Prop: Bowl and Ingredients for Hummus or Pesto
I know many of you kids out there have seen the Disney movie Ratatouille, right? How many have seen it? I’m going to play a little clip from that movie for a moment….
[Play the clip in which Remy the rat is discerning the flavors in food, as he creates a new delicacy by placing varied tastes together.]
Well, this morning, I have brought an experiment of our own to tempt our tastebuds. I have here…… let’s see …. some garlic, some herbs, some pecorino cheese, some olive oil, and a little bit of wine vinegar.
Are you hungry yet?
These ingredients were found in what’s called “Holy Land Pesto!” --a kind of pesto paste made frequently by the Romans. It was often used by early Christians for a kind of love feast. They also frequently used a kind of hummus as well.
So, how do we make this? Well, the first thing we do is, we put all of these flavors together here in my mortar and pestle, and we grind them up. [Start grinding/kneading the ingredients.]
Can you smell that?
Come on up here! We need a few volunteers to smell the delightful smell coming from the mortar and pestle here as we grind these flavors together.
So, let’s be like Remy today …can you discern each flavor? Can you tell which flavors are in the mix?
Can you smell the garlic? Who can?
The cheese?
The herbs? What herbs do you smell?
You can do this by the way with just about any recipe. A chef or a good cook in fact can tell you each ingredient in any food just by the smell. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? It’s an art. But why can you smell each ingredient?
Because the flavors don’t disappear into each other….but each flavor contributes to a new combination….
Anyone want a taste?
That, I have to say, tastes delightful!
Who wants to sample it? What do you think?
Mmmm… great, right?
As Remy the rat would say, that’s just next to godliness!
The varied flavors enhance each other. As a chef might say, the different flavors “talk to one another.”
These flavors “reside” together and because they all bring something unique to the mix….together they create something new and extraordinary. In pesto, in any really great recipe, you can have many flavors, but they exist in a kind of relationship in which they don’t just form one new common flavor, but together they all contribute their own unique quality and texture in order to create something new –something of “uncommon taste” and “uncommon beauty.”
[You can optionally read or play another clip as well from the movie:]
Remy: [sniffing a cake] Flour, eggs, sugar... vanilla bean... Oh, small twist of lemon. Emile: Whoa! You can smell all that? You have a gift! Remy: [voiceover] This is Emile, my brother. He's easily impressed. Django: So you can smell ingredients. So what? Remy: [voiceover] This is my dad. He's never impressed. Gusteau: [on the TV] How can I describe it? Good food is like music you can taste, color you can smell. There is excellence all around you. You need only to be aware to stop and savor it. [Remy tastes food accompanied by synesthetic visions of color and music] Remy: Oh, Gusteau was right. Oh, mmm, yeah. Each flavor was totally unique. But, combine one flavor with another, and something new was created!
One chef says it this way: “Odd bedfellows” make the best recipes. Combining strange and unlikely flavors can make for new and extra special tastes sometimes.
There are always trends to create new and interesting flavor combinations. Anyone remember “jello salad?” That may not have been the best combination. But great recipes have been made with orange marmalade…on steak, or chicken, or pork. In fact, one recipe claims to have found exquisiteness in watermelon on pork! Then there’s the brownies made with olive oil, the gourmet chocolate “bacon” candy. And don’t forget those “pregnancy” delights: pickles and ice cream! J
Well, just as combining different ingredients makes for great recipes, the same thing goes for our ideas –and our relationships!
We know from research in fact that the most creative ideas come from joining together, not like ideas, but completely different ideas! The goal is to take two completely different kinds of ideas from what might seem like entirely different disciplines, put them together, and “voila!” –you have come up with a new and exciting thought. It’s the way creative people look at ordinary things with new “eyes” or with new “perspectives.” It’s the way inventors come up with innovations and new patents. By putting opposites in “creative tension.”
The same thing can happen in our relationships! If you have several people who look the same, think the same, like the same things, have the same habits, dress the same, have the same tastes, it might make for a “tensionless” environment, but you also may not see much creativity happening! Nothing much new! Nothing interesting to carry the relationship forward. Nothing to challenge the senses, or your thoughts, or your brain, or your sensibilities. Nothing to keep interest and passion and conversation …going. And where there is no challenge and no conversation between differing opinions, there is no creative tension. No interaction of opposites. As the Puritans used to say in the early days of USAmerica, “the sparks are beaten forth by the flints striking together.”
