Alicia Akins is the author of Invitations to Abundance: How the Feasts of the Bible Nourish Us Today. In Invitations to Abundance, Akins guides the reader through the theme of “feasts,” as found in the Bible. She also explores the significance of knowing God’s table is spread before you.
Associate Editor Timothy Isaiah Cho spoke with Akins about the themes explored in her book. The transcript has been edited for clarity.
Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your work?
Thanks for having me. So, my name is Alicia and I live in DC. I’ve been here for about the past seven years. My current work, I work with an international exchange public diplomacy program that’s run through the State Department and I’m on the East Asia Pacific team. So, I work with students and scholars coming from the East Asia Pacific region to the United States for their programs. And before that, I was at the Smithsonian’s Asian Art Museum. So, I have a deep interest in Asia. Outside of work. I’m also currently a student at [Reformed Theological Seminary] in DC, and I’m active in my church here as well.
One of the things that really comes through with the illustrations that you use and the stories that you use throughout Invitations to Abundance is that you have quite a bit of experience with different cultures around the world. Can you talk about how these experiences have shaped you as a Christian and your walk with Jesus?
Yeah, so I first went overseas on my own after I had graduated from college. I know some people travel when they’re in high school with their family or travel for study abroad. I did live in Japan when I was a child, but I don’t remember it very well. So, my first real time that I said, like, “I’m going to explore the world” was after graduation when I went to China.
And I was there for three years. And the first two years, I did campus ministry, and my third year, I just was on my own. I really liked the country. I didn’t want to leave. But my time with the company I was with was over.
But I think actually a lot of things about my time in that country—and I lived in Laos as well for two years after grad school—but getting to see Christians flourish in a place where Christianity is the minority religion and is openly suppressed and attacked by the state was really eye-opening to me and is something that makes me really sensitive to people’s claims about religious persecution in the States, you know, having to go to worship services and it’s not my week to sing because everyone can’t sing every week.
I remember when I first came back, I would just stand in church, and I wouldn’t even sing. I would just listen because it was so loud. It was like, this is totally unheard of there. And it’s such a beautiful thing. But it’s also, like…it’s not something to take for granted. But I think a lot of people take it for granted.
When I came back to the States, I also went through a really, I guess, dark season, “a dark night of the soul,” what have you, with my faith where I actually wanted to believe that God wasn’t real, because I just was really struggling. And I remember feeling like I had seen God do so much stuff while I was on the mission field that I couldn’t deny that he was true. And I resented that for a while. It’s like, if only I hadn’t been a missionary, I could just walk away from this thing and not have to struggle anymore. But I think my experience and what I had seen, the encouragement that I had gotten from my Chinese brothers and sisters in Christ was sort of my lifeline when I didn’t even want to believe myself. So, I credit my time there for sort of sustaining me during a really dark time where I had my own questions and doubts about whether God was good or not.
And then, when I lived in Laos, my first year there, I had to sign a contract saying I wouldn’t go to church for my job, and it’s because it had to do with the company that I was working for, had really, really close relationships with ethnic minorities, and ethnic minorities had a really bad history with missionaries in that country. And so they were like, “We’re hiring you… not for missions. If you’re seeing to be hanging out with missionaries that might negatively impact our existing relationships.”
And so I had to think about what I think about church and what I think about religious freedom and what I think about—there’s like a debate about people taking prayer out of schools, and I’m like, “That’s crazy. As long as there’s Christians in schools, there will be prayers in schools.” And so I thought, well, I could say “No, I won’t accept this restriction.” And then they could have hired someone who was not a Christian to fill that space, and there would be no witness in my office. Or I could say, I can accept this restriction and find other ways of sort of feeding my faith while I’m out here, and having a witness among people.
And so I think the aspect of like, having a witness for God and being able to influence people in relationships, and even being able to be fed, even without regular church attendance, which I wouldn’t suggest as a long term strategy, but for the time, have been things that have strengthened my faith.
I feel like even with the pandemic, and not being able to go to church, that maybe that affected me less than other people who have always, consistently, every year since they’ve been a Christian, gone to church every Sunday that they were healthy enough to do so and sort of felt untethered when that was gone. I didn’t feel like that so much.
In your book, you ask the question, “What if God gave us feasts so that we could understand him better? What if these meals that seemed to be universal point, not just to the eternal, but to a table set every day that awaits us?” Can you talk about how the theme of feasting first struck you in your reading of the Bible, and how you began to see it as kind of really a pivotal, important theme in the Bible?
So, I mentioned before that I used to work at the Smithsonian. And then I lost my job there. And I was out of work for about 18 months until I found something else. And this was after I had a Master’s degree, already speaking multiple languages, like this wasn’t supposed to happen to me. And I had kind of a rough go of it. There was one month in particular, towards the beginning, where I didn’t have enough money to eat. And I was just like looking for coins and things around my house to go to the dollar store and buy whatever the most nutrient-dense junk food under the amount of money that I had was.
