What if the wisdom your mind can't access is sitting in your body — waiting? Week one of Taste and See: Loving God With All Five Senses opens the awkward, holy work of healing our relationship to our own bodies. Matt walks through the philosophical machine that taught us to mistrust the flesh, why Jesus might live in your heart while grandpa lives in your bones, and what it means to befriend the part of ourselves we've been trying to silence. We land at the table — bread, wine, taste, see. Join us Sundays in San Mateo, or next week at Beresford Park for Dwell in the Park.
What if your body isn't a problem to fix but a gift to receive? In this message from our series "Taste and See: Loving God with All Five of Your Senses," Matt turns to the strangest sense of all — smell — and finds it everywhere in Scripture: a God with a "long nose" of patience, a whole barbecue's worth of sacrifice rising as "an aroma pleasing to the Lord," and our most honest prayers gathered like incense into golden bowls at the center of the universe. By way of Pema Chödrön, Ezra Klein, and the science of the nervous system, we sit with a harder truth — that understanding our pain won't heal it, but learning to feel it, with tenderness, just might. The good news underneath it all: God accepts you, your relationship can be repaired, and even a prayer as raw as "I've never believed in you" smells good to him. Join us Sundays on the Peninsula.
We've quietly become a world that's lost touch with touch — consensual, non-sexual, life-giving human contact is now something most of us get in fewer than five places in our whole lives. In week four of Taste and See, our series on a theology of the body, Matt turns to the sense of touch: what 154 studies, the healing stories of Jesus, and an 89-year-old Buddhist teacher all reveal about why our bodies were made to be held. If trauma lives in the body, so does healing — and Jesus, again and again, chooses to reach out his hand. The message doesn't end with a point; it ends with a practice — a whole room turning to greet, and maybe even hug, a stranger. Join us Sundays on the Peninsula.
Why can't we see God? Scripture's answer isn't "because he doesn't exist" — it's "because we'd die." In week five of Taste and See, Matt follows the sense of sight into the Bible's surprising third-most-mentioned theme — trees — to ask what it means that we were made to see God, and that learning to see him is the slow work of a lifetime. From the burning bush to a blind man who saw "people like trees walking around," this is a message about a God-bathed world and the eyes to notice it. Join us Sundays on the Peninsula.
