My grandmother passed away just over a year ago. Time has a strange hold on our perceptions, so it feels both very long ago, and just yesterday. She and I shared a birthday, and every year that our schedules aligned we would celebrate together. She would always bake me a German Chocolate Cake, and finally gave me the recipe when I married. I’ve resolved to make it every year for my birthday since her passing. 

It’s not the most complex recipe, but it’s challenging enough for my skills. I whip egg whites and fold them in, I try to arrange the finicky pecan frosting in a way that doesn’t look slap-dash, and I think of my Grandmother. She wasn’t perfect, but we all know that. We try not to remember the faults of the dead–I wonder sometimes why we begrudge extending that same grace to the living. But for all that she did imperfectly, she did food well. We always joked that her love language was food. I think she appreciated something about food that many of us in our modern sensibilities do not. She didn’t understand it without error of course, she struggled with weight most of her life, and when she battled cancer the change in diet to try and fight it almost wasn’t worth survival to her. Nevertheless, what she got right was something forgotten; something I think at the very heart of the reason for food, it’s ontology if you will. I don’t think she would have thought she had a philosophy of food, but she did. For better or worse, we all do. She saw food and love as indissoluble, bound together in some unknown, but obvious way, and always directed by gratitude. To her, food was never about just the food itself.

She spent her girlhood in the Great Depression, five-years-old when the second Great War replaced it with new concerns. In her home in North Dakota she would gather around a small table with her four sisters and parents. We inherited her table, and it is so small my six-year-old sits at it alone to draw. But this tiny table was the family table of my grandmother’s youth. It was there she and her sisters sat with their German-speaking parents to say grace and eat whatever fare they could afford. I think her experience gave her an appreciation for all food, a practice many of us in our lives of decadence have forgotten. Many of us as Christians may give thanks for our food, but we do so with pantries and refrigerators full; what my grandmother knew was a kind of gratefulness that came with the knowledge that a table full of food was not a guarantee. She knew that every morsel is a gift from our Creator, given to us to sustain us, and somehow mysteriously bring us closer together.

My grandmother was also a single mother. She worked full time to care for her three boys, and she cooked for them. She was the mother who made their favorite foods and always made sure there was enough. I know she was saddened that she had to be away, and cooking was her way of being present, of easing the sting of her necessary absence, of loving them the best possible way she could.

This way of loving extended to us as her grandchildren. If we off-handedly mentioned liking a type of pie, or meal, she would always–and I mean always–have it on hand. I once told her I liked hot dogs and macaroni and cheese, and every time I stopped at her house coming home from college, she would have enough macaroni and cheese and hot dogs to feed a football team. This was how she showed us she cared about us, thought of us, and that she was grateful for our company.  She said I love you through the food she offered. 

Food is important. We know this. We know we would die if we didn’t eat. But it may not be important in the ways we tend to emphasize. It isn’t important in that it shrinks or expands our waist. It isn’t important in its perfected balance of macronutrients, or finely tuned ingredients that can optimize our health. It isn’t that those things are of no importance, but they are not the heart of food. They are secondary. I have a suspicion that the heart of food may be worship. What we love is often evidenced in how we interact with the food we eat (or don’t eat). Unfortunately, our relationship with food tends to expose, not a great love for God, but for our own flesh. To our shame, our god is often our belly.

Our 21st century appetites are not the only ones tainted by this sinful neglect of God and disordering of his good gifts. Food has been heavily involved in the history of mankind. While the first transgression against God wasn’t about food, it’s not incidental that the heart posture of disobedience led to the external act of eating something (that which was forbidden in this case). When the Israelites first turn away from the God who had miraculously, incredibly, mercifully, rescued them from slavery and annihilation, their rebellion begins almost immediately. Food takes a significant role when Aaron builds the golden calf in the brief interim when Moses is talking with God. Aaron crafts this god-imposter, and Moses tells us how the people of Israel responded:

And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. (Exodus 32:6)

They offered food to their false god, then they ate and drank in celebration, and then they plunged headlong into sexual immorality, as the euphemism “play” tells us. Food is a continued source of trouble for them in their whole wilderness wandering. Later as they wandered in the wilderness and God gave them miraculous bread from heaven, a blessed foreshadowing of the Bread of Life who was to come and satiate us forever, theirs was not a response of awed gratefulness for how he miraculously satisfied their hunger, rather they complained that it wasn’t the rich fare of Egypt. They longed to return to slavery because of this disordered understanding of food. 

When Jesus faced Satan’s attempts to corrupt him, he was hungry, and one of the three temptations was to turn a rock to bread to satisfy his legitimate hunger. Thankfully, unlike Adam and Israel before him, Jesus withstands temptation.

Later Jesus commanded us to eat in remembrance as he anticipated his death. Of all the practices for remembering, this is the most direct.  Eat, remember me. And just like Israel, the early church struggled with food too. The church of Corinth distorted not just food, but even the sacred meal designed to remember Christ. Instead of eating to remember, and eating to serve one another and grow closer in unity, eating to worship the one true God, they ate and drank merely to satisfy their own hunger with no thought beyond personal pleasure and bodily satisfaction. They fell into the false thinking that so many of us do, they believed food is for the stomach only.

The Corinthians struggled with food, they also famously struggled with sex. It’s not accidental that food and sex often go together. Their abuse both come from the same mistaken premise, that our bodies are merely bodies, and what we do with them has no spiritual significance. But Paul corrects this for the Corinthians, and us. For whatever we do now, we must do to the glory of God. So sex must be within the correct and beautiful confines of marriage, acknowledging that it is a picture of something much bigger, something eternal. In the same way, Christian eating looks different. It must also be within the correct confines, with eyes to those who are in need, as a way of serving, and a mysterious mechanism by which we remember the very foundation of our faith: Christ’s death and resurrection. This is in great contrast to how the Corinthians ate, in self-focus, to satisfy worldly hunger, and with no thought of the other or our eternal bond. But Christians have a new food ethic, just as we have a new sexual ethic. We eat to the glory of God, we eat to remember the Body of Christ that was broken for us, and his Body present in his people. Eating is an act of worship, and we must right our hearts to be worshiping him, not our stomachs, with the aim of glorifying God, not merely satisfying our appetites. This is absolutely true in our taking of communion, and I think it is in all our eating.

My grandmother thought of food as a way to serve other people. To remind them of her love for them. To connect her past with the present in a way that brought the people she loved together. Food isn’t just fuel. It isn’t just pleasure. It isn’t just for survival or for our desires. It evokes memory, connection, and love. This is why meals shared can be a foundation for evangelism, and a place for discipleship and fellowship. This is why praying before we eat is not merely a tradition or habit (though we often treat it as such). It is why the Lord’s people are not merely asked, but commanded to take and eat and remember, often and together. And while a German Chocolate Cake is most certainly not the Lord’s supper, that doesn’t mean there can’t be an element of remembering in every meal we eat if we right our hearts. The food we eat can be eaten to the glory of God, with thanksgiving as we acknowledge we eat only because of his provision, in remembrance of the Bread of Life who alone can satisfy us. The food we make can be prepared to the glory of God, in service to others as an act of love. Our tables can, and ought to be places where God’s glory is evidenced, and our love for him is apparent.