before I met Agnes, so I didn’t get a chance to talk with her about her visits to that neighbor family. But I did talk with one of my uncles one day who had helped burn that cross in their yard. “Even though I was grown, I never got in more trouble,” he said. “Mammy had a great respect for that family. She let me know they had faith, too.”
Mammy evangelized with food; she was evangelized in return over the same dinner plate.
As Pope Francis said in Evangelii Gaudium, “To be evangelizers of souls, we need to develop a spiritual taste for being close to people’s lives and to discover that this is itself a source of greater joy. Mission is at once a passion for Jesus and a passion for his people….we begin to realize that Jesus’ gaze, burning with love, expands to embrace all his people. We realize once more that he wants to make use of us to draw closer to his beloved people. He takes us from the midst of his people and he sends us to his people; without this sense of belonging we cannot understand our deepest identity.” (Paragraph 268)
How can you make God really happy today? How can you be a friend to the one who is different, whom you consider “outside, sinner?”
Prayer:
Lord, like my grandmother, I love to cook. I love to share food. Lead me and guide me to both cook and share a meal. Help me to truly sit down and get to know those who are different, outside, separate from me, those I might see as sinners. Show me how to share my faith with them—and let them share their lives with me, that we might both be evangelized and become pilgrims together. Mammy, pray for me and help me to follow in your footsteps. Amen.
