If you want to raise your children with wholesome values through acoustic children’s music, Tom Chapin’s your guy. At least he was in the 90s when I was growing up. This past week I was dancing in the kitchen with my toddler to one his tunes. It goes like this (and no, I’m not going to sing it):
They call my town a melting pot, like a stew or a casserole.
But we are not a melting pot, my town is a salad bowl…
We’re so imported and so assorted,
There’s no way of melting us down.
But different scenes for different greens,
Our differences strengthen our town.
A salad of course gets tossed, but none of the tastes get lost.
My town is a salad bowl…
Jesus is not above using food metaphors to help his followers connect with their sense of self. You are the salt of the earth, he preaches in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Your distinctive taste is essential to who you are - don't lose that!
We are most valuable when we stay true to ourselves, our saltiness. And yet, salt is a flavor that does not work on its own. It can’t stand as the only flavor in a food stuff. Salt is at its best when it complicates and compliments other flavors. Everyone who's ever enjoyed sea salt sprinkled on caramel knows that.
As much as we talk about how visibly diverse our nation is now, when I think of a salad bowl community, I think of my grandmother’s childhood - or Bob Gurney’s similar tales of North Adams. My grandmother grew up in Bellingham, Massachusetts in the 1920s and 1930s. She speaks with pride of the neighborhoods that made up her town: the Irish Catholics, the Polish Catholics, the Italian Catholics, the French Canadians, and other Protestants, and even the handful of Jewish families sprinkled here and there. Each neighborhood gathered in their own distinctive places of worship and had their own distinctive cuisine. The languages and accents of the Old World were woven into everyday conversations. Diversity looked different than it does today, but it behaved much the same - sparking conflict and debate, yes, but also a source of strength and pride. As my grandmother tells it, the distinctiveness helped you understand who you were. At the same time, my Irish Catholic grandmother married into an old American Protestant family - no small thing at the time. She found a way to stay true to her heritage and faith within her marriage and to this day.
If we pay attention to the Gospels, Jesus' Jerusalem was filled with the intermingling of cultures, languages, currencies, and religions, including multiple factions within Judaism. Jesus crosses cultural borders to speak with Samaritans and Greeks and Romans all over the Gospels. It’s not all harmony and rainbows, of course - Jesus dies on a cross, riots are suppressed, and the temple destroyed. But Jesus’ world, and God’s vision for humanity, reflects the diverse and multicultural and very, very human time and place into which Jesus was born. When given the chance to ride in as a conquering hero, Jesus entered on a humble donkey. He neither bowed down to the imperial forces of his day nor became an overpowering dictator himself. Throughout his ministry, Jesus’ rhetoric, his encouragement to his followers, fully expects that they will be a small, brave group with a unique voice: A bit of yeast in a mess of dough. Salt in the recipe. A lamp in a darkened home.
For a good chunk of Christian history, the church operated as a persecuted minority that provided sanctuary for the socially outcast and equality for the downtrodden. The early Christian martyrs were killed for refusing to bow down to the rulers of the world about them. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, Paul writes in Romans, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Even well after Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, even after Christianity became the religion of conquering European kings and queens, there were other places around the globe where Christianity persisted in small, ostracized communities - India, the Middle East, and Africa. As the Bhutanese refugee congregation who uses our sanctuary can tell you, small Christian populations are still persecuted for being themselves across the globe today.
A good argument can be made that Christianity is at its best and stays truest to its origins when it is not watered down to be the cultural milieu. When our faith stands in opposition to the corruptive forces of society, calling us to our better angels. When sanctuaries are exactly that, sanctuaries, protecting us from the pressures of cruelty, indifference, and greed in our wider culture. When we are not the dominant flavor, but instead the salt that enlivens the whole, the missing ingredient that makes the dish worth savoring. Bringing out the sweet and preserving the good.
When Jesus calls us to be the light of the world, he does not ask us to be a floodlight. Too much light can be just as blinding as too much dark. We are to be a lamp that draws others into its warm glow. We shine best when we illuminate an alternate way of being. The stars shine only at night.
The Episcopal Church is at its best and most influential when we speak alongside representatives of other faiths to address those forces that are hurting our communities and our neighbors, when we act as "repairers of the breach, restorer of the streets to live in." This past Tuesday, St. Mark’s vestry voted to renew our membership in the Interfaith Council of Greater Springfield so that we can do exactly that. The council includes local rabbis, Bahai’ practitioners, Catholic nuns, Protestant ministers, professors of religion, librarians, imams, and secular humanists. Like other interfaith groups I’ve been a part of, we are at our best when we give room for each member to be fully themselves, rather than watering one another down to the lowest common denominator. When we listen for points of connection and celebrate how our differences can teach us more about what we do and do not believe. In fact, on this particular council us Episcopalians are limited to three votes so that no one faith community overpowers another. A salad bowl, not a melting pot.
The smallness of our church can be our strength, our daring contrast with others, a virtue. We draw people in not by being like everyone else, but by being ourselves.
Our challenge as individual Christians is to find those places in our lives, personal and public, where we are called to shine in a way that draws others into the good. We are also called to greater self-awareness of those times and places we are too overpowering.
It is not a question of being too salty in ourselves. Salt can't and shouldn't change its essence. It is instead a question of whether we overwhelm others in a way that degrades and impoverishes our community. Whether we don't give enough space for difference to thrive as a strength. A salad of only lettuce is no salad at all.
Perhaps there has been a time in your life where you were shamed, or teased, or punished for being your flavor, for setting out to be yourself, for taking your own stand. Maybe it happened in your family of origin, or at school. Or when you were a teenager. Maybe it happened at church, this one or another. Perhaps it is happening to you, now. It is possible that you were told at some point in your life your saltiness was not welcome, that unless you melted yourself down to be like the rest, you were worthless.
If you have heard that, if you have ever believed that, listen to me now: Your saltiness is what makes you precious. Your flavor is the missing ingredient God sprinkled into the world, into this community, to make it thrive, to bring out its goodness. Do not lose your saltiness. Do not allow or encourage someone else to give up theirs. Even if it means letting them go their own way for a while.
In your life right now, have you found a place there you can shine warmly so as to draw others in? Where is the world missing out on you? Where can you step forward and shine?
Is there a place where you might to pull back so as to better allow other flavors to come through? Where are you overpowering? Where can you step back and listen more?
Neither are about betraying your essence. They are about being wise and kind in how you show up in relationship with others.
We have a sign out on the front of our church that says: Love your neighbor who doesn’t look like you, think like you, love like you, speak like you, pray like you, vote like you. My prayer is that we mean it.
We also have a sign out front that says: We welcome you. We mean that, too.
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