Alexander’s

Monday, 29. December 2008 by Ronald T. Brown, Ph.D.

These guys might be on to something.
On a Thursday night in mid-December, I was invited to a local steakhouse (Alexander’s) for dinner. Outside, the freezing rain was turning nasty, the kind that makes walking treacherous, let alone driving. But inside the steakhouse, the atmosphere was festive.

Now Alexander’s is not your ordinary steakhouse: you have the option of cooking your own steak on one of Alexander’s expansive grills…or letting the in-house chef take care of that. Whenever I go to Alexander’s, though, I love to cook my own.

That’s why I mentioned earlier that these guys might be onto something—they run a restaurant where most customers are eager to cook their own food. Where else does that happen? Basically, we pay to play on Alexander’s culinary playground. For them, it’s not a bad gig at all.

On this evening, I opted for a sirloin (which probably means nothing to most of you, right? Me neither.). This particular slab of meat was pretty thick. Translation: I logged a lot of additional minutes at the grill.

In that time, I learned that the grill is a great place to people-watch. At any moment, there are about 15-20 other people lined up around the grill. On Thursday, I was standing next to some wanna-be expert who was correcting his son/nephew/younger co-worker in the finer arts of properly grilling a steak. And he was doing so at a volume such that the whole grill could hear his tutorial.

I found the whole scene mildly entertaining, worthy of an internal chuckle.

He struck me as one of those guys who appears to know what he’s talking about, but really doesn’t know any more than you or me. You know the kind. I mean, come on, how hard is it to grill a steak? Every now and then, you flip it until the middle is not blood-red. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but put a man in front of a grill and a captive audience of other men and the process becomes rocket science.

Then there was Alexander’s in-house chef.

He was a large black man, probably around 60 years old, with a nametag that read “Calvin.” From the other side of the grill, he went about his business with this calm swagger. Every now and then, he would softly whistle a song to himself. I studied how Calvin flipped all the steaks he was overseeing, effortlessly insuring that the grill lines on each steak criss-crossed perpendicularly (the geometry teacher in me). It was obvious this man had grilled a steak or two in his lifetime.

He reminded me of Jesus. Not ruffled by our self-proclaimed expertise, yet wholly available if anyone had a question or wanted his advice (I eventually worked up the courage to ask one). Instead, Calvin wore this peace-filled smile as though he were totally content sharing his grill despite being surrounded by all of us amateurs, almost as if He preferred it this way.

One week later, I was reminded of this scene. This time, I was in church celebrating Christmas Eve. We were singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” when my eyes came upon this lyric:

“Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel.”

Pleased to be surrounded by us amateurs. Pleased to invite us up to the grill. Pleased to stand nearby and watch us do things He could’ve done better on His own because He gets how that makes you and me feel.

Do you get that?

Really?

The other day my 5-year-old nephew asked me if Christmas was over. “Oh no,” I told him, “Every day can be Christmas—I don’t care what the calendar says.” (Looking back now, I was admirably trying to make a point without maybe considering the pressure I had just put on my brother and his wife…we’ll see how that one turns out). There’s truth, however, to the notion that we are always Christmas people because we have placed our hope in a Jesus…

“…who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” —Philippians 2:6-7

May we not gloss over the very idea that Jesus—that anyone—would trade in His Godness for a dance with humanity. Pleased as man with men to dwell because, as author Ann Lamott so brilliantly puts it, Jesus understood the power of two words:

“Me too.”