The Bible is full of stories about food. Adam and Eve decide to eat some fruit. Joseph saves his family and country from famine. God sends the Israelites manna when they’re in the desert – which, if you were wondering, tasted like wafers made with honey according to Exodus 16:31. When they first see the Promised Land, they call it a land flowing with milk and honey. The book of Ecclesiastes claims that “there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad.” (Ecc 8:15) God is associated with sustenance, a pretty high stakes part of our lives. We need food. As Christians we’re pretty familiar with God being in bread and the wine – but there are other notable foods in the Bible.

Proverbs has several anecdotes about honey. Like: “My child, eat honey, for it is good and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul; if you find it, you will find a future, and your hope will not be cut off.” (Prov. 24:13-14) Here’s another one: “If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest, having too much, you vomit it up.” (Proverbs 25:16) “It is not good to eat much honey or to seek honor on top of honor. Like a city breached, without walls, is one who lacks self-control.” (Prov. 25:27-28) The prophet Ezekiel wrote that when God called him, God handed him a scroll to eat. Instead of tasting like animal hide, the scroll tasted as sweet as honey and gave him the message he needed to say to God’s people.

God is often associated with delicious things, fruit, milk, honey. The word of God is sweet, and as we read from the Psalms, you can taste and see that God is good. Maybe food and eating have some things to teach us about God. Like that we should slow down and savor God’s presence and God’s word. That spiritual nourishment is better as an everyday meal than a twice a year feast. That when God was figuring out how to make us, at some point God was like “You know what sensation I want them to experience? Deliciousness. Sweet, and spicy, and sour, and savory. Let there be flavor.”

Then when Jesus walked the Earth, he spent so much time eating with people, it’s like it was his favorite thing to do. He wasn’t so much the meal organizer as he was the guy traveling around just waiting to see who would invite him over to eat next. Where Jesus taught, meals appeared. On mountainsides and in people’s homes. The gospels of Matthew and Luke tell us that critics accused Jesus of being “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” What does that tell you about the amount must’ve he ate and drank? You wouldn’t call someone with impeccable table manners a drunkard and a glutton. Nor do you get accused of being a friend of sinners if you’re too good to hang out with them. But if there’s one thing Jesus was good at, it was challenging people’s expectations of him, especially around tables. He taught using food as a metaphor, because it was familiar stuff for everyone. He ate with the people he wasn’t supposed to eat with so that he could teach them. He called us the salt of the Earth; we bring the flavor to life. We make things taste better, so long as we don’t lose our saltiness.

When I first started to really deconstruct my faith in my 20s, I had already started college. If you want to hear the whole story – you should go and listen to the first episode of the Rev’d up podcast on Spotify, because it’s kind of a rollercoaster, and too long of a story to tell you now. Part of my journey was to leave the Christian university where I started, and transfer to Ohio State University where I joined a progressive Methodist church. Now, this may sound silly, but at the time, I was so scared they would reject me.  My first conversations with the student pastor there were all about assuring me that I was acceptable, and welcome, and wanted with them. She encouraged me to join one of their C-groups, (which stood for community groups). These were intergenerational groups, with college students, working adults, and older members of the church all mixed together. Our group’s purpose was just for us to get to know each other and to find out how we could support each other. No pastor was present.

The locals suggested that we meet at a pizza place. So, when the time came, I made my way there, white knuckling the wheel because I was very new to the environment of downtown Columbus. When I arrived, I realized this wasn’t just a pizza place. I was in a campus bar. Now, I had not yet spent any time in campus bars. The floor was sticky, and the music was loud. I took in the jukebox, the billiards tables, and the patrons. I was more than a little uncomfortable, and a part of me stayed ready for something bad to happen, but it never did. I slid into the wooden booth covered with scratched-in names, and sharpie graffiti. I remember both admiring all the marks that other humans had left behind, and wondering why they would let people do that to their furniture.