No flints, no sparks.
No creative tension, no creativity. No creativity, no growth.
No “difference” is like bread without pesto. Or broth without vegetables.
Has your life or your relationship become a stale, still place, where nothing is wrong, but nothing is interesting? Has your marriage become a stalwart of “ordinariness” in which you’ve become so “alike” that you have nothing more to share? Has your workplace become a place where new ideas are squashed, and the status quo reigns? That’s when the bottom line starts falling!
Has the Church in America become a stale, odorless, colorless, tasteless, and bland place where everyone is the same, and growth has stopped, because people are afraid of “tense conversations”? Or afraid of “conflicting ideas”? Or afraid of “different ways of doing things”? Or afraid of “new and different kinds of people”?
Or is YOUR church a place where ideas can flourish, where new things are exciting, where healthy new tastes, and ideas, and creative “often different” thoughts and even “conflicts of opinion” can lead to new ways of worshiping Jesus, new ways of creating community, and new ways of doing ministry and mission?
Say, YES! [YES!]
Because while Jesus is always the same, always powerful, always present, always enduring –the WAYS that we worship Jesus, the way we point to Jesus in our lives and through our churches, the way we connect with our communities, the way we relate to people in our lives and in our churches, the way we make beautiful “music” to the Lord can be as different as all of those ingredients in that pesto. But together, it’s a symphony of smell, taste, enticement, and excitement!
You can have garlic music mixed with a basil worship style. You can have pine nuts in your bell choir, or a bit of onion in your mission team! You can have an oily kind of budget but with a bit of vinegar in your finance manager. And you come up with a great group of people on a Jesus kind of mission.
When Jesus went out to choose His disciples, he sure didn’t post a note asking for only “a few upright, devout Jews, with 10 years of Temple training, and all believing the same things, and all who think the same way about the Romans, and those too who won’t cause any conflict, or make any waves.” No way! Whom did Jesus choose?
A few rowdy, coarse fishermen, some of them known for their raucous behavior, a sicarii (a hit man with a dagger), a tax collector (that’s kind of like putting a rep from the IRS into your church!), a couple of John’s disciples –ascetic perhaps, some who hated the Romans, and some who worked for them, some who hated each other in any other kind of circumstance! And he taught them to work together, to worship together, to learn together, and to hang together through thick and thin. And as a result, they withstood the roughest of persecution and conflict when the going got tough. They withstood the crucifixion of Jesus Himself!
There WILL be Democrats and Republicans in heaven!
There will be pacifists and Marines in heaven.
There will be in heaven married and single, “slave and free,” “Gentile and Jew,” Russian, and American, and Egyptian, and Australian….all worshipers of Jesus.
There will be people who love Bach and people who love Bono in heaven . .. people who love B. B. King and people who love the Beatles.
In God’s “household” there are many, many rooms, and not every one of them is decorated alike! They come in different sizes and shapes. Some have flat roofs, some pointy, some have shingles, some cedar. Some even have steeples! And the people in them are as different as their décor.
But they are all “citizens” of the “Household of God!” Because God loves difference. God made each and every one of you ….unique and beautiful, each of you “younique” in your own way. God made you with your own likes, tastes, and differences. With your own ideas, perspectives, and loves, and dislikes. But guess what? When we put you all together, you make a beautiful, and delightful “pesto” of praise!
As long as you “talk to one another” in your household of God. As long as you interact with one another. You don’t have to have a common opinion, but you have to talk to each other and brainstorm with each other, and worship with each other, and rejoice with each other, and live with each other “in common.”*
We need to “talk to one another”….. in the household of God. Even when we differ. Especially when we differ. Because out of our differences comes beautiful music. In Christ, we become one in a unity not built upon “everything and everyone the same” but a unity built upon the beauty and harmony of “difference.”
In our scripture for today, Paul tells us that Jesus’ “purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, [Gentile and Jew] thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.”
We may not have a problem with “gentile” and “Jew,” but we do have a lot of differences in our culture and in our society that we wrestle with just as much today. Paul’s message is just as important today, as it was then. It doesn’t matter about our differences, if we are united together in Christ. Jesus is the one thing that truly matters.
