“Hymn and a Movie Part 2:
Joyful, joyful... & Ratatouille”

July 20, 2008
Common Time

For 1st Mennonite Church of Denver

8 2008, Vernon K. Rempel

 
Hymn “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee” WB #71

1) Joyful, joyful, we adore thee, God of glory, Lord of love;
Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee, praising thee their sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness; drive the dark of doubt away;
Giver of immortal gladness, fill us with the light of day!

2) All thy works with joy surround thee, earth and heaven reflect thy rays,
Stars and angels sing around Thee, center of unbroken praise.
Field and forest, vale and mountain, blooming meadow, flashing sea,
Chanting bird and flowing fountain call us to rejoice in Thee.

3) Thou art giving and forgiving, ever blessing, ever blessed,
Wellspring of the joy of living, ocean depth of happy rest!
Thou our Father, Christ our Brother, all who live in love are thine;
Teach us how to love each other, lift us to the joy divine.

4) Mortals, join the mighty chorus, which the morning stars began;
Love divine is reigning o’er us, leading us with mercy’s hand.
Ever singing, march we onward, victors in the midst of strife,
Joyful music lifts us sunward in the triumph song of life.

E-mail note sent out Thursday:
Folks, this Sunday's movie is Ratatouille, last year's Pixar hit (Their current movie "WALL-E", about, of all things, a sensitive, compassionate robot is another cinema wonder).

Questions to think about, in connection with Ratatouille (besides exactly how it is pronounced):
1) What is your most powerfully compelling food smell/taste?
2) What is the talent or gift you value the most in yourself?
3) If the world is full of such goodness, as a gift of God, how shall we respond as citizens of the human race, all creatures of God's love?

Happy viewing,
Vern

Sing “Joyful, joyful” vs. 1

The Science of Cooking
In the wonderful book, On Food and Cooking:
The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Harold McGee gets inside food and eating.

You can look in the book for answers.
Or you can just read it.

So for example, we have his article on “The Yak”
which we learn is the third important dairy bovine,
after the cow and the buffalo.

The milk of the yak is substantially richer in fat
and protein than cow’s milk.

Tibetans make elaborate use of yak’s milk
for butter and a variety of fermented products. (pp. 9, 10)
(Dan Jantzen has personally sampled the latter
and can tell you about it.)

There is an entire section on “The history of sauces in Europe” (pp. 581ff).
Also, a mini-essay “Why Some People Can’t Stand Cheese”
Also, we may read and learn that raisins
“have caramel flavor notes due to a combination of browning-enzyme oxidation of phenolic compounds and direct browning reactions between sugars and amino acids.” (p. 363)

This is important for myself as a Russian Mennonite to know.
So many of my historic dishes include raisins,
and now I know about that browning-enzyme oxidation.
It kind of lifts the culture to a new culinary level...

It is a book full of how the wonder of food
is granted to the senses.

What makes bread and coffee so wonderful?
It is something called the “Maillard Reactions” after
Louis Camille Maillard.

These reactions are responsible for the color and taste of
bread crusts, chocolate, coffee beans, dark beers and roasted meats.
(anyone hungry?)

They involve carbohydrate molecules and amino acids.
Change happens with cooking or baking or roasting
and the result is hundreds of by-products
mixing and re-mixing nitrogen, sulfur,
carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

Flavor names for these re-mixes include:
savory, floral, onion, earthy, nutty, butterscotch.

In the wonderful animated movie Ratatouille,
our hero is a rat—the movie’s central pun:
rat and ratatouille—named Remy.

Remy is a rat with a “highly developed
sense of taste and smell.”

So we see him sampling a discarded dessert.
He notes: “flour..., eggs..., sugar..., hmm—vanilla bean...,
Oh!—small twist of lemon....”

Remy is able to discern all these wonderful flavors.
We see splashing and dancing colors on the screen to show
how the flavors splash and dance in his
mouth and mind as he tastes food.

