“Soup or Salad?”
A sermon on the theme of Unity
Preached by the Rev. Carol A. Huston
Community Unitarian Church at White Plains
September 13, 2009

Here at CUC, we are initiating a different way of organizing the themes and topics that we will be considering this year.  Each month we will declare a different theological concept or category.   Most (not all) of the services in that month will advance that theme.  And our Director of Religious Education, Lara Campbell, will focus on that theme as well.  This will give all of us a better chance to focus our thoughts around the same issues.  I want questions and feedback from you.  And you can talk about these ideas with each other. 

A resource list on the theme will be available before the month begins.   One for this month was sent with the Communitarian; it is also posted on the website and in your order of service today.  Please don’t be intimidated by this; it is not a required reading list.  The list is there simply to suggest the direction I might take with the theme.  I will not use all the recommended references in a particular week and may not use all of them through the month.  Perhaps you might want to read something on the list, or there may be something on the list that you already know about.  In the future we will include children’s books as well as adult books, and television or film resources are going to be very important.  More and more, films and television, for better or for worse, give us the texts that we look to for our thinking. 

And occasionally a film can be a call to arms, can send you home to do something different, perhaps something you have been thinking you should do.   An Inconvenient Truth got a widening group of people to look for concrete projects on climate change.  Taxi to the Dark Side kept the pressure on for anti-torture inquiries.  For me, the big call to action this summer came from Julie and Julia.  It sent me home to cook. 

I have had a copy of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking on my shelf for a long time, but I hadn’t opened it for years.  After seeing the movie, I made four major recipes within a week, including Beef Bourguignon which plays a central role in the film.  In the same stretch of time, I also cooked from The Joy of Cooking, which, by the way, I consider our UU cookbook.  Erma Rombauer actually used the kitchen in First Unitarian Church of St. Louis as a test kitchen for her recipes.  When I was there in the 1980s, there were still women in the church who would bring in a pot luck casserole and tell you that “this was really the way that Irma made that dish” – the recipe somehow got changed when it went to print.

I am serious that a call to action involving cooking is an important thing.  We need a paradigm shift to change our attention to local foods, to fresh, non-processed ingredients, and a big part of that shift needs to include cooking those foods ourselves.  A film that could remind me, and many others as well, that cooking is worth the time that you put into it is a valuable thing.  There is great creativity and aesthetic value in cooking.  You will probably hear more on that another time, because it was actually the goal of the month to look at things through the lens of our them of “unity,” and that brought me to another place

There is a definition of “unity” is at the top of your order of service which includes the words “oneness,” “singleness,” “harmony.”   For us, harmony and unity are virtues.  We are UNITarians after all.  Some of our congregations have the word “Unity” in their names.  But how is unity achieved?  The most common metaphors about the process are, in fact, culinary.

A good recipe has a unity, a oneness about it.  The flavors come together, we would say.  And as I watched the pot of Beef Bourguignon bubbling on the stove, I thought about all the chopping and heating and stirring and whisking I did to combine the meat and stock and vegetables and wine for that unique flavor.   

And I thought about the great melting pot of the United States (there’s the word again).   It is a cliché of long standing that the United States became one – e pluribus unum -- through the melting pot of cultures.  That is the background that my family on both the English side and the Hungarian side would acknowledge.  The English side probably needed a little less heat than the Hungarian, but for both the fires of education and competition, and years and a generation or two were necessary for the edges and the differences to be melted off.  But think about it:  a melting pot is a violent image:  changes come through heat -- deforming, falling apart as an individual substance.   In all but the most subtle recipes, the individual elements lose their original character.  In recent years many have begun to criticize how easily we accept this image.¹   Do you really want to be melted as you move into a new society?² 

Many have tried to replace the melting pot imagery with the metaphor of the Salad Bowl.  It provides a different form of unity, in which the character of each element is maintained.  And heat need not be applied.³   In the salad bowl, the lettuce and the cucumber and the pepper and the tomato all retain their character.  Or do they?  How do they become a unified salad, rather than a boring bowl of vegetables?  There must be some transformation, even if it is just adding a dressing.  Even in this metaphor, the creation of unity demands change, the violence of chopping and tossing, let us say, if not the violence of heating..  

