Christian Oreos

Learning best practices of heaven and earth

07/23/2024

MT 12:46-50 While Jesus was speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers appeared outside, wishing to speak with him. Someone told him, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, asking to speak with you.” But he said in reply to the one who told him, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

This past weekend I visited with about 50 hispanic youth who participated in a weekend retreat at our parish center. My message to them was something my brother told me a few weeks ago. He said, children of immigrant families are essentially like oreo cookies: brown on the outside but white on the inside. One young girl at the retreat who was rather light complected said with a smile: “I am a vanilla oreo because I’m white on the outside and white on the inside!”

In other words, we immigrant children inherit our parents' external appearances – brown skin, or language, or cultural habits – but our values and principles – often called mores – are absorbed from the American culture we grow up in. Brown outside, white inside.

But my real message to the Hispanic youth was not simply to admit we are oreos, but to take advantage of being oreos. How so? Well, since they have a foot in two worlds, they can learn and adopt the best practices from each. For example, Americans have a good habit of arriving early for Mass, but a bad habit of leaving early from Mass. Hispanics, by contrast, arrive late, but also stay late. So, adopt the American habit to come early, and the Hispanic habit to stay late!

Another example is being bilingual and speaking English and Spanish. Typically, teens want to be different from their parents, so we oreos try to speak only English to shows we’re not like mom and dad who speak Spanish, or in my case Malayalam. But that attitude is just caving in to adolescent angst.

The smart move would be to master both English and Spanish (or Malayalam) and you exponentially increase your job opportunities. A bilingual employee is hugely more valuable than someone who only speaks one language. And, I added, that way you can talk about your friends and they won’t know what you are saying about them. They understood that advantage.

In the gospel today, Jesus also invites his listeners to transcend their particular culture, class, or customs. As you know, what matters most in the Jewish world is ethnicity, and the more Jewish you are, the better. There are no Jewish oreos. From the Jewish worldview, there are only two kinds of people.

There are Jews and non-Jews, called Gentiles, or pejoratively, Goyim, the rabble, the hoi poloi, those who don’t count, the plebs, the riff-raff. So, when someone says to Jesus, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside asking to speak with you,” that ethnic bond should trump all other considerations and stop all other conversations.

Jesus, however, replies: “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.” In other words, Jesus invites his hearers to become Christian oreos.

A follower of Christ can be any color on the outside but his inner color, his inner compass, must be the Father’s will. In a sense, Christians must learn from the best of both worlds, whatever their country or culture on earth, but also adopt the gospel values of the Kingdom of heaven. And if you are an American Christian, I guess that makes you a vanilla oreo.

My friends, as the political season ramps up into full gear, please keep this idea of being a Christian oreo in the forefront of your mind. That is, you can be a red Republican or a blue Democrat on the outside, but we are to be Christians on the inside, transcending all political colors. Some families forget that healthy prioritizing of principles and cannot have a civil conversation at the dinner table.

We can be proud of country and work and vote for the candidate we think will “save America.” But remember what Hebrews 13:14 teaches: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come.” To be a Christian means being an oreo, living in two worlds, and adopting the best practices from each.

Praised be Jesus Christ!