HomeTURKEY SOUP: It is traditional to use leftovers in creative ways. What are the leftovers of your Thanksgiving celebration; what are the leftovers of your life to now; and how will you use these in the future?
READING:
Recipe for turkey soup.
Take the left over Thanksgiving turkey carcass, place in large soup pot or kettle. Just cover with cold water. Boil to the bone; that is, boil until all of the remaining bits of meat and fat have boiled off the bone, and the marrow has cooked out of the bones. Remove bones and gristle from stock. Add chopped onions, carrots, and celery. Add pepper, bay leaf, parsley and other herbs as desired. If sage or tarragon were used in the stuffing these make an especially nice addition to the soup.
If desired, leftover stuffing may be added to thicken the broth. If this is done, simmer until the breading breaks down.
About an hour before serving, add diced potatoes, turnips and parsnips. Simmer gently until all of the flavors are well infused throughout and the ingredients have softened but are still somewhat firm. Add peas or other green vegetable of choice and cook until just tender.
Accompanied by a loaf of good bread, this will provide an adequate soup.
For a truly delicious and heartwarming meal, however, add the leftover pleasure of the Thanksgiving Day table, the joy of a gathering of family or friends and a few heaping scoops of love and care.
AND Responsive Reading #660
SERMON:
Good Morning!
I have a confession to make at the beginning of this sermon: I do not make turkey soup with the leftovers of my Thanksgiving dinner. Many times I have set out to do so. I have simmered the turkey carcass, let the stock cool, separated the meat from the bones and set the results in a sealed container in the refrigerator. Then sometime about two weeks later, two weeks filled with good intent and plans to get to that soup “soon”, I find the container in the back of the fridge and toss it out without opening it, fearful of the aromas that might arise. I thus am out hours of work, hours of usage of electricity for our stove, one perfectly good storage container, and I once again feel that I have somehow failed to succeed at a task I had promised to fulfill. For the last five years I have not bothered to begin making turkey soup. Nevertheless, I can preach about it. That is one of the perquisites of ministry, we can preach about anything we wish to--even those things we do not do ourselves.
Sometimes making soup is a way to preserve leftovers that otherwise would be tossed out, but one usually makes soup when there is not enough meat on the bones to make a decent meal in any other fashion. The soup produced might be a meal itself, sometimes lunch, but often soup is used as the first course to a different meal.
It is the last reason for soup that I want to concentrate on today, using what otherwise would be tossed away to make more food.
Whether a turkey or chicken carcass or a hambone or beef bones, the soup is made when the leftovers are too small to make a meal out of by themselves. There is, so to speak, nothing left. And yet, so much more can be gotten from the remains. That is the magic of a good soup. It is really a form of resurrection. The dead and empty carcass transformed into a filling, nurturing, flavorful meal that satisfies body and soul.
The reading said to take the carcass and “Boil to the bone, that is, gently cook until all of the remaining bits of meat and fat have boiled off the bones, and the marrow has cooked out of the bones.”
In life we sometimes face dark moments and on occasion the question arises of whether there is anything more to get out of life. We can feel as if the good parts are all gone, that we have used the best, had the leftovers and now life is but a carcass. What a dismal image that is. But some people find they have that image in mind—or one like it—at particular moments in life.
It can happen to people whose children leave the nest, to those who retire, to people who divorce or to those who have lost a life partner to death.
But it can happen to anyone at any stage of life. No matter how old we are or how young, how financially successful we are or how poor, married or unmarried, with children or without; that sense of life lacking meaning or lacking any further joy or purpose can strike us and cause us pain. Sometimes that pain is the result of clinical depression, and when it is we need to learn to seek treatment for it. Too often people ignore the illnesses that we call mental illness because it is too embarrassing or too shameful to admit we have a problem. Of course, mental illness is almost always a manifestation of something physical happening in the body; there is too much dopamine someplace or not enough myelin coating on nerves or there is a shortage or surplus of electric current in the brain—almost always there is some physical cause to mental illness. But even if there were not, we should never feel ashamed to seek help for mental illness.
But it is also true that the view of life as no longer flavorful or nourishing can be a problem of perspective, of outlook. A turkey carcass looks unappetizing, but the magic of creativity turns it into soup. The magic of creativity can do the same with life.
But even without speaking to depression or blandness, we tend to overlook certain aspects of our lives when the tastiest morsels are gone. What are the leftovers of my life that I have failed to look at and make use of? What are the things that I have thought of as used up and no longer worthy of attention? What can I do to boil life to the bones get more from it than I ever thought possible?
That is, “How do I squeeze every last drop of sustenance or excitement out of life?”. That was the stated desire of Thoreau, to live so truly that he was able to squeeze out the last bits of life and therefore to know life to its core.
Thoreau was a bit more willing to face the negatives in life than I am, “If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world”. I do not wish for that for myself. If life is mean I want to do my best to avoid “the whole and genuine meanness of it”. I am glad we have developed a society that buffers us from the worst of the meanness of life. But his point of living fully is an important one, to know life so that when we come to die we do not discover that we have not lived.
When we have roasted the turkey we are done with the dinner. To make soup requires the additional effort of cooking the turkey carcass all over again. It is in the second cooking that we get to the marrow, that we really get to the center of the bone.
One implication of this is that as in soup from a turkey carcass so in the making of life if we are to get the fullness of it we must sometimes cook things all over again. That can mean many different things including the fact that we must sometimes recreate ourselves or our careers.
Doing so can seem like just too much of a task when we are feeling weak and drained, such as people do when they have lost a loved one, been let go from a job, dropped by a lover, burned or flooded out of their home or hit by a ravaging disease. It is ironic that those times when we are typically required to remake ourselves or remake life are precisely the times when we are feeling too battered by life to do so. How can I possibly begin again or take the next chemo treatment or the next surgery or go on without my life partner or whatever the circumstances may be.
The life message for this morning is that we do indeed still have energy and resources and hope, even when it seems there is nothing left but the empty hulk of ourselves. The fact is that we can take the next step, we can find it within ourselves to meet in some way whatever it is that life is presenting.
Our religious beliefs are important to this.
Those of us who are Humanists know that there is much more to the human spirit than we can see or know on the surface, that the human spirit is strong and can rise above or at least can face with dignity and calm whatever [obstacles} confront us in the moment;
those of us who believe in human community and connection know that even when our resources feel drained, when we feel empty and lost, a community of strength and nurture can feed our spirits and fill us with the energy of hope and possibility, or can merely sit with us in our weakness lending the support of human heart. It is for this that we join in community;
those of us who are Theists know that beyond human strength there is more than the human mind can conceive of; there is miracle and wonder; there is the reaching forth of divine intervention and divine power that fills us with the ability to suffer and to overcome suffering; and,
those of us who believe that the soul lives beyond the body, finding new vessels to live through, know that the troubles of today are fleeting, that these shall pass and that we have the strength to face any troubles, and that even to die is not the end as we will rise after death to new life.
Whichever of these is our faith belief, whichever one or more of these we draw from, whichever other beliefs we hold, may they fill us with the strength to take life as it is, to take the events in life as they come, and to boil to the bone both life and ourselves, making the magical transformation from lifeless hulk to food for the spirit and soul.
May we know that however empty or battered we may feel in the moment, there is more to gain from ourselves, more to give from ourselves. Let this be the magic that fills the life of each of us. So let it be.
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