It is hard to see the unity in the United States right now, but this country, from its beginning, carried a vision of unity in the thoughts of our Puritan forebears.  A book called The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell analyzes this in depth (if there’s anything that you should read on this month’s list, it’s this book – I will come back to it again later in the year).  The founding documents and journals of that Boston colony spoke incessantly of unity.  From John Winthrop’s sermon on their arrival:  “The only way to avoid shipwreck is to be knit together in this work as one man.  .  .    We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.” (p. 51)  

And from Anne Bradstreet, a poet who was on the first boat:  “As it is with countries, so it is with men:  there is never yet any one man that had all excellences (and so) he stands in need of something which another man hath.  .  .  God will have us beholden one to another.”  She cautions that this compensatory unity, this unity based on mutual need and ability will work as long as we aren’t saying “I need you to mow my lawn and you need me not to report you to immigration.”

So they consciously worked at Unity, those Puritans did.  And how did they do it?  No melting pot in operation there:  they exiled those who refused to unify.    Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson (as in parkway), had their own ideas about religious freedom and community, and they were forced out of the Boston colony – in the winter.    No unity through melting or mixing together there.  A deep unity came through purification – literally freezing out the odd flavors.

Unity can come through a purifying process.  Unity can come through violent transformation.  But the most common unifying force we see around us is unity in opposition to something.

The film Norma Rae is included on the resource list.  In a fine performance, Sally Field shows us the work of a union organizer and the harmony that can come from it -- but it is harmony in reaction to another.  Unions, armies, sports teams, political campaigns -- people report their deepest sense of unity in these situations of confrontation, standing over and against something else.  District 9 – a fine film, by the way, even though the violence level might be too much for some of you – shows us South Africa, the races working comfortably together, but it is over and against the aliens from space who landed in Johannesburg.  The fastest way to unity is through opposition.  What does that say to us about virtues of unity?  I leave that to your discussion. 
 
But the vision of unity is still there.  And even with all that reservation about how we get to unity, it is a vision we must maintain, because only through unity can there be peace.

As I prepared my own meditations for 9/11 this year, I found a reading from Norbert Capek, the Unitarian minister who created the flower festival that we celebrate each year in the spring.  His ministry called people to oneness and harmony in life.  It is heartbreaking to realize that Capek came to his end in one of the greatest divisions the world has known – the Nazi Death Camps of World War II, because he preached these kinds of ideas.  These words are his:

“In the name of Providence, which implants in the seed the future of the flower, and in our hearts the longing for people to live in harmony;
“In the name of the highest, in whom we move and who makes the mother and father, the brother and sister, lover and loner what they are.  .  .  
“Let us renew our resolution – sincerely to be real brothers and sisters regardless of any kind of bar which estranges us from each other.
“In this holy resolve may we be strengthened, knowing that one spirit, the spirit of love, unites us; and endeavor for a more perfect and more joyful life."

So may it be.

¹A parishioner remembered when people started saying it was stew instead of soup in that pot - the elements of stew keep some of their identity.
²Frankly, the melting pot is less in operation here now than it is in other places.  France and some other European countries turn up more heat, especially for religious difference.  Head-coverings for Muslim women and the turbans for Sikh men have been melted off.  In general America is not requiring that, at least not legally.
³The Chinese, I have read, do not understand the American interest in uncooked foods, in dishes that aren't melted and melded together, and so this can't be a truly inter-cultural metaphor.

Theme:  UNITY

Written resources:
   “The Tower of Babel,” Genesis 11.
   Yes to a Global Ethic:  Voices from Religion and Politics (Hans Kung, ed.)  Assembled brief essays on the principles drawn up at the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions
   The Wordy Shipmates (Sarah Vowell)  An insightful and often amusing story of the Puritan colonies in Massachusetts
   The Plague (Albert Camus)  A novel about the extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion that come to a small coastal town.

Film and other media: 
   “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain” (1995)  A family comedy in which the whole village responds to disappointing news.
   “Norma Rae” (1979)  Sally Field stars in this film about union organizing.
   “Remember the Titans” (2000)  Denzel Washington stars in a film about how a racially integrated team works to become one.
   The situation comedies “Friends” and “Seinfeld”