Of all the things my Cajun grandfather cooked, it was his roux that held the greatest mystery. It was a frequent familial topic of discussion. Other family members would try to get their roux dark enough to lend the right amount of richness to the etouffee, and frequently, it would be either too light or it would burn.
Roux in Cajun dishes is the secret ingredient, and it’s the foundation of dishes like etouffee and gumbo. A little vegetable oil or butter and some flour, that’s all. But like making a risotto, you have to stir and monitor roux constantly. Walking away from it for even a minute can mean you’ve lost everything. Stir and stir and stir. Watch and watch and watch. And at some point—and this is where the mystery lies—the roux will be ready. If your roux cooks just a second too long, it will burn. It's a bit like performing a chemical titration. One drop too many can kill the experiment.
Most recipes about making a dark roux will give you descriptions of the color of the roux. It should be the color of peanut butter, some say. But there’s something more to judging the status of a roux simmering on the stovetop. The ultimate judge of its readiness can’t be a visual description in a recipe, nor can it be a defined amount of time. So many factors are involved: the type of cooktop, levels of heat, kinds of oil, types of flour. The ultimate judge is a kind of sixth sense in the cook, who can tell when the point of perfection has been reached by smell and sight. I wish I’d asked my PawPaw how he could tell when a roux was done, but I bet he wouldn’t have given a specific cooking time or a particular shade of brown. I think he would have said something like, “I’ll know it when I see it.”
There’s a mystery to making a good roux that alludes even the best of cooks. It’s annoying in its lack of specificity and so is unlike the chemistry of baking. It’s not a science; it’s an art. And this indefinable art and its accompanying air of mystery are frustrating to those of us who are generally impatient and like clearcut answers. Cooking up a delicious dark roux will vary based on your environment and ingredients and pace of stirring. It requires settling into the moment with patience and attentiveness. It necessitates giving up control to all those unpredictable factors that are operating behind the scenes. But despite these uncontrollable factors, the art of discerning when the roux is ready can be acquired only with time.
And time is the key that unlocks some of the mystery to Jesus’s parables. You must spend time with them, and even that’s not enough because parables speak of something that is timeless. I don’t know how a Biblical literalist reckons with parables because they’re meant to frustrate and challenge, not to give answers. To literalize them is to destroy them. There’s no secret code to unlocking a parable. A parable invites us into a world of mystery, a world in which we must live and breathe and spend some time. And when speaking about the kingdom of God, Jesus can’t limit himself to one shining parable. He must tell several, each of which can’t fully encapsulate the meaning of that mysterious and glorious kingdom.
Being a good agrarian man, our Lord naturally gravitated to images of planting. He compares the kingdom of God to the scattering of seed upon the ground, which would, of course, make complete sense to a farmer, whose life depends on the weather and infinite patience. It would probably even make some sense to an avid gardener who gardens as an avocation. But it may be bewildering to those of us without a green thumb and especially to those of us who live in a culture that operates at ninety miles an hour with no time to breathe and wait and watch. If you ask me, the most surprising thing of all in this image of scattered, growing seed is its uncontrollability.
This parable must frustrate the living daylights out of anyone who adores planning and wants to be in control. The man in the parable does practically nothing. He scatters the seed and then waits. And waits and waits. And watches and watches and watches. Meanwhile, the earth has a mind and agency of its own, producing first the blade, the ear, and then the full grain in the ear. Who knows how long this would take. And while there are signs that the harvest is nearing ripeness, Jesus gives no discernable length. There’s no recipe for the readiness of this roux. The laborer waits and waits and waits until the harvest is ripe.
The problem is that this may seem like a recipe for laziness or inactivity. Perhaps an irresponsible reading of this parable gives license to those in the modern Church who say they’re managing decline or who are inclined to give up on the Church’s future altogether. But nowhere does Jesus’s parable equate waiting with lack of agency. In fact, this parable demands the most vigilant form of agency. It demands that the laborer know when the harvest is ripe, at once, for the sickle. The cook can’t leave the roux for even a second on the stovetop lest it burn.
There are all kinds of reasons why this parable frustrates. There’s, above all, the mystery of time. There’s the surrendering of control to the timeline of the environment. But there’s also the knowledge that to know when the harvest is ripe we must have lived. We must have lived through some crops that we failed to harvest in time. We must have lived through disappointments of too much rain or not enough. We must have been forced to wait with excruciating patience until the time was right. We must have gone through some trial and error to hone our skills of discernment, to know just when the harvest was ready for the sickle. We must have cooked gallons of roux and seen and smelled them before we could say like my PawPaw, “I’ll know it when I see it.”
But despite some of the frustrating aspects of this parable, I find it to be one of the most encouraging for the modern Church. It’s unbelievably good news. It doesn’t give us easy answers or a definitive key to discerning the ripeness of a particular harvest. It simply assures of us something that many Christians have too easily forgotten or ignored. It comforts us with the good news that the harvest will come one day. It assures us that in God’s kingdom, there will always be growth, and the Gospel will live on and never disappear.
Sure, experiencing the fruit of God’s kingdom may take far longer than we imagined or would like. It will undoubtedly require infinite patience. Chiefly, it challenges those of us who like control to cede that control to God, who alone gives growth to the seed in God’s good time. In this, there’s hope for us when the pews seem far too empty. There’s hope when we’re confronted with the pessimism of statistics trying to predict the future of the church. The problem with all those supposedly clear signs is that they wrest control of the kingdom from God and give it to humans. And this is a grave error.
So, instead of predictions and statistics, we can opt for something less definable and more mysterious, however frustrating it may be. It’s rather like making a roux. Jesus’s parable suggests that our role in God’s kingdom is not to claim total responsibility for the growth of the Gospel or even to control it. Our job is to scatter the seeds and wait. And wait. And wait. But while we’re waiting, and through troublesome seasons and destructive weather, we learn to pray. We learn that if the bedrock of our lives is prayer, and if we are patient, we’ll learn the art of discernment. We’ll learn how to keep stirring the roux while attentively but non-anxiously watching its color and smelling its aroma. And we wait some more. And we continue to pray. And we watch, and we wait yet some more. And then in God’s good time, with plenty of living and lots of time, we’ll eventually know when the harvest is ripe. The roux will be ready. We’ll know it because we can see it. And we’ll be able to see it because we have been trusting in God and saying our prayers. And so, we’ll put in the sickle, and we’ll give thanks because, as promised, the harvest has come.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 16, 2023