Fellow Pilgrims,
I want a church like a fine dining restaurant with a pickup window serving Chicago style beef sandwiches.
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The image is from The Bear, Hulu’s very human television show about grief and family and excellence and food and all the ways people wound each other while trying, desperately, to love each other at the same time. In the show, Carmy Berzatto takes the neighborhood sandwich shop he inherited from his brother and turns it into a labor of love: a restaurant where every plate is considered, every ingredient honored, every guest welcomed with astonishing care.
But Carmy doesn’t abandon the sandwich shop.
Alongside the restaurant is a window where people can still walk up and order the sandwiches that have been a neighborhood staple for years. The restaurant becomes two things at once. I love the image, because often it feels like churches have an either/or mentality.
We can devote ourselves to beauty, depth, liturgy, theology, careful formation. Or we can be accessible and meet practical needs. We can welcome people who don’t know the language, don’t understand the customs, aren’t quite ready to come inside.
What if the church needs two windows? What if both windows serve good, good stuff?
One opens into the dining room, where people linger over a feast, learning practices that cannot be rushed, reading Scripture slowly, receiving the Eucharist with reverence, repeating prayers that shape us and songs that become part of our bones. There is something profoundly Christian about giving years to learning how to love God well.
The other window opens onto the sidewalk. Someone is hungry today. Someone is walking by with no intention of coming in, and someone needs nourishment long before they understand the menu.
Via fxnetworks.com
The Bear understands that hospitality is costly. Nothing beautiful appears by accident. Every dish requires labor. Someone chopped onions. Someone scrubbed pots. Someone arrived early. Someone stayed late. Guests experience delight, because a community has quietly given itself for the sake of those guests.
The church ought to feel something like that. Not effortless, but generous. Not polished for the sake of appearance, but attentive and hospitable because people matter. Hospitality is not simply greeting someone at the door with a smile. It is arranging our common life around the possibility that Christ might arrive looking like a stranger.
I also love that The Bear refuses to make us choose between the family we are born into and the family we discover along the way. Born family and found family are both treasured, something very rare in contemporary storytelling.
The Berzatto family is complicated. They have inherited love tangled together with addiction, grief, anger, impossible expectations, and old wounds that nobody knows how to name. Their family is not idealized, but neither is it discarded. It remains precious precisely because it is real. And Jamie Lee Curtis has the courage to look truly, unabashedly, gloriously old.
Alongside that family grows another one, a found family. Sydney belongs. Richie belongs. Tina belongs. Marcus belongs. They aren’t all the same, and they don’t always understand each another. They belong together, because shared work slowly becomes shared life.
This points to something profoundly ecclesial.
The church has never been a replacement for our ordinary loves. It is something stranger than that. It is the place where grace keeps enlarging the table. We discover siblings we never expected to have without ceasing to care for the people we’ve loved since childhood.
Diversity in The Bear isn’t presented as an achievement. It is simply the reality that no one could make this restaurant work alone. Sydney sees possibilities Carmy cannot. Richie becomes the host only Richie could become (“I wear suits now”). Marcus notices beauty. Tina carries wisdom born of perseverance. Every person’s gift becomes everyone else’s flourishing. To quote Richie again; “We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We got no money. But we have each other and nothing left to lose.”
That is much closer to Paul’s vision of the body of Christ than the flattening sameness we sometimes mistake for unity. The church is not healthiest when everyone thinks alike or works alike or prays alike. It is healthiest when every gift is offered for the good of all.
And then there is the food. Christianity insists that bodies matter, that bodies are central to our faith. Our story begins in a garden and ends at a feast. Jesus keeps revealing himself around tables. He feeds hungry crowds. He compares the kingdom to banquets. He gives us bread and wine. Even after the resurrection, he cooks breakfast. The God we worship meets us in embodiment.
Food matters in The Bear. Meals are never simply meals. They become memory, grief, celebration, apology, generosity, hope. That omelette Sydney makes for Natalie has weight. And cheese! Or, think of the moment when Syd’s short ribs come from family dinner into the main dining room. Food is a way of attending to bodies that are hungry but also to bodies that are lonely, bodies that need touch, rest, beauty, song, bread, wine, laughter, candles, kneeling, standing, silence. We were never meant to be brains carrying around inconvenient flesh. We worship an incarnate Lord who still bears scars. The church should remember that salvation always arrives for us as embodied.
Which brings me back, once more, to the two windows.
I don’t want a church that gives up beauty in the name of relevance. But I don’t want a church so devoted to beauty that it forgets the people standing outside.
I want the dining room.
I want the sandwich window.
I want careful theology and warm bread. Ancient liturgy and practical mercy. Reverence and neighborhood. Formation that takes years and grace that can be received in an instant.
Church should be a place where extraordinary care is given to the feast, while a window remains open to the street, so that anyone who is hungry can find something good to eat.
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Grace & peace,
BFJ
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