By Rev. Jamie Green Klopotoski
Colossians, chapter 3, verses 11-17
Memorial Day Weekend, May 25, 2025
Topsfield Congregational Church
I recently discovered a great
little podcast called “Everything Is Alive”. The host, Ian Chillag, interviews actors, comedians, and professors,
who pretend to be ordinary, everyday objects, like a chainsaw, a
bath towel, a
pencil, or a toaster. The people step into the perspective of the inanimate object, and Ian interviews them about their lives. The conversations
are completely improvised, and both Ian and his guest take it really seriously,
so there's this feeling as you're listening that you're actually hearing a very
personal interview between a great interviewer and like a stapler.
One of my favorite episodes
features Chioke I'Anson, a philosophy professor and director of the Community
Media Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is also known for being
the voice of NPR (he’s the one who says Support for NPR comes from NPR stations.) Anyways, in this episode of “Everything is Alive”, Chioke pretends to be a grain of sand.
Ian asks questions to get to
know Chioke as a grain of sand. “Do you know how
old you are?”
Chioke answers: “Not
exactly, no. I think it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of
thousands of years. I mean, I wasn't always sand, right? There was a time when I was a
boulder”.
At one point in the interview, Chioke, as a
grain of sand, interrupts the line of questioning and says: “You know,
we're doing this interview and I'm a grain of sand. But that's
not really the way that I would think of myself. I think normally I would just
say, ‘We are sand.’ There's this kind of mass noun thing happening. When I think of what
I am, we are the sand in the aquarium. When I'm on a beach, we are the sand on the beach. It's weird to talk to you because you don't seem to have a mass
noun arrangement. You say of yourself that you're a person, right? So, like,
why aren't you a grain of person?”
Ian responds: “Like,
why do I not consider myself as a fraction of all of
humanity?”
Chioke says: “Yeah. That makes more sense. It
just seems to me, if you recognized the degree to which you owed your existence
to other people, you might also be nicer to other people.”
His words took my breath away. I absolutely love this.
I also love the sand metaphor. Humans are like grains of sand, but humanity
is sand. Each grain of sand, each person, each and every single one of you, has
individuality. You are unique. You look different than others and talk differently
and grew up in different cultures with different backgrounds. Each of you has a
different personality, different learning style, different preferences, different
ways of understanding.
But “you” are
also a “we”. You are a grain of sand, and you are a grain of sand, but we are also sand. Yes, we are
each independent grains of sand, but we would be nothing, we would be
practically invisible, without all the other grains of sand. That makes us interdependent – we owe our
existence to other people. And I agree with Chioke that if we
recognized the degree to which we owed our existence to other people, we
might be nicer to other people.
I think this was Paul’s point in his letter to the Colossians. Yes, human
beings are unique and different, some are Greek and some are Jews, some are
religious and others are not, but ultimately, we are all one in Christ. And as
such, we are called to be nicer to other people. To practice compassion,
kindness, humility, patience, and forgiveness. To celebrate our unique
individuality as a grain of sand, while also recognizing our unity as sand. Unity
amidst diversity. Out of many, one.
That’s what “E pluribus unum” means. “Out of many, one.” It is one of the
mottos of the United States of America and can be found on the
Seal of the United States and on most coins in circulation. Dating back to 1782, it originally suggested
that out of many colonies or states emerge a single nation. But it has come to
suggest a broader idea, that out of many peoples, races, religions, and
ancestries has emerged a single people. On Memorial Day, we will celebrate all those brave people
who have died for this belief that human unity was possible. We will celebrate
the people who have fought for freedom, and equality, and peace among all who
are different. Unity amidst diversity. Out of many, one. E pluribus unum.
Let me be clear. Unity does not mean uniformity. I love the sand metaphor
because the unified entity of “sand” is made up of individual “grains of sand”.
