Growing up we enjoyed my mother’s rhythm of making sauce every Saturday. We could smell it throughout the house as it simmered for hours in order to be ready for our Sunday meal. Sunday was primarily set aside for church and our church community. So I suppose that’s how I’ve ended up thinking about the connection between meatballs and Christian community…
I try to make spaghetti sauce once every three weeks. It takes about 12 hours to make my sauce. I usually start at around 6:00 AM with water and a large variety of tomatoes (crushed, diced, puree, and paste). To the water and tomatoes I add black pepper, salt, onions, parsley, oregano, basil, garlic, and crushed red pepper. All of it simmers together for about 8 hours (thoroughly stirring every 15 minutes). A big part of making sauce is the process of making the meatballs.
After this long simmering session, I begin to put the meatballs together. I mix ground beef with Italian bread crumbs, salt, black pepper, and onion. I roll the meatballs together and place them on two large cookie sheets and bake them in the oven for 35 minutes. After removing them from the oven, I place them in the sauce and let them simmer together for the remainder of the cooking time (about 3 more hours). This final 3 hours has both the meatballs and the sauce delivering flavor back and forth, with both being changed by the other.
One of the big questions is always the balance between the sauce flavoring the meatballs, or whether the meatballs primarily deliver flavor to the sauce. In my opinion, the sauce should be the driver for flavor, with the meatballs providing the secondary flavor back to the sauce.
I think certain aspects of Christian community function a lot like the combination of my meatballs and sauce over the last three hours of the cooking. Both the individuals and the community as a whole affect each other. The extent of that effect often varies depending upon the nature of the community and the individuals involved. All of this is very complex.
I believe that a healthy Christian community should flavor (affect) the individuals in that community more than any single (or small group of) individual(s) affect the community. And yet, the community needs to nurture the gifts of individuals in order for them to add flavor back to the community.
Bad sauce cannot be fixed by good meatballs…in fact, bad sauce can almost ruin the best meatballs. In the same way – bad community can be very damaging to a person’s soul. On the other hand, really good sauce cannot fix bad meatballs – it can help (but the meatballs need a miracle from outside the sauce…maybe the analogy is breaking down a bit at this point…)…the meatballs need more than what the sauce (community) can give them to completely fix them. Tasting/Discerning the sauce is a critical skill (wisdom) for those engaged in Christian community. Adjusting behaviors (ingredients) on the fly is important (see 1 Corinthians 11)…
Todd Rivetti 