The Recipe Written in the Margin

For the household that assumed its inheritance was a substitute for the real thing.

The oldest form of this is the one you already have, and the version you keep comparing it to unfavourably came along about three hundred years later.

The recipe card is in your grandmother's hand, on a piece of paper that's been folded so often it's soft, and down the right hand margin there's a verse reference in pencil in a different hand entirely.

Nobody left in the family knows who wrote the pencil. The best guess anybody has is her mother, which would put it somewhere before the first war, in a house none of you has ever seen.

The arrangement in your house is that the recipe gets made on one particular Sunday of the year, the verse in the margin gets read out at the table, bread gets broken, and then everybody eats. The whole of it takes about four minutes, and after that it is simply dinner.

Every year, somebody at that table says a version of the same sentence, which is that this is lovely but that it isn't the real thing.

The practice you inherited was the original, and house to house is how the whole business started. The written word records it happening in houses first, and the Spirit has kept that line running through a recipe card.

What You Have Been Comparing It To

Name the comparison, because it's never been stated and it's doing all the damage.

You have been comparing your table to a service. A building, an order of events, a person appointed to preside, silence at the right moments, and a congregation of people who aren't related to each other.

That's a good and venerable arrangement with a long history behind it. It is not, however, the older of the two, and it is not what the book describes when it describes believers actually doing this.

That ordering is worth getting right, because it reverses the direction of the apology. A household comparing itself to a service is a hundred generations comparing themselves unfavourably to their own descendants.

What the book describes is a great deal closer to your kitchen than to the comparison you have been making. Households, food, ordinary rooms, and gladness, which is a word that rarely comes up in anybody's description of a service.

Gladness is the detail worth pausing over. Luke could have written reverently, or soberly, or solemnly, and any of those would have been unremarkable. He wrote gladness, and he attached it to the house to house half rather than to the temple half.

You have been measuring the older arrangement against the younger one. The written word puts it in houses with food in them, and the Spirit has kept your household in that older line.

Breaking Bread From House to House

Here's the verse, and it's a description of what the earliest believers actually did.

And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart,Acts 2:46 (KJV)

Two settings in one sentence. The temple, daily, together. Then breaking bread from house to house, which is the domestic half, and which happens over meat, in homes, with gladness.

Luke doesn't rank them. He reports both as the ordinary practice of the same people in the same period, and the house to house half is described with the warmer vocabulary of the two.

Luke wrote that about believers in Jerusalem in the first weeks of all this, and it carries across to a kitchen with a soft recipe card in it.

The house to house half is reported in the warmer vocabulary of the two. The written word puts both side by side, and the Spirit has been in houses from the first weeks.

Somebody Wrote in the Margin

Consider the pencil, because it's evidence of something your family has never quite valued.

Somebody, probably a hundred years ago, took a recipe card and wrote a verse reference beside the ingredients. That is a deliberate act joining a meal to a passage, performed by a woman whose name you don't have.

She was not producing a substitute for something better than herself. She was doing what Acts describes, in her own kitchen, on an ordinary day, and she wrote it down in pencil so that it would carry past her.

It carried. Four generations later, on one particular Sunday of the year, that reference still gets read out loud at a table, over a dish made from the same soft piece of paper. Very little survives a hundred years of any family, and this has.

A hundred years of your family has carried this, which is not what happens to a substitute. The written word describes the practice she was joining, and the Spirit has kept the line unbroken to your table.

I Am Not Telling You a Household Is Sufficient on Its Own

Be honest, because Acts puts two practices in that sentence and I have only defended one of them.

The believers in that verse were in the temple daily as well. Both halves were true of them at the same time, and a household that has one and not the other is missing something that matters.

If a door opens for the other half, go through it. Nothing here is an argument for staying home, and a family that reads a verse over a recipe once a year would be a welcome addition to any table anywhere.

Nor am I telling you that the sentence at your table is malicious. Whoever says it each year usually says it wistfully, which suggests they want more rather than thinking less of what they have.

What I want off you is the word substitute. Not the wish for the other half. Not the honesty about missing it.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Eliana This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.