You don’t have to lose yourself or your uniqueness or your individuality. Diversity
is to be celebrated, not absorbed or erased. I think God must love diversity
because of how much diversity was created in our world - the wonderful
distinctions of color, texture, taste, and contrast, the rich variations of
expression and perspective. Variety is indeed the spice of life. Unity does not
mean we lose our variety.
Unity means that we recognize the differences among us without labeling
the “other” as deficient or not good enough. Unity means being able to assert
what we believe without being abrasive toward those who follow a different path.
Unity requires that we possess enough of God’s grace to recognize human oneness
in the midst of human diversity. How good and pleasant it is when even the
starkest differences among us do not prevent us from dwelling together in unity.
Unity means realizing that we need each other to survive and to thrive. No
matter how successful we are as individuals, we need to realize that we didn’t become
successful by ourselves. There is no such thing as a self-made person, just as
there is no such thing as a beach consisting of just one grain of sand. Anyone
who claims they worked their way to the top all by themselves is mistaken; our
entire interconnected and interdependent society was required to get them where
they are today.
The richest among us didn’t get rich by themselves; they didn’t make the
cars they used to drive to work, or pave the roads they took, they didn’t
manufacture the computers or phones they used, they didn’t drive the garbage
trucks that disposed of their company’s waste, or pump their building’s septic
tanks. They didn’t even make the cup of the coffee they picked up on their way
to work.
Let’s consider that one cup of coffee, like this one. I think that you
can very clearly see how interdependent we all are by considering how many
people it took to get this cup of coffee into my hands. It required farmers to
plant, harvest, pick, and the sort coffee beans. Workers to process, dry, mill,
and roast the beans. Artists to design the packaging. Planes and ships and
truck drivers for distribution. Business owners to run coffee shops. Baristas
to serve the final product. It required the people who make the trucks for the
truck drivers, who make the farming equipment for the farmers, who make the
roasting and brewing equipment to turn coffee beans into coffee, and people who
make packaging supplies like tape, cardboard boxes, cups, and labels for
retailers. It required schools and teachers to educate all these people,
daycare centers to take care of all their children, factories and retailers and
tons of other workers who make everyone’s clothing, furniture, food,
refrigerators and cars, and sanitation workers to clean up after everyone. All
of that (and more!) just for this one cup of coffee. Without all of these
people, this cup of coffee could not exist.
Our very lives depend on interconnectedness and interdependence. We
cannot and do not do this thing called life by ourselves. If we could begin to
understand this interconnectedness and how much we rely on other people to do
anything, then maybe we could start to break down the huge divides that exist
in our society.
If we truly started to think of each other as interconnected with
everyone else whom we live with on this planet, then maybe we would love one
another and look out for one another. I have a really beautiful example of
this.
An anthropologist once proposed a game to kids in a South African Bantu
tribe. He put a basket of fruit near a tree and told them they would be running
a race, and whoever got to the tree first would win all the fruit. When he gave
them the signal to run, instead of making it a competition, the kids all took
each other’s hands and ran together, so they all won. Then they sat in a circle
enjoying their treats together. When he asked one child why they chose to run
as a group when they could have had more fruit individually if they had won on
their own, the child said: “How can one of us be happy if all the other ones
are sad?”
We are interconnected. We are not just individuals living alone in the
world but we are part of this complex, diverse interconnected system created by
God. I invite you to look at your life in this way, to recognize the degree to
which you owe your existence to other people. I invite you to open your hearts
and minds, to build relationships across differences instead of divides. We can
be one. We can be one in our vision of a nation devoted to the covenants of
citizenship that believe that life can be good, that there can be justice for
all of creation, and that we can resolve our disagreements without the use of
violence. Unity amidst diversity. Out of many, one. E pluribus unum. We are
sand. May it be so. Amen.
BENEDICTION:
May we celebrate our unique individuality as humans and our interdependent
unity as humankind. Out of many, one. E pluribus unum. We are sand. May we
recognize the degree to which we owe our existence to other people, so that we
might be nicer to each other. May it be so. Amen.
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