He loves the wonder and power of flavor,
mixing strawberry and cheese:
First the cheese: “creamy, salty sweet, an oaky nuttiness...”
Now the strawberry: “sweet, crisp, slight tang on the finish.”

So many names of food, descriptors for taste.
Including one cooked by thunderstorm that is “lightening-y.”

He notices all these things while the other rats
are just, as he puts it, “horking it down”.
What we begin to learn is: can’t creation be wonderful?

Sing “Joyful, joyful” vs. 2

The Gifts of God for the People of God
In the classic communion service, this phrase is uttered
as the bread and wine are held forth:
“The gifts of God for the people of God.”

It echoes our offering blessing
“May these gifts be a blessing in the Spirit of God.”

Part of what makes creation wonderful are the raw materials,
such as food with all its atoms waiting to be transformed.

And part of what makes creation wonderful is the
human ability to work on it and play with it.

This too is the “gifts of God for the people of God”
All our diverse abilities.
Appearing even in unlikely places.

A few months ago, I sat across from a man
who does speed sheep-shearing as a sport.
Who knew? Diverse abilities...

The opening of Ratatouille
begins with a sample bit of the
French national anthem: La Marseillaise

and then an adoring newscast about how
“the best food in the world is made in France,
the best food in France is made in Paris
and the best food in Paris - some say -
is made by chef Auguste Gusteau.”
(French laugh...)

But here’s the thing - chef Gusteau’s best-selling
book is “Anyone can cook!”
From the heart of haute cuisine,
his idea is anything but elitist.

As we learn later in the movie, this
does not mean that everybody is just
as good at cooking as everyone else.

We all have gifts, but not all are cooks.
Rather, it means that the gift of cooking can
arise from unexpected places.

Which, as we soon learn, is exactly what
(French accent) our leettle story is about (French laugh)

In the case of the this movie, a rat can cook!
The rat—Remy—becomes the chef at Gusteau’s!
This is a discovery of biblical proportions!

Biblical because Jesus is the unlikely one too,
the unlikely peasant savior.
His ancestors include
Rahab, Tamar, Ruth, Bathsheba, Mary
(the five women listed in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus)

The stories in quick summary, respectively: dangerous, tricky, forward,
conniving and peasant teenager.
Not the stuff of the average lead article in “The Mennonite” magazine.

And of course all the unlikely men too:
Reluctant Moses who whined, delayed, complained,
indulged in temper tantrums.

And David, who can only be described as a bit of a loose
cannon in love and politics—to put it mildly—read the stories.

And this is good news. This is the glory of God. Why?
Because God will not be limited by our imagination
for where great goodness will arise.

And so the “gifts of God for the people of God”
appear where they will. And fortunate are we if we see them.

Sing “Joyful, joyful” vs. 3 on my count (count off four) (sing with accomp.)

Bread and Wine: The Glory of God
My favorite Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart,
notes that the symbols of the Christian faith
are not occult [signs] or bull’s blood
or sipping brackish water from the wilderness...

Rather, the symbols of Christian faith are the
cardinal signs of human fellowship: bread and wine.”

He notes that Christian faith rejoices “in the order of creation
as gift and blessing..., an abiding sense of the sheer
weightiness... of God’s glory and the goodness of all that is.” (107)

It is in the material and physical realities
that we are invited to discover God.
What matters is “Not in some heaven light-years away,
but here in this place” as the hymn goes. (WB #6)

As Hopkins puts it “The world is shot through with the grandeur of God”
and so Hart notes that we don’t need the hidden
codes of the occult or secret societies.

There isn’t some coded or hidden grandeur;
You don’t need the DaVinci Code or The Secret

We don’t need some hidden spirit
(called “docetism” in classic theology) or
or special and secret knowledge
(called “gnosticism” in classic theology)

Hart says it’s the surfaces of creation that matter,
not some imagined invisible depths.

The beauty and power is right in front of your face:
first of all, in our movie: food!
A rat who loves the smell, the taste,
the magical power of food!

