Used Dishes: A Thanksgiving Story

I relinquished them all from my kitchen, but like a boomerang, every container would find its way back. Most often, I would find my bowls resting on the parsonage’s steps.

Left there, but never empty.

The first time it happened, it was cookies. I was experimenting with cheesecake and dropped off several slabs to congregants. When the plates came back, the first contained a mess of Dave’s famous chocolate chip cookies. A day or so later, another showed up, but this time filled with Hershey’s Kisses. When the last dish arrived, a small pint of maple syrup accompanied it.

“What’s this all about?” I said to my spouse.

“I don’t know, but I bet you Judy does,” she said.

For three years, I took all questions, big and small, to Judy. Her calling to serve as the administrator in the church was just as, if not more, significant as my call to be a pastor there. People came to me if they had a question and wanted more questions. If you needed an answer, you went to Judy. Like J.Q. Dickinson, she is some of the finest salt of the earth.

Peeping into her office, I asked, “So, I’ve been dropping off food to people, and everyone keeps sending me stuff back. Yesterday, I took Elenor a piece of pecan pie, and today, she brought back my plate with a Costco bag of pecans! Am I missing something?”

She smiled, “Here in Lincoln, you never return a dish empty.”

Even without the use of a telescope, you can catch glimpses into different universes. You see a way of life so counter to what is going on anywhere else that it leaves you wondering if what you’re witnessing is real.

I peeked into one of those alternative realities in Lincoln. A place where empty dishes were unacceptable because the people there would not allow them to stay that way. They replenished everything that was empty, including me. On Sunday mornings, my role was to invite everyone to the Lord’s Supper, one of only two ordinances held by those who call themselves Baptists. Emptying out of pews they would come, one by one. The cradle church-goer, the questioning agnostic, all were welcome. Reaching out their hands, I would feed them pieces of broken biscuit I baked in the parsonage oven that morning. As the warm bread left my hands and fell into theirs, I looked them in the eyes and said their names. It was here where I shared a part of me I believed was the best of me. Through the grace of reciprocity, they would do the same—serving me holy communion, becoming priests and ministers themselves, every time they returned my dish, one I expected to be empty, filled instead with an authentic love and way of living I’m still learning to understand. Sometimes this included something savory or sweet.

It always included something sacred.

That was the case during my last week there as their pastor, when I found myself on the phone with a woman there who had been all things to me and mine. She had allowed me into her life. Inviting my family to her townwide Christmas party, to summer evening weenie roasts where the marshmallow bag was always within reach. She called on me when her beloved dog, Georgia, passed. I prayed with her, laying hands on Georgia as we both choked back tears at the holiness of a creature nobler than most. We cried some more when she sold her home of over thirty years and flirted with moving away.

“What will this town do without you, Nancy? Who’s going to deliver food and gifts to the boys in the trailer? Who could ever fill your shoes as justice of the peace? Who going to be the town’s personal private investigator and notary?”

In the end, we wouldn’t let her leave. She admitted defeat, renting a small cottage a mile or so away.

“I have something for you. I’ll leave it outside your office door,” Nancy said before saying goodbye.

I found a casserole dish waiting for me the next day. It was stained in a few places, proof the previous owner had used it well. It was the only dish someone there had ever given me with nothing in it. Picking it up, I discovered a small Post-it note attached. It read,

Food made in used dishes always tastes better.

She’s right. Plates, bowls, pie tins. All belonging to someone and, somehow, to everyone. Dishes that have spent time in someone else’s house have a special kind of seasoning that can’t be replicated.

I’d like to think that people who are willing to be used for the greater good turn out the same way.

This spirit of never returning a dish empty has stuck with me, becoming a continuation of the doctrine of the “to-go plate” from back down South. It follows me like a shadow.

As I finish saying grace in this fellowship hall in Connecticut, I wonder what new spirit these people will put into me. I watch folks I’m still getting to know from two parallel lines, their stomachs grumbling. I make my way to the end of the line, like the good backrow Baptist I am, thinking of the countless bread puddings I’ve produced in Nancy’s used casserole dish, which I have brought with me from Vermont. I have already taken large gobs of that bourbon-soaked Southern goodness to some of the folks who surround me right now—people who are showing me their own traditions and who will, I hope, welcome some of mine.