We are still in the season of Pentecost, and this is a story of Pentecost. At Babel, everyone stood divided by their single focused arrogance, their selfishness, their desire to be independent from God, to be incommunicado from God, to be out of relationship with God, to be “as” God.
But at Pentecost….. people of all races, tongues, cultures spoke with one another and understood one another. The lines of communication –and relationship—were opened and enabled, and new relationships were forged that day –with Jesus …and with each other!
Now listen, the scripture doesn’t say, they all became alike! It doesn’t say, they all melded into a Stepford Disciple, who talks the same, walks the same, thinks the same, worships the same, or even likes the same music! Gasp! It doesn’t even say, they liked each other! But they understood each other, they communicated with each other, and they found a common Creator in the breath of the Holy Spirit!
Life is not a “one-way tower of sameness,” but a “pesto” of praise filled with differing voices singing God’s Song in a multitude of ways together!
[Optional replay of paragraph above in interactive conversation:]
Does it say that they all became exactly alike? [NO!]
Does it say that they all melded together into a kind of “Stepford Disciple”? [NO!]
Does it say they liked the same kind of worship or liked the same music? Gasp! [NO!]
Does the scripture say that they all of a sudden now liked the same things, thought the same thoughts, walked the same, talked the same? [NO!]
No! It doesn’t say they learned the same language. It says, they all spoke DIFFERENT languages, but could now understand each other, because they were “interacting” and “listening to each other” and “respecting each other’s differences” IN RELATIONSHIP!
Wow! Now, THAT’s a vibrant church of Jesus!
You don’t have to be alike to be in common. In fact, it’s much more beautiful to be different “in common,” to celebrate a community of difference, to live in the creative tension, the beautiful tension that comes from differing ideas, views, thoughts, and even feelings. As long as everyone worships the same Jesus! And agrees that He is Lord. That’s the only thing you need to have –Jesus Christ as your foundation! And a firm foundation can be built, some of the best foundations are built, when the bottom falls out.
Jesus is the trunk and the roots. And the water that feeds the roots. After that….you can sprout as many different branches as you wish, and draw in as many different creatures as you can hold. Jesus loves them all!
The Church is a “mustard tree,” a community of “different” people living in creative tension with one desire –to all follow Jesus into eternity. And He has made a place for us –for each and every one of us.
God loves you because God made you as a unique, beautiful individual, with your own tastes, and your own preferences, and your own thoughts, and your own ideas. And when your ideas and creativity come in contact and in communication with others’ ideas that are different, even radically different, amazing things happen. Boom, baby! Or as Remy would say, it’s “lightningy!”
You are part of a global church! You are part of something huge and extraordinary! You may come to worship each week in one small church, one micro-portion of the Great Church of Jesus in the world –but you are part of something so much bigger, so much more vibrant, and different, and beautiful than only you here.
And it’s all part of Jesus’ kingdom.
Close to John Wesley’s heart could be found a people called “Moravians.” These Moravians had a custom that Wesley loved, because it celebrated just this kind of community that Paul is talking about here to the Church at Ephesus those many years ago. It’s called a “love feast.”
The love feast celebrates the “great feast” of God’s heavenly kingdom, that place of many rooms, in which every person, unique as they are, is celebrated as a child of God, and a citizen of Christ’s kingdom. The early Christians called that community “koinonia.” The love feast recognizes that at the head of every table, no matter where or when or who sits around it, is always and ever shall be Jesus!
Let’s end our time together today with a kind of “love feast” –to remind ourselves who we are as a community in Christ, and that we are a part of God’s mission in the world of many, many others inside and outside of our church. That our table isn’t a closed circle, but an outstretched hand. That at the head only Jesus and forever Jesus resides to unite us in a “common prayer.” And let’s say that prayer together….
“Our Father…..”
[You may also want to end with another prayer of your choice.]
