The Kitchen, for me at least, is a place where I find the Kingdom of God. Jesus seems to have thought similarly, with parables of yeast and several parties.
I've just spent an hour or two trying a new recipe which I am thinking of using for a big meal in one of the villages in February, so one strand of the Kingdom of God is certainly found in the preparation of an act of service. I'm not sure if a Vegetable Biryani (from scratch of course) will be quite right, but this trial run will at least let us sample the flavour when everybody gets back for lunch in a few minutes.
Another strand is the doing of something simple. My head has been refining things to say at midnight and Christmas morning; looking at what I might have said a couple of years ago and seeing those bits which no longer hit the mark (were people really that worked up about the Gospel of Thomas that I had to refer to it at Midnight Communion?), and there's this whole matter of trying to judge exactly what people are thinking and experiencing in the Great Recession of 2008 - is it just a lot of brave faces?
But there is also the cherry on the knickerbocker glory - the delight of using the beauty and complexity of the abundance of creation to make something that tastes...just right.
Apologies for my cookery joke on Sunday morning - the Incarnation is nothing at all to do with a brand of evaporated milk (groan), but the Word made flesh somehow gives the making of something like a veggie curry a place of honour in the important things of life....
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