We ordered a couple of pizzas and a pitcher of beer. Then we all started to share where we had come from, and what we had been through along the way. We told stories, shared laughter, and used all the four-letter words. We were honest with each other. We were real and messy. We ate our pizza off of paper plates and drank the pitcher of beer out of thin plastic cups. It looked nothing like the last supper in our paintings, but that meal of pizza and beer is a sacred memory of mine. As I relaxed into the smooth, worn, wood of the booth, I was beginning to feel safe. There was no high bar for me to jump over here. I didn’t have to prove my goodness to them. I just could just be myself, something I hadn’t realized I was starving for. They didn’t care that I wasn’t sure what I believed. They empathized with what I had been through. They told me about their own confusing years as college students. They told me that they also had more questions than answers. They affirmed that my questions were a part of my journey, and not a sign that I was irreversibly broken.

This is a moment where I tasted and saw that God was good, through those folks. In the dim light of a campus bar. In mouthfuls of pizza and cheap beer, with no clergy present. They handed on to me something that had been handed to them. Their ordinary human compassion and their faith, which was able to accept me where I was. Maybe it didn’t look like the Last Supper, but I wonder if might’ve felt like it. I wonder if the disciples had that same feeling of being embraced, safe, and accepted. I wonder if they appreciated all the wisdom being shared with them during those mealtimes with Jesus. The same experience that Paul received and handed on to the Corinthians.

Perhaps, it was around a table that he first invited them to come taste and see the savior that had been good to him. I wonder if he brought along bread and juice when he first told them about the night Jesus gathered his disciples for a holiday meal – the Passover – a yearly religious ritual they inherited from their ancestors.  An ordinary tradition being kept by a handful of ordinary guys, mostly fishermen. One of them was about to become a traitor, but Jesus didn’t hesitate to pass the bread or offer the cup. He told them to remember him when they eat, because he would not always be with them. Soon, it would be in their hands to keep passing the bread and offering the cup to the world. To hand on what they received.

So, we hand on what we have received. Ideally, we hand on the deliciousness of God, the sustaining nature of God, and an idea of how to maintain your spiritual health through the ritual of regular nourishment, so that all may know what it’s like to be full in their spirit. Whatever deliciousness you’ve found in God, you would not have tasted it without the journey you’ve been through. When you share it, it’s like telling someone about honey. If they’ve never tasted it, you can’t really convey its flavor in words. We all have to taste honey for ourselves to know what it’s like. In the same way, when we invite people to join us here or encourage them to find a spiritual community wherever they are, it is like saying to them – “Taste and see! Right over here is where I found the honey and it’s delicious.” But you can’t taste it for them, and you don’t have any control over whether they also enjoy it. What’s delicious to you might not be delicious for someone else, and I think it’s probably meant to be that way.

What I’m doing, is trying to point you to where I found something delicious, like the bees do for each other when they find a patch of especially good flowers. What I’m trying to hand on through my work is the open-hearted church that I received when I needed it. I want to hand on the opportunity to be in a place like the one that embraced me as my college student self. That church was a soft place for me to land when I was in a tailspin, and they loved me through those years of seeking and healing. I can’t hand you all the answers because I don’t know them. I can’t hand you my own experiences with God because I am not inside of your head – nor would I like to be. What I can hand you is the bread, and the cup, and the invitation to be here and be loved, which has been handed to me so many times. It was handed to me so that I could hand it to you, in this community where your questions are welcome, your concerns are valid, your story is your own, and we simply trust that if you seek the sweet goodness of God, you will find it.

As we come to the table today, remember how the good news was handed on to you. Think of the ones who shared their faith and wisdom with you, the ones who accompanied you, even if only for a short while along the path of your journey of life. Think about what sustained those people. If you can, maybe it would great idea to ask them where the best flavors of life reside sometime. Let them hand on their wisdom to you, savor its deliciousness, and hand it on to someone else. That’s exactly why we keep coming back to this table. Again and again, across the span of our lives. It is always the same and yet as the crowd at the table changes, it always able to become something new. Every once in a while, the experience of it might be sweeter than honey.