Gumbo
Nathan Attwood
Pastor, Marianna First United Methodist Church
"After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and people and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands."
Have you had the chance to eat at the Cajun Corner? It's the newest restaurant here in Marianna, owned and operated by my dear friends and members of my church, Kim Walters and her son, CJ Jackson. They have a wonderful selection of authentic Louisiana-style cuisine--beignets, gumbo, etouffee, Po-Boys, boudin, and more. They have a number of Jackson County touches, too, including Southern Craft Creamery ice cream; they serve boiled peanuts on the table like a Mexican restaurant brings chips and salsa. It's a fantastic place.
CJ learned to cook in Louisiana restaurants. He learned authentic Cajun cuisine the only way to learn it correctly--locally. We were recently discussing the roots and background of all the unique foods from the region. I was telling CJ about a food tour I took in New Orleans years ago in which a guide took us to places where signature foods were invented. We sampled the food and learned how those foods were created.
For example, I learned that a century ago New Orleans had a large immigrant Italian population due to the need for stone masons. The traditional Italian practice was to have restaurants that would serve different foods on small plates, such as cheese, olives, bread, etc. Busy workers needed a way to get their food on the go, so a local restaurant created a meal to put it all together in a portable way--the muffaletta, my favorite sandwich, was born. Similarly, the Po Boy was invented as a means to feed poor Irish workers a cheap sandwich from trimmings of meat thrown on a cheap roll of bread. Fried shrimp and oysters came later.
Pralines are an adaptation of the French practice of eating a small almond confection between meal courses as a palate cleanser. Louisiana doesn't have almonds, but it does have pecans, and it does have sugar cane plantations. Oila!
Gumbo is only gumbo because of okra, a vegetable that was not native to the Americas. It came to this country from Africa, carried as seeds in the pockets of human beings who were trafficked across the Atlantic and, horrifically, sold as property through the New Orleans trade route at the end of the Mississippi River.
Bananas Foster, boudin, jambalaya, and more. Louisiana is full of good food and full of stories about where the food came from and who the people were whose story intersects with the cuisine. New Orleans has a unique geography and a unique history that has brought people together from around the world into a unique blend. New Orleans is where Deep South culture meets African-American and Caribbean roots, where French language and history connects with Americana, where immigrant populations from many European nations found their own niche and worked their way into the mix of flavors and sounds. Like any family story, and like the human story, not all of the interactions are a happy tale and the memory of prejudices and injustices, too, are preserved in the items on the menu. Still, even at our worst, the human family has received and included the gifts of all people and made them part of who we all are and what makes our collective life rich and beautiful.
When John the Revelator imagines the people who make up the citizenry of God's Kingdom, when he gets a vision of those family members who will spend eternity worshiping around the throne and eating at the wedding supper of the Lamb, he see people of every language, of every race, of every tribe. In this life, we are all beloved and, praise the Lord, we are not the same. In the life that is to come, we will be perfected, but even then, we will not be the same. The Kingdom of God is not a melting pot in which our differences and uniqueness dissolves into an undifferentiated mass. We are more like gumbo, a stew of intermingling flavors in which our distinctives make the whole so much better.
Every congregation contains people of varied ages, genders, perspectives, and experiences. I teach a small Bible study that, at first appearances, seems like a pretty homogeneous group of older adults. But the people in that group came to Marianna from Georgia, Wisconsin, England, Nebraska, Massachusetts, and Kansas. Our varied backgrounds enrich our conversation. They never diminish it.
We are tempted to divide up in this world. We still have white churches and black churches. We have churches divided by doctrinal differences, too, though most people know so little theology these days that they tend not to understand those differences. We surely let the politicians divide us and we mainline their propaganda teaching us that our neighbors who vote differently are somehow to be feared and never to be trusted. That's a shame. It's a shame, too, when we put people in the church of different ages in different rooms to sing different songs. Maybe that's the only way to get people to come to church, but we lose a lot when we don't have the opportunity to experience each other and learn from each other. I know I learned a lot from my grandfather and I know my grandsons like to hang out with me. One of the great things churches provide is lots of grandpas and grandmas and lots of grandkids for people who aren't related by blood.
John envisions a church, a world, a community, a people more like gumbo. I like okra and shrimp and onions and bell peppers and celery separately. But I like gumbo a whole lot better. It has a story, a heart, spice, and tastes like the sound of jazz. Maybe we could be a people who accept each other a little bit more, not only because it's the right thing to do, but because life is better with what comes from sharing it with all God's children.