*For more on the idea of “pesto it!” see Tablet to Table by Leonard Sweet (Navpress, 2014)
Based on the Story Lectionary
Major Text
You Are Members of the Household of God (Ephesians 2)
Minor Text
God’s Promise to Flourish the House of David (2 Samuel 7 / 1 Chronicles 17)
Psalm 84: Psalm of Praise for the Courts of the Lord
Psalm 18: The Lord is My Rock
The Mountain of the Lord is the House of the God of Jacob (Isaiah 2)
Jesus Teaches His Disciples and Many Others On a Mountain in Galilee: a Weeding Out Story (Matthew 4:23 through 7:29)
Jesus Choose His 12 Apostles and Then Teaches Them Among Others in Galilee (Luke 6:12 through 6:49)
You Are Members of the Household of God Says Paul
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (which is done in the body by human hands)— remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Image Exegesis: God’s Holy Mountain
Dwelling place, household of God, citizenship, foundation, cornerstone, wall of hostility, body, holy temple, kingdom, realm, and in other scriptures this morning, the mountain of God –these are all metaphors which describe “place.” Or at least a kind of “space.”
That “space” is on in which Jesus is the “cornerstone” and “foundation” of a spiritual Temple, upon which many “rooms” or “houses” or “dwelling places” are built, each unique, but each part of a “kingdom” of God that celebrates difference “in common.”
I like to think of it another way that may be more familiar: a quilt.
Each person is God’s handiwork –a unique “patch” in an endless quilt of diverse beauty. Yours may be multicolored, while another person’s is filled with different shapes and colors. Each may have its own history, personality, culture, identity etched upon it, stitched upon it, but each one is a praise piece to the glory of God, and so much more beautiful together.
For if you’ve ever seen a true “patchwork quilt,” they are exquisite in their difference and unique pieces –most beautiful in their unity of differences.
Paul, in many of his letters to the early churches, tried to teach people that we are not “citizens” of God, or children of God due to our biology, or our history, nor do we have an “easy in” just because we are descended from God’s “original” Jewish people. We don’t “earn” our way into God’s household through mere deeds, or following a set of prescribed duties, or by coming from the “right” family, or by being a “pastor” or a “priest.” We belong to the household of God simply by following Jesus!
And we are all following Jesus, each in our own way, but with unified voices of praise.
I always have to chuckle at the ad on television for ancestry.com. There’s a guy who always thought he was German, wore the appropriate lederhosen, learned German music, all because he thought he was German. When they took his DNA, he learned he was in fact more Irish! So, as he puts it, he “traded his lederhosen for a kilt!”
At ancestry.com….you can find out your biology, where you come from, what’s unique and cultural about you…. But you can’t dissect your faith. We are all born of something more than flesh: the Holy Spirit. And God’s DNA is more authentic than yours.
To be a part of Jesus’ Holy spiritual Temple, all you need is faith, faith in Jesus, and the willingness to follow Him into conversation with other followers, into new places and circumstances, and most of all into a place of “deep faith.”
God’s house has many rooms! Different kinds of rooms for different kinds of people…but they all reside within Jesus’ holy Temple…. Because HE is the foundation…the cornerstone.
One has to note all of this building imagery in Paul’s scripture. Perhaps this is because Jesus used it Himself, and we know that Jesus was a “mason,” a builder, a “tekton” in Greek, which summed up every kind of materials “handiwork.” Jesus used this metaphor of invisible, spiritual Temple directly to His disciples. It would be built up in three days! He spoke of His resurrection Life! To be part of Jesus’ Temple…..as we all are encouraged to be….we need merely to be His disciple. Jesus is always the cornerstone. We are always the building stones. Our “rooms” that He has prepared for us, are part of Jesus beautiful spiritual Temple, and our feast together at His heavenly Table is that “sacrament” of praise that unites all of our voices as One in Worship.
Perhaps “voice” is a good word for it. In the movie, “The King’s Voice,” the king needs to find his voice so that he can communicate with his people. For us, we need to contribute our voice to the “Great Song of Life” that is God’s creative spirit in the world.
You don’t need to use food in order to demonstrate difference in unity. You can use so many metaphors –one that I like very much is the song by Eric Whitacre, a kind of music of the spheres with many voices in common from 12 countries in the world, a virtual choir. Listen to it here. It’s called “Lux Aurumque.”:
Or you may prefer the voices of children from around the world. If so, you can also find youtubes from 2012 or 2015 (Voices Around the World), videos of children singing from different countries in a common song.
No matter which metaphor you love the most, Paul’s message is just as important today as it ever was. We live in a time of great difference, but it doesn’t have to make us weaker. It can instead make us so very much stronger –in our faith and in our lives as followers of Jesus in (but not of) the world.