And I remember going to a Thanksgiving that a friend of mine has, and the question was, “What makes you rich?” And I thought, with no money to my name, what made me feel rich. And I started to think about, like, how God had sustained me and fulfilled me and sort of been there for me during that time. So, the same friend, the following year, asked me if I would write a blessing for his Thanksgiving meal, because I’ve always sort of done Thanksgiving with friends. And so there’s one friend whose house I went to for Thanksgiving often and he was like, “Would you be interested in doing this?” And I said, “Sure.”
At the time, I was also—that was back in 2018. I think I spent that entire year in the book of Jeremiah. I don’t know what it was, but I was just really drawn to that book. And I would get to the end, and I’d start back over again, just read it over and over again. And there’s this one verse that said, “I will feast the soul of the priests with gladness.” And I was also taking Hebrew at the time, and there was a lot of things that were confusing to me grammatically about this, and I just was very interested in this passage. And so I started studying it for my friend’s Thanksgiving blessing.
So, I wrote a short blessing for my friend’s Thanksgiving dinner based on that verse. And then the following semester, I took a class on Jeremiah, and decided to write my term paper on the larger passage that that verse was in. So that was sort of the beginning of my thinking about the idea of feasting throughout Scripture. I got really obsessed with this one word in that verse that was about fat. The Hebrew word for fat came to me in abundance. And then thinking about the way we think about fat, and like fat and food and how it gives it flavor and it makes things enjoyable to eat, and why God would give that part that was restricted to the priests.
And so I just sort of went down this rabbit trail, as I often do, into how God feeds his people and the directives that he gives them surrounding meals and celebrations. And I was really intrigued in the idea that God didn’t just want us to come to him for utilitarian purposes, but that he wanted to be enjoyed, and that he wanted rich, satisfying things for us. And that he didn’t just want to be known, but sort of maybe even to know him fully means to find satisfaction in him.
And so that is sort of how I ended up in this general area of research. And as I kept sort of going down that trail, I just continued to be surprised with the various shades of meaning that these feasts brought to God’s relationship with us and our relationship with each other. So when the opportunity presented itself, I was like, I think I’d like to keep learning about this more.
One thing you’re probably familiar with as surveys have gone out over the past couple of decades is that Christians are becoming less and less familiar with the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Your book spends a lot of time actually talking about the feasts in the Old Testament, which a lot of Christians may not be incredibly familiar with; things like Passover, the Feast of Firstfruits, to Yom Kippur, and so on. Why is it important for Christians to understand these feasts as a backdrop to the gospel? What do Christians miss if we don’t see these feasts?
I think the Old Testament is intimidating for a lot of people. There aren’t clear lists of how you should live. And the stories feel a little bit more distant than stories of fishermen and boats and miracles and things like that. But I almost have to be—and this is maybe bad to admit—but I almost have to be like forced to read the New Testament. I really like the Old Testament. And so it was a pleasure for me to get to dig even further into what it holds.
But one of the things that I think is really vital about the Old Testament is that the gospel is a response to a question that is raised in the Old Testament and it didn’t just come out of a vacuum, but it arose out of a need to meet specific problems with the human condition and the world that are laid out beautifully in detail in the Old Testament. Issues around holiness, issues around redemption, and freedom and justice, and all of those things, which are wrapped up in the gospel, really find their first expression in the Old Testament.
And so it’s a little like, I feel like going into your faith blind when all you have is the New Testament. As great and rich as the New Testament is, there’s a reason that they’re together. Because even the people in the New Testament who are talking about their faith and what it looks like to live out in Christian community, are doing so with the backdrop of the Old Testament as well.
It gives full flesh to the things that are in the New Testament to have a good background of the story that necessitated, inspires, animates Christ’s coming. Several of my chapters in my book were in their first form term papers for seminary. Partially, I knew I was going to write…Once I knew I was writing this book, I was like, “How can I not have to write so many papers at one time?”
So, actually, I took Genesis to Deuteronomy and Hebrews to Revelation at the same time. And I wrote my Genesis to Deuteronomy paper on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus, and I wrote my Hebrew to Revelation paper on the Day of Atonement in Hebrews, so that I could sort of use those papers in dialogue with each other and what I was learning.
And I had read Hebrews many times before – great book, highly recommended. But reading it against the backdrop of Leviticus gave it so much more power and so much more weight and filled me with so much more gratitude and awe at what Jesus accomplished for me. And even when I pray, I’m always like, “Thank you that I don’t have to bring animals before you. And I don’t have to have some elaborate sacrifice re-enacted every time I need to be cleaned before you before I can worship.”
