Doctrine is a word that’s likely to scare folks off, isn’t it? But it just means right teaching. For instance, if we’re sitting around the Thanksgiving table and mom brings out Great Grandmother’s sweet potato casserole, we’re all very glad that the recipe has been kept safe over the years. We want the right recipe, because we want that casserole to taste the way it’s supposed to taste. That recipe is a doctrine; it’s the right teaching about how to make sweet potato casserole, and if it’s written down wrong or lost we lose something sweet to the taste, and we lose something that, in a mysterious way, makes Great Grandmother seem present with us at the Thanksgiving Table. 

Doctrine, like a good recipe, protects a connection to our family. But it also saves us a lot of trouble by allowing us to tap into the shared work of others. If the recipe is lost, we’ve got to start all over again and reinvent the wheel. Did you know, for instance, that the Romans had a formula for making concrete that is far superior to ours? But the recipe was lost. We have no idea how they did it.  

Another way to look at this, if we take Roman concrete as our example, would be that there’s an end we’re trying to reach, which, in this case, would be amazing concrete. And there’s a right way to get there, which is the lost concrete recipe. Now, recipes contain ingredients, but they also communicate instructions about how to rightly combine those ingredients. There’s an order that allows for the steps to create very particular kinds of relationships among the ingredients that produce certain results and not others. If you want to reach the destination, there’s a specific means of approach. You need certain ingredients and you need to combine them in the right way. A recipe, then, is a piece of invaluable wisdom, because not just any ingredients will make Roman concrete, and not just any way of combining them. But that doctrine got lost, and now we have to repave every few years, while the Roman roads, after a couple thousand years, are still intact. 

Or to change the analogy, let’s think of music. I’m a songwriter, and when I write a song, I’m putting together lots of ingredients: a certain key, a variety of notes, rhythm, words, and so on. If you wanted to learn the song, you’d need, not just the notes, but the right order, key, and rhythm of those notes if you have any hope of arriving at the melody. You need not just the words, but the right words in the right order, if you’re going to have any hope of arriving at the lyrics and meaning. A song takes very common ingredients, but each song combines them in very specific ways. Sheet music was invented to preserve little “song doctrines” or “song recipes”. Because we have musical notation, we have a sort of map that allows us to find our way back to those lost places and hear again a song that may have lain silent for centuries. 

When I was a little kid, I read Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” again and again. Something about that story was like getting a taste of some meal I’d never had, but was starved for. Or like hearing the faintest scrap of a lost tune whose beauty broke my heart with longing. In that story, whenever the elves hear the song of seagulls they’re overwhelmed by a longing to cross the sea and return to the sort of Garden of Eden of Tolkien’s world called Valinor, even if they were born after the primordial Elves left that Eden-like land and had never even seen it themselves. Deep in the marrow, every elf knows he came from somewhere over the seas, from a land now sundered from this world. A land where light and glory have not faded. Every elf knows Valinor is the home she belongs to though she’s never yet set foot on its shores, and the aching song of the seagull ignites such a longing for that place that ever after Middle Earth can no longer satisfy. 

And so the elves make their way to the Havens where they board ships able to sail beyond the walls of this world, until they make their approach by shrouded paths to their all-but-forgotten and true homeland. This is what Gandalf is referring to in the movie when he tells Pippin, “The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it… white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” 

All the scraps of song that move us most in this world, are calling to us like the voice of the seagulls calls the to the Elves. But, it may be that we’ve not yet really heard anything, all our hearing amounts to merely having glanced at the sheet music, or having read an old yellowed recipe card smudged and tattered. We haven’t arrived. All our lives we’ve only been on pilgrimage, ordering our steps towards the sound of the sea, and beyond that, a guessed-at song from beyond the walls of the world that has broken our hearts with its beauty. A song that calls us to remember where we came from, who we truly are, and to whom we might someday return.

And so one Sunday recently, as I was taking communion, I realized that God was meeting me in a certain way. Not simply reaching out through the intellect. The bread and the wine weren’t abstract ideas, they were a means of grace more like affection. I sensed in that moment while the taste of wine still lingered on my tongue and the texture of bread remained in my mouth, that as much as I like to think about God, this was where all the thinking was meant to lead to – presence – to actual contact. 

Thinking must arrive at a face, at the real presence of a person. What good is a recipe that never makes it to the table, to the fork, to the tastebuds? What good is a doctrine that never makes its way to muscles, speech, touch, or embrace? 

Tim Keller said recently that, 

“The sense of the honey’s sweetness on the tongue brings a fuller knowledge of honey than any rational deduction. In the same way, it is one thing to believe in a God who has attributes such as love, power, and wisdom; it is another to sense the reality of that God in your heart. The Bible is filled with sensory language. We are not only to believe that God is good but also to “taste” his goodness, the psalmist tells us; not just to believe that God is glorious and powerful but also to “see” it with “the eyes of the heart,” it says in Ephesians.”  (See the full article) 

But even this affectionate contact that takes place when doctrine takes on blood, bone, and sinew in the lives of God’s people, and the affectionate contact that we taste at the Lord’s Table are themselves foretastes – they are seagull song, touching us here with a beautiful music, while filling us with an “inconsolable longing” for the unmediated presence of the Singer Himself. They are blazes along the pilgrim trail to the joy set before us. 

Like Lewis so beautifully described at the end of The Last Battle, all human history so far has just been the title page of an endless book that gets better and better with every chapter. Is this whole world just a gathering place for the ingredients that, according to the recipe written in and by the Word Himself, will go into making the unimaginable eternal feast God has in mind? 

Now, I learned to cook by hanging out in the kitchen with my Mom as a kid. Maybe church is like that? Through the Scriptural doctrines and practices of the church across generations we are learning recipes. We’re little apprentices hanging out in the kitchen being taught to cook up good things to eat. The recipes are like culinary treasure maps that open forgotten ways back to good things that would otherwise be lost to us. 

When we walk into the House of God, the delicious fragrance of the Kingdom is wafting out from some unseen, heavenly kitchen. We say, “Oh, it sure smells good in here… what is that?” And the Holy Spirit, ringing the dinner bell for all who have ears to hear and noses to smell, says, “Oh, you won’t believe what we’re cooking up, it’s an old family recipe from before the foundations of the world.”  

And now, like my Mom used to do when I was a little kid in the kitchen, pulling at her skirts saying, “Mom, can I help?” –  she’d hand me the wooden spoon and say, “Give it a stir. Taste and see if there’s any special spice you want to add.” She watches as I try out what I’ve been seeing her do, and then she says “Oh, that’s good. Now go set the table, please. And tell everybody supper’s ready.”