A Christian’s Guide to Feasting

10 December 2025

Author Charles de Lint once wrote, “Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important.”

Our lives are stories. What an idea! That’s beautiful but also kind of scary right? People read our lives long before they listen to our words. When people see us — in our homes, workplaces, friendships — what story do they get?

The question isn’t “Is my life telling a story?” The question is “Which story is my life telling?”

If you need a theologian to back that claim up, here’s Stanley Hauerwas: “The truth of the story we find in the Gospels is known only through the kind of lives it produces.”

God is a brilliant storyteller and at the heart of how he taught his people to follow Him, was to ask them to do things that told a story. Baptism is an enacted story. Marriage is an enacted story. So is our feasting.

Food and meals are important events in every culture and sharing meals is a wonderful way to establish friendship in almost every culture. Meals become a place for great stories to be told, but also to be re-enacted. It is a way of teaching that reminds us that our lives are signposts always pointing to the truths we believe. There’s a lot of feasts in the Bible and each one has a slightly different story or purpose. For example,

The Passover feast retells the story of Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt
And the Feast of Tabernacles tells the story of their wanderings in the wilderness

And then there’s Jesus who seems to eat his way through the Gospels.

John introduces us to Jesus at a wedding feast making gallons of wine from water and Jesus gets invited to meal after meal. And combining these two ideas of stories and feasts, Jesus told some of his most famous parables at the dinner table. However, Jesus is so unfussy about who he eats with that he creates a controversy. He did that so much that they called Jesus a glutton! Maybe that is why Luke says, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking.” (Luke 7:34)

But what story do the meals of Jesus tell? The tables of Jesus became places where he, amongst other things,

welcomes sinners
breaks down social barriers
teaches about the kingdom
offers forgiveness¹

Then the early church made food central to the life of the assembly. They broke bread together and had fellowship meals, communion became known as love feasts and some people misunderstood their language and thought they were cannibals because they said they were “eating the flesh and drinking blood of someone called Christ”.

And finally the climax of the whole Bible is the wedding supper of the Lamb and blessed are those who are invited! (Rev 19:9). Priest and foodie Robert Faror Capon said, “To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is.”

Do you see the pattern? Every feast tells a story — and God keeps inviting those you’d least expect to join in – including you.

People are story-telling creatures and feasts are stories for us to tell. Feasting in the Bible is never just eating — it’s participating in God’s story of welcome

In this coming month there is the slight possibility that you will do some feasting. Some of them others will invite you to and others you will organize yourself. And of course the biggest one of all is Christmas.

If feasts tell a story – what story will your feasting this Christmas tell? Parents, in the way that you celebrate Christmas what story will your children take part in? Who will be the centre of that story? But if Jesus’ tables were places of welcome, mercy, crossing social lines and offering grace, then our Christmas tables can echo His.

I have to be a little careful because my DNA is part human, part Grinch. But honestly, I’m not always sure that the patterns we copy for our Christmas feasts are telling the story we really want to tell.

And here’s a warning: the book of Isaiah, from which we get many great Christmas verses opens with God saying to His people

I hate your new moon celebrations and your annual festivals.
They are a burden to me. I cannot stand them!

Isaiah 1:14 (NLT)

Why? Because while they were feasting they were also turning a blind eye to injustice, and specifically the ones without family – the widow and orphan. Their religious feasting and worship had become separated from obedience to the commands of God.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Compare that warning with these instructions from God for one of the great national feasts:

This festival will be a happy time of celebrating with your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, foreigners, orphans, and widows from your towns. For seven days you must celebrate this festival to honour the LORD your God at the place he chooses, for it is he who blesses you with bountiful harvests and gives you success in all your work. This festival will be a time of great joy for all.

Deuteronomy 16:14–15 (NLT)

Notice both that it is 7 days long AND that God commands you to have a happy time. But for all the people not just some of the people. The foreigner, the orphan, the widow, the workers, they were to be invited to join the party too.

That was the story God wanted His people to understand. They had been foreigners, they had been workers and servants, and they had not been allowed to feast. They weren’t supposed to make the same mistake. They were supposed to tell a story of God’s gracious, generous, abundant provision and faithfulness and that the invitation to enjoy God’s grace was much bigger than they realised.

Christmas is an annual festival and the closest thing we have to a national feast. Is there a way that we can tell a better story?

When I was growing up, my family would always invite people to join us on Christmas Day. We would open presents (which I enjoyed), we would go to church (which I didn’t), we would eat a big roast and have trifle (which I enjoyed), we would be forced to listen to the Queen’s Speech (which I didn’t) and then we had to do something quiet while some of our guests fell asleep in our living room and I wondered why I had to share my Christmas with these weirdos who didn’t have anywhere else to go.

The story I was being schooled in was incomplete because my parents never joined the dots for us kids. What was the link between the duty of including people with nowhere to be and no one to be with, and the story of Christmas? Sharing became a sacrifice but never a joy. Welcome became a duty and never a delight. Hospitality became a burden and never a blessing. We weren’t invited to be gracious hosts with them, we just had to put up with it.

The story of Christmas is the incredible story of God’s gift that brings us into His family if we accept His invitation. In Immanuel we find a friend we didn’t know we could have who brings us into a fellowship more precious than we ever dreamed of. We find life where before there was loneliness and we find hope where before there was none.

The story of Christmas is the invitation of God to sinful people, and it included a radical extension of who the family of God now was. It opened up the doors to the house and home of God and if our lives, our church, our Christmas is not shaped to tell that story – well then it is some other story entirely.

One of the elders in our church wrote in a recent newsletter, “Sweden is filled with people who feel alone during the dark months. Many in our international community live far from family. I pray that you will remember them. Lives have been changed simply because someone opened their door and made room at their table for one more. Hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to be powerful. It needs a heart whose intention is to love others.”

One of the most powerful tools you have to share the gospel is something you do 3 times a day. Eat a meal.

The gospel isn’t ‘you must invite someone to your house on Christmas Day’ but that through the gospel our notions of hospitality, of family, of who my neighbour is, of who I’m called to love are redefined. Life and love get bigger and richer and truer because the Gospel has come to us in Jesus Christ, God with us.

We bear witness to God’s grace around the table. Around the table bread is broken, cups are shared, blessings are given. Around the table conversations take place that can cause hearts to burn, eyes to open, and people, perhaps for the very first time, recognize Jesus for who he is.

So this Christmas don’t hunker down in the bunker of your home but open it up wider, spread the joy, play the games, watch the films, tell the jokes, give the gifts, but do it in a way that tells the story of the laughter and joy that Jesus has brought, the meal he has invited us to share, the home he has prepared for us, the family he has adopted us into. Get creative but in the coming feast tell the right story, tell the one that still has Jesus right at the heart of it.

Every feast tells a story — what story will yours tell?

This post was taken from a sermon I gave at Grace Church Stockholm which you can listen to here