Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
October 6, 2024
Earlier this week, I was making chicken pot pie for dinner and discovered I had a bit too much filling for my pie but not quite enough to make a whole second pie. So I looked at all this creamy, brothy goodness and decided I could use it to make some chicken noodle soup. I cracked an egg, threw in a dash of milk, salt and pepper, then flour. Stirred with a fork until it looked about right, squished it out onto a floured cutting board and used a pizza cutter to quickly slice it into noodles.
Anytime I make noodles or pasta from scratch, I have the same thought: how can something with only two or three ingredients create something so delicious? It feels like an absolute miracle. Just a few basic ingredients - flour, eggs, some liquid - suddenly you’ve got thick noodles or fettuccine, ravioli or dumplings. Throw them in soup or serve with some quality olive oil. Dump on a can of tomatoes or toss in a handful of spinach and some chickpeas. An absolute wonder, right?
There are so many parts of our daily lives that are absolutely wondrous. And we rarely pause to notice. Last week in adult Sunday School, Dan and Courtney came to talk with us about the Jewish high holy days. One of the things Dan mentioned is how the Jewish tradition has dailly blessings for all kinds of everyday things. Blessings for waking up, blessings for changing a diaper, blessings before eating your veggies. Maybe there’s even a blessing for making noodles? If there isn’t, there should be. Some strains of Christianity have this, too. There’s a 19th century collection of Celtic Christian blessings called the Carmina Gaedelica and it’s useful if you ever want to bless the kindling of fire, milking a cow, shearing sheep, or beginning an ocean voyage.
These blessings, passed down through the generations, help us remember to pause and notice the holy in our everyday lives. Children memorize them and see their parents recite them - and, in this way, they are taught to value the practice of wonder.
It turns out that practicing wonder is one of the most important things a child needs for their spiritual development. More than memorizing Bible verses, more than being lectured about right and wrong, even (dare I say it?) more than going to church on Sunday. What children need if they’re to grow into adults with a strong spiritual foundation is space and encouragement to cultivate a sense of wonder. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons we created the Sacred Space for elementary-aged kids in our balcony. There’s space up there for the kids to sit in a pew and listen to the service if they’d like. But there are also quiet toys to fidget with, paper for drawing and coloring, quiet nooks where they can read books, and comfy pillows where they can simply rest and let their minds wander. In a world where we are all often overscheduled, it’s important to have spaces where we can slow down, lean into stillness (and even boredom!), ponder, daydream, and just BE. Worship can be that for children (and adults, too) if we create a space that encourages this type of holy wonder.
Children, of course, are wired for holy wonder. And they don’t even need adults to begin their spiritual development. I grew up in a family that was not religious and we did not go to church until I was a teenager. Nevertheless, I can remember having long talks with God and an active spiritual life as a young child. The world was full of wonder and I had a strong sense that God accompanied me each day. I didn’t need an adult to teach me - I just needed space to allow the Holy to do her work.
As we get older, we sometimes lose the gift of wonder. We might rush around and forget to make space for it. And when we find ourselves bored, we grumble instead of welcoming an opportunity for curiosity.
The rituals and traditions of the church can be a great place for wonder to grab and surprise us - if we allow it. For example, when we sing together: even if you don’t sing, you have an opportunity to listen with curiosity, or to thumb throught the hymnal and look for other songs that catch your eye. I’ll never be offended if your mind wanders during the sermon - perhaps the Spirit is planning to speak to you directly and you need tune in. And when we gather for communion - goodness, there’s so much time when you may be impatiently waiting to get on to the next thing. OR you could approach the sacrament with a sense of wonder, inviting holy curiosity, and making space for the Spirit to surprise you.
The elements we use for communion are filled in wonder, in fact. Like the egg noodles I made earlier this week, the communion elements feel like everyday miracles to me. Bread: it’s just grain, liquid, and some yeast. Juice is, of course, simply grapes and water. And the wine Jesus used it his time would have been created by allowing the invisible world work it’s magic.
It turns out that both bread and wine are fermented. And although we are mostly used to buying our bread and wine, the ancient practices would have been quite different, of course. One of the amazing things about fermentation is that it can happen even without adding yeast or another kind of starter. This process is called wild fermentation and it works for bread, veggies, yogurt, beer, and wine. Naturally-ocurring bacteria and yeast can be given space to do their thing and the results can be delightful. Each batch of food or beverage created will have its own unique flavors and depth.
We have no way of knowing how humans began fermenting our foods because it happened so very long ago. Historians suspect that mead might have been discovered when someone saw a bit of honey and water bubbling inside a tree stump. Yogurt may have been a happy accident when travelers packed up milk in an animal bladder of some kind and - surprise! - it wasn’t milk anymore when they got to their destination. No one’s quite sure if bread or beer came first - maybe we were soaking grains to make bread and left them too long and beer was brewed. Or perhaps we needed a use for our leftover bread and threw it into some water and the microbes surprised us. [1]
However it all happened, fermentation is a beautiful dance of creativity and relationship. It honors the relationship between humans and the planet: fermentation helps us reduce waste, conserve resources, and co-exist safety with the invisible world of microbes all around us. We know it also helps us keep the microbes in our bodies healthy and flourishing. Fermentation helps preserve food because it crowds out the bad germs and makes room for the good guys to grow.
Fermentation is also a beautiful testament to the relationships we share with one another. For millennia we’ve taught these methods of preservation to our children and our neighbors. Humans have gotten together to experiment, create, and ferment big batches for parties and celebrations. And we’ve gathered over tables heaping with wine and, beer, kim chi and miso, sauerkraut and pickles, injirah and labneh to laugh with friends and family.
Over the millennia, we’ve improved our skills. Artisans know that sometimes the best way to ferment is by using a hybrid method - catching those wild microbes AND carefully introducing a curated starter to finish the job. If you grab a bunch of grapes, they will eventually ferment on their own because the fruit already has microbes on it. That’s the wild fermentation. But it turns out that this process will only develop a wine with a very low alcohol content. If you want to make it into a stronger wine, you can finish the job by introducing a starter later in the process. This is called sequential fermentation and it’s a marriage of both methods. A vintner who uses sequential fermentation will get the local flavor, surprising complexity, and variety from the wild method. But they’ll also create consistency and depth by finishing with a starter. [2]
Maybe humans are a bit like this, too. Even if we never stepped foot in a church as a child - the wild Spirit would still find her way to us on the breeze. She would work slowly and relentlessly in our lives - breathing new awareness, possibility, and wonder into each of us. We would all have our own local flavor - our own faith stories, our own carefully fermented wisdom and wonder.
But when we come together in a community to wonder together - well, that may take the alchemy to another level. In church, we introduce the starters in our faith - scripture, shared prayers, practices and rituals. We allow the hymns and ancient stories and practices to take hold and move in our lives. Our faith may acquire a new depth and grow stronger over time.
Whether we are the product of wild fermentation or an ancient starter or some combination of the two - we are all invited into the wonder of a fermented faith. As we eat this bread and drink this cup, may we remain ever mindful of the wonders of the world around us and our place within the miracle of creation.
May it be so.
NOTES
[1] I learned the theories in this paragraph from Our Fermented Lives: A History by Julia Skinner
[2] https://winemakermag.com/article/758-wild-yeast-the-pros-and-cons-of-spontaneous-fermentation
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