We had just moved to Richmond. The moving truck was gone, the house was full of boxes to unpack, the kitchen stacked to the ceiling in cardboard. The doorbell rang, and there stood a family from down the street holding a large foil pan of beef tortellini. I couldn’t ask them in. There was nowhere to stand, let alone sit. But their welcome warmed our new home. For three nights, we ate that pasta, reheating it in a saucepan on the one burner I’d managed to clear.
Food is rarely just food; it’s woven into our sense of who we are. Memories tangled up with particular foods become markers of belonging.
When I remember my childhood church, for instance, I recall the sticky-sweet presence of homemade root beer, brewed in a massive tub.
(I’m pretty sure it was a garbage can, scrubbed clean for the occasion.) At every church potluck, the tub appeared, and we kids jostled for position, dipping our Solo cups over and over into that brown froth. Then we tore around the church lawn crazed with sugar, hands sticky, giddy with joy.
Long before I could explain what Christian community meant, I knew what it tasted like.
The small church our family attended in Illinois had a common recipe for communion bread that passed from baker to baker. I’d never tasted communion bread like it before; it was somewhere between a croissant’s savory richness and the sweet crumble of cornbread. There weren’t many of us in that sanctuary, so the bread was cut into generous squares. And, honestly, we all wanted a big piece, not the careful, shy pinch from a loaf customary during intinction.
My kids devoured their pieces of the “bread of life” and begged for more. Their hunger was shameless, which was its own kind of lesson. We shouldn’t hide our appetite for grace, our craving for spiritual sustenance, at church. It should be acknowledged and fed.
Christian communities talk a lot about belonging, welcome and hospitality. We print those words on banners and websites and work them into mission statements. But belonging is not primarily something we announce. Belonging is something people experience, often through surprisingly ordinary acts.
Feeding another person says, “I noticed you.” “There is enough for you.” “You do not have to earn your place here.” “Your hunger matters.”
This is part of what makes the meals in Mark’s Gospel so compelling. Again and again, Jesus challenges boundaries around food and fellowship: who may eat with whom, whose presence renders a table suspect, whose hunger matters. When a great crowd grows hungry in Mark 6, the disciples suggest sending everyone away to buy food for themselves. Jesus answers, “You give them something to eat.” Then, in Mark 8, he feeds another crowd, this time in Gentile territory. Across these parallel stories, the circle widens. Jesus does not treat hunger as an abstraction. He notices bodies. He notices need. He refuses to separate spiritual care from the ordinary necessities of life. Jewish and Gentile hunger alike become occasions for abundance, community and grace.
The church has inherited this ministry in practices so commonplace we can miss their significance: casseroles delivered after a death, soup during an illness, a meal train after a new baby, potlucks and coffee hours, beef tortellini carried down the street to new neighbors standing knee-deep in boxes. These gestures communicate the kind of community we hope to be.
The foundation of feeding is attention. Before we can feed someone, we must notice them. We must recognize their hunger, and not only their hunger for food, but also for company, dignity, mercy, rest, recognition, joy and grace. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is notice what someone needs and offer what we have.
In a world where people are increasingly hungry for community and connection, the church can still be a place where nobody is expected to pretend they’re full, thank you. A place where grace is not rationed into careful, shy pinches. A place where we keep setting the table, making room and handing out big pieces of bread.
