Food, Ideas, and Love
The Litchfield’s horses love me. They recognize my car and start heading my way the second I pull into the drive. They know I am going to feed them. The Sandersville Community Theater people love me too. I feed them pizza and chocolate. The children here love me too. I feed them pizza occasionally on Wednesday afternoons. I find myself in the kitchen more and more as the years go by. My dog loves that. He is right beside me when I open the refrigerator door. He is developing fat rolls behind his shoulders. There is definitely some love there too.
We Christians wage holy war with covered dishes. Jesus said, “If your enemy is hungry, then feed him.” That is how we see God. For us it is about the carpenter-rabbi that so often took bread, blessed it, broke it, and distributed it. He sometimes found himself away from the kitchen, so he just fed thousands at a time miraculously at the world’s greatest picnics. Feeding people is essentially the same thing as loving them. He later took that another step and applied it to spiritual instruction. “Simon Peter, do you love me more than these?” (pointing to freshly cooked fish) — “Then feed my sheep.” Thus began Peter’s more mature role as spiritual instructor and evangelist.
You will find a number of other people around here in the kitchen. They too have discovered the relationship between food and love. A busy kitchen is the sign of a mature church. The sanctuary is where ideas are served up fresh (I don’t preach old sermons for the same reason I don’t keep leftovers in my fridge.) The Bread of Life program, food for funerals and church fellowships, and the dabbling in Sunday morning donuts and pastries all speak of how we express love.
They love me because I feed them, or is it the other way around? The Lord’s Supper is central every Sunday for us. He feeds us because he loves us for a very long time before we begin to love him back at a mature level. All he asks is that we do the same for each other.