And that is something that if we’ve prayed together, that comes up, this gratitude that I can just come as I am, without any of the formalities that used to be required. So, I think the Old Testament is really— it provides the vital details that give the gospel its full weight.
You mentioned in your answer to one of the earlier questions about how if we don’t understand feasting as a main way that God communes with us, we can tend to see God in sort of like a utilitarian sort of way. What are some utilitarian ways we might be seeing God? And how does that damage even our faith or spiritual formation?
So, in Ephesians, it talks about how you’ve been given every spiritual blessing in Christ. And I think, at least my experience has been when you talk to a lot of Christians, they want things from God. They want the new job, or they want to finally get married, or they want to have a kid or they want…They have a lot of things that they want, and maybe somewhere down the list, growth and righteousness and holiness, and patience and kindness, and the fruit of the Spirit is somewhere down there, but it’s not at the top.
And even when people find themselves in urgent situations that seem like they’re not going to turn out well, they might exhaust their entire physical, material list of resources to deal with that before ever turning to God and thinking that he has anything for them other than an escape from that. And so sometimes I’ve heard people say, like, “Why did this bad thing happened to this person? They’re such a good person.”
I was even having a conversation with someone earlier today who said no, why didn’t her son get in into this particular college, why would God allow something like that to happen? And she was like, “Doesn’t God want good things for us?” And I think our definition of “good” is very narrow, almost flushed with whatever we want.
And I think that there are a lot of— sort of going back to your question about how my experience abroad has influenced my relationship with God. I think about people who live in the poorest parts of the world whose countries will always be ravaged by war and who have sort of no hope of experiencing the kinds of comforts that we experience as Americans. And I think what is the gospel promise that their current situation cannot restrict? Yes, God might want more for us than those things. But at the very base level, if people in those conditions can still fully have access to God’s promises, then God’s promises must be more than just those other things of getting just what we want and a happy ending to our stories here.
One of the things about your book is that each chapter is organized with a liturgy or a prayer at the end. What inspired you to include these liturgies in each chapter?
I had a lot of reasons why I wanted to do that, actually. One, they’re really fun for me to write. And so it was kind of a nice break from being more in commentaries and sort of the more academic or prosaic parts of writing. I really like writing them. I started getting into the practice of writing out prayers. Personally, I’ve always journaled, but then, when I had that year in Laos that I didn’t go to church, I would sort of make my own church services, and I would write my own liturgy for my own church services. And then I was like, “Oh, I kind of like this.” So, it was fun for me to write.
But also, one of my friends a few years back said that one of the things she appreciated about my writing was that it led people to worship. And so I thought, how can I write this book in a way that people don’t just go from one chapter to the next without thinking about what they’ve read, or without responding?
And so each of the chapters is kind of like, it opens up with an addressee: “to the poor,” “to the prodigal” – to whomever it is. And then the chapter sort of unfolds as the invitation. And I really thought of these liturgies as our RSVP, how do you respond to what we’ve learned? How do we take a next step into living out understanding, meditating on what we’ve been invited to? And so I thought that this would be a good way to sort of distill the invitation and the message of each chapter into words that people could use in worship. And so that sort of was another reason that I chose to do it that way.
What is one thing about God and the gospel that you hope readers will take away with as they read your book? And why is that one thing so important for people to grasp?
I think the one thing that I hope people take away from the book is that a deep enjoyment of God’s mercy and abundance leads to us being merciful and generous with others. One of the things that surprised me in my research was that in almost every single feast that I saw, there was some command to be generous to others and to include others and to bring others in first thought. In the Passover, you can share a lamb with someone if a neighboring family doesn’t have enough people to get a lamb on their own or when it comes to the Feast of Firstfruits, leaving the edges of your field for other people to take and not cleaning all the way up to the edges.
But then I kept seeing that it was over and over again, that it’s not just that we get to enjoy God as a part of these meals, but that we are transformed by them. And that we can’t eat at the table and then come away with our own tables the same. And that as our understanding of God’s table expands, our tables expand.
And so there is always, in my mind, this sense that it’s not just about me, but then it’s again about my interactions with my neighbors, then, so not just like, “Oh, great, I enjoy God,” but like, no, if you get it, like, if you really understand, then that will extend to other people and that will change your sort of sphere of generosity and the way that you give and the way that you love and the way that you welcome across the board.
Is there anything that you would like to leave us with? Any last words from you?
If anyone gets an opportunity to spend time with believers from other cultural backgrounds, especially at a table, I would encourage people to do so. I think a lot of my understanding of God and my development as a Christian has been in community with people who were unlike me, who helped me see God in different ways. And I think that that is a big part of the table as well, that it’s a table that’s wide and welcoming to people from lots of different backgrounds. And that all of that is a foretaste of the final feast that we’ll one day get to participate in. So, if you want a sneak peek, widen your tables now.
