Cooking for the House That Is Grieving

He has cooked for eleven funerals in this parish and he has never once cooked for one like this.

The call came at seven in the morning from the woman who organizes these things, and she did not have to explain, because there is a way she says his name on the phone that tells him what she is going to ask.

The Delgado boy. Twenty. A car on the highway on Saturday night. The house will be full from Tuesday and they will be full for a week, and could he do the arroz, and enough of it, and the beans, and would he mind starting today.

He said of course. He always says of course.

He got the big pot down and he set it on the stove and he stood there with his hands on the rim of it and he looked at his mother's chair.

It is still at the end of the table. Pushed in. Her shawl is still folded over the back of it. She died in February and it is now the middle of May and he has not moved that chair and he does not intend to and nobody who comes into this kitchen has ever said one word about it.

She taught him everything he knows about a pot. She stood right there. Every single thing he is going to make for that family this week came out of her hands into his over about thirty years, and he is going to carry it down the road to a house where a mother is sitting in a front room, and he is going to say almost nothing, because that is what he does.

And under all of it there is a sentence that has been running since seven o'clock this morning.

Who do you think you are.

That is the shape it takes. Not you cannot cook. Not they do not need it. Just: who do you think you are, going down there with a pot, when your own kitchen still has her chair in it, when you cannot get through Wednesday without something taking your legs out from under you. You are pretending. You are a fraud with an apron on.

If anybody has stood over a pot with that sentence running, stay here. There is an exchange in the fourth chapter of Second Kings that ends the whole argument.

She said it is well and it was not, and nobody corrected her

Here is one of the strangest and kindest exchanges in the whole of the Old Testament.

Run now, I pray thee, to meet her, and say unto her, Is it well with thee? is it well with thy husband? is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well.2 Kings 4:26

Her son is lying dead on a bed in the upper room at that moment. She has laid him there herself and shut the door and saddled a donkey and ridden across a valley. And a servant runs out to meet her and asks her three questions and she says two words and rides straight past him.

It is well.

That is not a woman lying. That is a woman declining to hand her grief to somebody standing between her and the place she is going. She keeps her own counsel and she keeps going.

And the astonishing part is a verse later. Elisha says, let her alone, for her soul is vexed within her, and the Lord hath hid it from me. The prophet does not know. God did not tell him. And the prophet's instruction to everybody standing around is: let her alone.

Nobody in that chapter demands an explanation from a grieving woman. Not the servant, not the prophet, not the writer.

You are met by that same God in a kitchen in May, and you were met by Him on every Wednesday since February when your legs went out from under you. 2 Kings 4:27 is the written word putting the prophet's own hands off a grieving woman, and the Spirit who inspired that page is standing at a stove with a man who has both hands on a pot.

Now hold that beside what the woman does next. She goes and gets what her house needs. Vexed in soul, unexplained, unexamined, she rides to the man of God and she catches him by the feet and she does not tidy herself up first.

You have the same freedom she had to go and get what your house needs without composing yourself first, and you were never required to arrive anywhere resolved. 2 Kings 4:27 says her soul is vexed within her and the record treats that as reason to let her alone, and the Holy Spirit does not require a man to be well before He will move through him.

A fraud is somebody pretending, and you are not pretending

Now let me take that word apart, because it has been running since seven this morning and it is the wrong word.

A fraud is a person representing himself as something he is not.

What exactly is he representing? He has not told that family he is at peace. He has not told anybody he is at peace. He has said one thing, which is of course, and then he got a pot down.

Nobody in that house on Tuesday is going to believe he has grief settled. They know his mother died in February. Half that street was at her Mass. When he walks in there with a tray, the mother in that front room is going to look at him and think, his mother died in February, and that is not going to make her trust him less, it is going to be the only reason she can stand to have him in the room.

The word he has been using is not just harsh. It is inaccurate. There is no misrepresentation happening anywhere in this. There is a man who can cook, cooking, in the middle of his own hard year.

You are exactly what you appear to be on that doorstep, and you were exactly that in February when other people carried trays into your house. Nothing in the whole written word makes a settled heart a condition of feeding anybody, and the Spirit of God does not read an apron as a claim.

The pot is not a substitute for the words you cannot find

Let me say the other thing, because I suspect he half believes it, and it is not true either.

There is a voice that says cooking is what he does instead of saying anything, and that the real ministry is the words, and he is dodging.

That voice does not know its Bible.

When Elijah was under the juniper tree wanting to die, the answer was not a sermon. An angel touched him and there was a cake baked on the coals and a cruse of water, and he ate and slept and ate again, and the text says the way ahead is too great for him, and then he went. Twice fed before one word of instruction came.

Food is not the lesser ministry. It is the one God chose in the worst hour of one of the greatest prophets who ever lived.

And in a house in the first week, there is nothing on this earth more useful than a man who arrives at four in the afternoon with something hot, sets it down, does not require a conversation, and goes home.

You are doing the thing God Himself did under a juniper tree, and you were being ministered to the same way in February when the trays came to your door. 1 Kings 19:5 has an angel baking a cake on the coals for a man who wanted to die, and the Holy Spirit has never once ranked a pot below a paragraph.