Jesus understood this too:
“I have come eating and drinking
He enjoyed himself with people;
In his work, teaching and food went together.
Food was teaching, and teaching food.

The beauty and power of bread, juice,
skin, eyes, houses, leaves, flowers,
all the wonderful nouns of creation.

And the love which we may have for these
and for the people and stories and memories
that they carry for us.

We do not need an alienating religion or abstract philosophy
that takes us out of this world.
This world is given to us as gift.

In the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are invited
to enter the world whole-heartedly,
not to be above the whole flesh and blood thing,
to be people of earth.

People of earth!
Which naturally and seamlessly involves us
in peace-building and seeking justice
because the physical world that matters so much includes

my body, but also others’ bodies,
and the greater nest in which we live - the earth.

What you need is not secrets and signs
but rather a willingness to throw yourself
into the project of loving and being loved.

Last week I talked about the geworfenheit
of being thrown into our lives.

But we may chose that thrown-ness and recapitulate it,
throwing ourselves into the life
in which we find ourselves.

Throwing ourselves, risking, splashing on in,
for the sake of love. Not meting out life
in careful little nibbles and sips.

The psalmist says “Taste and see that I am good...” (Ps 34:8)
And also
“The earth and it’s fullness are the Lord’s” (I Cor. 10:26; cf. Deut. 33:16)

When you risk love, what you plunge into, what ocean of life,
is the sensual world, the world of the senses,
not some abstraction, but “food on the table” if you will.

In Ratatouille, there is a dreaded food critic named
Anton Ego. His nom de plume is “The grim eater.”
He is not in the least impressed with anything “Gusteau.”

But upon hearing that there is something new
and wonderful happening at Gusteau’s
with it’s new chef, he goes to check it out.

When asked what he would like,
in his best not-to-be-impressed, bored-with-life manner,
he asks the chef to “surprise” him,

as if he “smells a rat” in the kitchen...
...which he does, and will, but it is a smell—
and taste—which will amaze.

He is served the rural vegetable dish ratatouille.
It is an extremely unlikely entree in a fine restaurant,
but our rat—Remy—has worked his magic,
including his own version of one of those
European sauces that McGee writes about.

And so here is perhaps the most beautiful moment in the movie:
The camera zooms in on our ghoulish and skeptical critic
about to take a bite; and then he does

and—voilá—he is transported to his
childhood, to his country home
and his mother comforting him
with, of all things (of course) ratatouille.

As the gospel of Luke says of the prodigal son
the old critic “comes to himself.”
This disaffected old critic
now finds himself rejoicing in food
and now, we also notice, rejoicing in life itself.

He is no longer alienated, but re-enters
the world with all its capacities and loves.
In the final scenes he is enjoying himself
not in his fortress of a writing room,

but among joyful people in a new and wonderful
restaurant whose chef is our rat Remy.

Have you ever been transported by food?
Just as with Anton Ego’s taste of ratatouille
a taste of childhood food can recall for us
those times and places.

For me, something with raisins from southern Russia.
For you, perhaps a certain chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Or we may be taken to a country where we first ate couscous
or we remember slurping spaghetti on our first date.
Or the creme brulee at our own Le Central.

Embedded in the food is meaning, story,
a whole feeling and conception of being.
This is what makes it so powerful.

Food, and other basics of the stuff of life
and how we love each other with them,
are the “gifts of God for the people of God.”

This is the earth, and the “fullness thereof”
as the King James puts it.

After his transporting meal of ratatouille,
scary Anton Ego is moved to opine:
“Not everyone can become a great artist
but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

And we might add, democratically, and theologically,
that all have gifts that matter,
all have gifts that can add
wonderfully and significantly to the sum
of the world’s joys.

Let us be such people of the world,
let us be such people in the world,
thrown in, joyfully sharing love

people who discover and share joy in God’s creation. Amen.

Sing “Joyful, joyful” vs. 4 a cappella; vs. 1 reprise with accomp.