The Bible and the Recipe Book
Sermon — September 8, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
When Alice and I were married, one of my mother’s oldest friends gave us a wedding gift: a binder full of some of her family’s favorite recipes, with plenty of empty plastic page protectors for us to add our own. I’ve put a few recipes in there over the years, but I have to admit I’m not good at keeping up with it; in part because, try as I might, I can never seem to keep a printer working for more than a couple months at a time. Anyway, as a result, I often find myself cooking from recipes that I found online. In other words, I often find myself doing something with which you may be familiar: scrolling through what appears to be the entire story of the recipe author’s life, marriage, and culinary education, until I finally arrive at the recipe itself. I’ve never really understood this phenomenon. I don’t need to know about your first date. I just want to know how much baking powder these waffles need.
I think people sometimes make the mistake of reading the Bible as if it’s a recipe blog. And I can understand why. Our readings today certainly look like a series of instructions, from the ritual practices of the Book of Exodus to the ethical commandments of the letter to the Romans to the practical guide to church conflict that Jesus offers us in the Gospel. We read them without much context; our lectionary cycle has conveniently skipped past the stories for us. But these Biblical recipes aren’t for cooking or baking, but for the much more complicated subject of living a human life. And in this recipe book, the story really does matter; the meaning of these instructions is shaped by the story that leads to each one.
Take, for example, these ritual instructions for the celebration of Passover. It’s hard to know what to do with this text. Christians don’t celebrate Passover. Our Jewish friends and neighbors don’t celebrate it quite like this. This predates the Seder as we know it. It mostly sounds like a series of precise and somewhat gruesome instructions for how to slaughter and eat a lamb and where to smear its blood.
But today, we only read the recipe. (Literally, in this case.) But the story is the real source of its flavor. If you’ve been here the last two Sundays, you’ve heard pieces of the story of Moses. We’ve heard that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. We’ve heard that God sent Moses to set them free. You may know that Moses has demonstrated God’s power with a series of plagues culminating in this one: the angel of death is going to pass through the land of Egypt and pass over the homes that the Israelites have marked with the lamb’s blood.
The particularities of the ritual reflect the intensity of the experience of flight. There’s no time to gently simmer the lamb in water; it must be roasted on the fire. There’s no time for bread to rise; it must be eaten flat. The Law commands the people to eat it with their sandals on their feet and their staffs in their hands, to eat it that night and leave nothing leftover, because then it’s time to run.
And as much as these instructions reflect the urgency of the initial situation, this isn’t a story about a ritual done once in the past; it truly is a recipe for a ritual to repeat year after year in the future. This month, God says, will mark the beginning of the year; it marks such a deep break with the past that it initiates a whole new way of marking time. (Exod. 12:2) It will be a day of remembrance through all generations. For thousands of years, it will remind the people of God of their ancient experience of being strangers in a strange land and becoming refugees, of preparing to flee in the middle of the night.
While the Israelites would escape Egypt and find a new home, in the coming centuries they would continue to need to flee. In the wake of destruction, in the hope of safety, in the pursuit of better lives for themselves and the children, they traveled throughout the world. By the time of Jesus and Paul, Jewish communities could be found scattered throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Some ancient Jews grew up, as Jesus did, in the Jewish regions of Judea and Galilee. Others, like Paul, were members of small minorities who lived within much larger Greek and Roman cities around them.
These small Jewish communities became the nucleus of the Christian movement as it spread throughout the world. When traveling to any city, the apostles would first spread the news of the arrival of the Messiah to the Jewish community there; and then, through them, to the monotheism-curious Greeks and Romans around them.
And so it is that Paul, his Letter to the Romans, addresses a remarkably diverse group: in his conclusion, he sends greetings “Prisca and Aquila,” two Jews (Acts 18:2-3) with Roman names, and Epaenetus, “the first convert in Asia for Christ”; (Rom. 16:5) “Mary” and “Herodion,” who have traditionally-Jewish names, but also “Hermes” and “Olympas,” whose names evoke the Greek gods.
He offers them a simple message: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” All of the commandments, he says, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Romans 13:8-9) Jesus says much the same, when he names the Two Great Commandments: to love God with all your heart, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
But Paul’s words are even richer when we put them in context; when we remember the story behind this recipe. Jesus comes from the village of Nazareth, home to a couple hundred people in his day. To “love your neighbor,” in this context, means to love people whom you’ve known for your whole life. Which can be difficult, but is a particular kind of difficult. When Jesus identifies the Second Great Commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Mat. 22:39) he’s in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a much bigger city, with a population of 50-100,000 at the time, but all sharing the same culture, all identifying with a shared religious text.
But Paul is writing to a genuinely mixed group in the big imperial city of Rome—population about 1 million, drawn from all the nations of the known world. To “love your neighbor” in Rome means to love someone who doesn’t share your culture or your religion or your way of life. But Paul elevates this commandment nevertheless. He asks these Roman citizens, whose culture dominates the world and whose philosophy comes has its own sophisticated set of ethical ideals—to embrace the commandments of the Jewish God. And in exchange, the Jewish Christians like Paul will accept that many of the traditions and rituals of their Law will not be binding on these converts to their faith.
It’s a delicate dance. Like Jesus, Paul, digs into the Book of Leviticus, which is usually known as the book of the Bible that contains the most intricate ritual laws, and pulls out one commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” (Lev. 19:18) And even as Paul plays down many of the ritual requirements of Biblical law, he elevates this particular commandment to love. Because even in a big and diverse city—perhaps especially in a big and diverse city—the whole Law is summed up in this one commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
The beauty of the Bible is that it’s not a series of recipes to be extracted from the text and applied directly to our lives. And it’s not a series of stories about the past, without relevant to our lives. It’s a great library in which those two things intersect with one another and with our own lives to form a living text. The ancient Israelites knew that the experience of the Exodus was what gave meaning to the Passover ritual. Paul knew that the experience of an ethnic minority living in a cosmopolitan city gave meaning to the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. And we know that our own experiences breathe life into what we hear in church, today and every Sunday. Our experiences of life in our city teach us what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves.
