Food for the Fight: Festivity as Warfare

Transcript

I've titled my talk Food for the Fight: Festivity as Warfare. This is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. As CJ noted, I've had the privilege of teaching at NSA for many years, and one of the classes that I teach there is gastronomy—a class on food and culture. And it really is a class about food, yes, but also about a sort of biblical philosophy of what things are. I hope that a lot of what I teach in that class over the years comes out in this talk. It's kind of a summary of many of the themes that I teach when I undertake that class.

I want to begin with a quote from Chesterton, which I know was sent out as an introduction to my talk. I think it's a very profound quote. Chesterton very much understood, in his bones, the things that I'm going to talk about today. Chesterton said, giving us insight into the task of a faithful warrior—one who battles in the name of the Lord—that "a true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

So I invite you, just for a moment, to think carefully about what Chesterton is saying and what he means. First, I think we can observe that there is an essential connection between love and fighting the good fight. Years ago, there was a set of ads for a Norwegian cruise line that said, Make love instead of war. But in the biblical picture, you cannot fight or make war without love. The two go hand in hand.

Another thing Chesterton is saying is that fighting is not a neutral topic. It's deeply embedded in our assumptions about the world. How we fight reveals what we believe about the world in which we fight. Let me give you two examples. The first is the ever-presence of fighting all around us in what we call cancel culture—this outrage we see everywhere. Everyone's fighting all the time, it seems. But this kind of fighting is rooted in personal insult. It’s often at the heart of our conflicts. Think of our presidential debates as an example.

That is because we fundamentally believe that everything about our world is subjective, dependent upon us, rather than the external world we observe. Whoever shouts the loudest wins. We no longer discuss or debate because we no longer believe in a world outside our subjective perceptions that can compel us toward truth. It becomes simply my view versus your view, and whoever is loudest or most clever with put-downs wins.

Contrast this with courage, a virtue like courage. When I ask my students, "Does courage remove fear?" the answer is no. I had two grandfathers who fought in World War II—one on Iwo Jima, the other on Okinawa. As a young boy, I used to ask my grandfather who fought on Iwo Jima about the war. He rarely talked about it. Over time, I understood why. He would tell me, "Joshua, you don't understand what war is like." It wasn’t that he had no fear—it’s that courage persists in the presence of fear. Courage arises when something good is threatened, which means that at its heart, courage involves love. It’s love that drives courage and makes it possible to face danger.

You cannot fight or be a true warrior unless you are first a great lover. Great loves compel your willingness to encounter the cost of battle. Chesterton's insight applies here: "The true soldier fights because he loves what is behind him."

I want to explore why this is so, with three main points. First, what festivity is and how it’s rooted in the love of what is good. Second, how idolatry destroys our capacity to be festive. And third, how redemption restores our ability to be festive like God Himself is festive.

Festivity is an expression of joy rooted in the love of God and His good creation. Father Robert Capon, an Anglican priest and chef, gives us insight in The Supper of the Lamb. He calls himself an amateur—one who loves—and says the world needs lovers, people who respond to its beauty with delight, not boredom. Boredom is a kind of heresy, he says. Festivity begins with the amateur’s loving eye.

Philosopher Joseph Pieper, in In Tune with the World, explains that joy is always a response to love. It’s rooted in receiving or possessing what one loves. This helps us see that festivity is not just an event but an expression of joy in something good.

But idolatry—the imposition of our own meaning on the world—destroys festivity. Capon describes idolatry as treating things not as they are but as what they can mean to us. When we impose our will on creation, we distort it, rejecting the goodness of what God has made. Idolatry is an insult not only to God but to the things He has made.

Finally, redemption restores festivity. In Christ, God has taken away our reproach, gathered us for the festival, and invited us into His joy. The Lord rejoices over His people, and that joy compels our own. This is why the Eucharist is central—it is both thanksgiving and festivity.

True festivity is not something we make but something we do because of what God has done. It is delight in God’s goodness and His works of creation and redemption. When we love the world as God made it, we fight not out of hatred but out of love for what is good and worth defending. As Chesterton said, "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

Thank you.