There is a Lot of Food in the Bible

22 hours ago

2 Min Read

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The Bible begins not in a flower garden, but in one flourishing with fruits and vegetables and herbs.

Abraham welcomes three heavenly guests with a picnic of fresh bread, roasted meat, and cheese.

Joseph—before revealing his true identity to his brothers—invites them to sit down to what must have been the most extravagant meal of their lives.

The Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt was marked by an intentionally hasty meal.

It’s nearly impossible to think of the wilderness wandering without thinking of manna and quail and water spewing from rock.

Daniel’s vegetarian diet is such a notable feature that it has spawned a popular modern diet.

Jesus began his public ministry by turning water into wine.

Jesus fed thousands of people at a time, and on more than one occasion.

Jesus got in plenty of trouble with the religious elite for his dinner parties with tax collectors and sinners.

More than a few of Jesus’ parables culminate in a raucous feast.

His final Passover Meal with his disciples’ was the institution of the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

The risen Jesus prepares breakfast on the beach for his friends.

And the great eschatalogical hope, as expressed in Revelation, can only be best described as a wedding banquet.

Again, there is a lot of food in the Bible. I say this as plainly as I can only to hopefully make the point unmistakable: If it’s there, it’s there for a reason. If we rush past all the smells and tastes and textures, if we pass over meals as mere colorful details in order to get on to the more “important” or “spiritual” matters, I suspect we may miss much of the point.

Food is much more than nourishment.

Robert Farrar Capon says it best:

To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste. The Supper of the Lamb

See Exodus 12:29-42.

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Remembering

2 days ago

1 Min Read

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Rituals are memory-keepers.

We blow out the candles to remember that we were born.
We clink our glasses to remember that we made vows to one another.
We stand for the anthem to remember others’ sacrifice.
We visit a grave to remember a life that shaped our life.
We break bread and drink wine to remember that “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”

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Be Grateful for Quiet Nights

4 days ago

2 Min Read

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I have this friend—we’ll call her Emily—who seems to always be upset about something. She’s constantly up in arms about some tragedy somewhere in the world. She’s in a persistent state of anxiety over someone else’s suffering. Her news apps are constantly pinging her with updates, and she’s hyperactive on several social media platforms. “If you’re not heartbroken and outraged,” Emily tells me, “then you’re just not paying attention!”

But maybe we don’t always need to pay attention. Maybe we just can’t. Not to everything. Not to everyone. Not everywhere. Our limited hearts and minds simply can’t hold it all.

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What Worship Will Ask of Us

5 days ago

2 Min Read

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We can never quite anticipate what worship will ask of us.

One aspect of worship that has been lost in a lot of our modern, western conceptions of worship is that worship involves sacrifice and service. Especially since “worship” in common parlance has become associated almost exclusively with singing songs, with an entire economic industry is built up around it (nearly $1 billion annually, depending on how you’re counting). In such a consumeristic environment, it’s only natural that “worship” would become more about “What do I get?” than “What do I give?”

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Letting Go is Hard

6 days ago

2 Min Read

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How many chances do you give a stubborn heart? Two? Three? Four? How about ten? Or even more?

One way of reading the Exodus narrative is God giving Pharaoh chance and after chance after undeserved chance to soften his stubborn heart. Yes, some translations of some of the explanations say that, “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” (Exodus 9:12) Such language paints the picture that, all along, it was Yahweh’s desire to give Egypt a proper beat down before liberating his people from slavery.

But that’s not the whole story.

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A Tumbleweed Prayer

7 days ago

2 Min Read

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Sometimes it feels like God is silently for you and the whole world is loudly against you.

It’s taken me a long time to realize this: My enemies are mostly in my head. I mean this in two ways:

First, I’m making a lot of it up. The world is not really conspiring against me. I’m not truly that important; I’m not on other peoples’ minds nearly as much as I assume.

Second, my real enemies are not “out there” but “in here.” My worst enemies are my own thoughts. Those negative and adversarial voices in my own mind. Whether the echoes of people who have hurt me in the past, demons messing with my thoughts, or my own imaginative negativity bias—they’re not actually what one might call “real.” They pose no real threat to me beyond me feeling that they do.

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A House of Prayer

1 week ago

2 Min Read

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The following article was written for our monthly newsletter:

Every place has a purpose. If you walked into your doctor’s office and saw a deep fryer cooking up some fries behind the counter, you’d have questions. If you sat down at your favorite burger joint, and the waitress asked to record your weight, temperature, and blood pressure, you’d probably walk out. The wrong activity in the wrong place!

The central place of ancient Jewish identity and worship was the temple in Jerusalem. For centuries, through all the ups and downs of faithfulness, God’s people gathered there in order to draw near to him. Unfortunately, by the time Jesus came on the scene, God’s people were once again in a bit of a spiritual slump. The necessary commerce that supported temple worship—the selling of sacrificial animals, and the exchanging of foreign currency for pilgrims—had come a little close to the center. Rather than remaining outside the temple courts, commerce had worked its way inside. The purpose of God’s temple was being confused. The wrong activity in the wrong place.

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The Divine Ecosystem (A Prayer)

June 3, 2026

1 Min Read

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This past Sunday, on Trinity Sunday, I preached a sermon that I titled The Divine Ecosystem. I’ll save you the time of listening to the podcast by telling you that I basically said this: Just as plants need light, soil, and a favorable environment, so do we thrive in the ecosystem of the Trinity.

I ended by praying over our congregation this expanded version of Paul’s trinitarian prayer in the very last verse of 2 Corinthians:

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Green is for Growth

June 1, 2026

3 Min Read

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In Spring we are surrounded by explosions of new life: Trees budding out with fresh leaves. Daffodils peeking out of hibernation. Gardens multi-colored with fresh vegetables. Honeysuckle and wisteria fragrance wafting through the air.

In the creation we catch glimpses of the glory of the Creator. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes,

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Not only do we experience the glory of God in the visible creation of individual blackberry bushes, but we see his glory within the changing of seasons: The exuberance of Spring. The fullness of Summer. The transformation of Fall. And even the dormancy of Winter.

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The Silence of Jesus

April 3, 2026

6 Min Read

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Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed.

-Mark 15:5

The silence of Jesus is remarkable.

His economy of words. His restraint. His refusal to add to the noise.

But Jesus is not known for being a silent man.

Here is a man who is incredibly good with words. As a tween he could hold conversations with the adult scholars of scripture in the Temple. Now, as a grown man, thousands of people flock to listen to him teach. Lawyers try to trip him up with questions—and he finds a loophole. Religious leaders try to back him into a corner—and his witty and wise response makes them look foolish. He tells stories so simple a child can follow them, and yet so layered that we are still discussing their meaning today.

And now here we see him, death bearing down on him as he is on trial, and he is silent.

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