Though You Have Considered All the Facts by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz

When they want you to buy something they will call you.

  So, friends, every day do something that won't compute.

  Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.

  Take all that you have and be poor.

  Love someone who does not deserve it.

  Denounce the government and embrace the flag.

  Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

  Give you approval to all you cannot understand.

  Praise ignorance,

  for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.

  Ask the questions that have no answers.

  Invest in the millennium.

  Plant sequoias.

  Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant,

  that you will not live to harvest.

  Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the

mold.

  Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

  Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under

the trees

  every thousand years.

  Listen to carrion--put your ear close,

  and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.

  Expect the end of the world.

  Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.

  Be joyfulthough you have considered all the facts.

Sermon:

Though You Have Considered All the Facts, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, April 19, 2009

         My dreams are haunted by Al Gore and his pointers. In my nightmare, the charts from Inconvenient Truth pile up and cover the Earth the way our Earth stickers have covered Carbon Guy. Al himself gets bigger and bigger, as if he’s filled with air or helium, and he begins to float menacingly above us.

         We have the facts. We know that we should have started years ago to save our Planet Earth; we know that for every hybrid car we buy, a thousand people in China or India are putting down the money they have carefully saved to buy their very first car, not a green one, and we know that we are on shaky moral ground to tell them they shouldn’t get rich by polluting the planet, since that is what the overly developed world has been doing for generations.

         But maybe the facts aren’t all we need to know.

         Besides understanding Al Gore’s charts, and the science of how carbon is affecting the atmosphere of our planet, and how fast our climate is changing or how little rainforest is left, there is something else we need to understand. In community organizing, this is called a “foot analysis.” What are the systems that have their foot in the back of this planet?

         Even more important, we need to understand this: what are the mental boxes that keep us from seeing what there is to do about it? What are the structures that influence our thinking, the frames of reference that seem so basic that we who question everything don’t think to question them?

         Thomas Berry said it this way: “what is demanded of us now is to change attitudes that are so deeply embedded into our cultural patterns that they seem to us as imperative of the very nature of our being.”

         As Unitarian Universalists, we understand that we belong to an interdependent web – that we live and move and have our being in a vibrantly complex relatedness to one another and to the Earth. Bit by bit this spherical way of thinking is settling into our being, replacing the vertical model of humans as lords of the earth, given dominion on this planet by a creator-god, the lord of us all. This is an important change, but most of us were brought up and still live and work today within the old vertical systems, and so we don’t fully inhabit the world of our imagining; we are still bound by the old structures. Even our architecture, even this sanctuary with its oversize pulpit, reflect that old way of thinking. I am glad to be preaching this particular sermon on a level closer to yours, though I apologize that I myself am vertically challenged and I know that given the architecture of this Sanctuary, it is hard for some of you to see me unless I am elevated the way the Earth is this Sunday.

         There are other structures that have crippled our imaginations, and they live in the shadow areas of our mind where we can’t see them. James Gustave Speth, in “The Bridge at the Edge of the World,” writes that the ideology of capitalism has so shaped our thinking that we no longer question a basic premise of economics: that growth is necessary for economic health. This is the “indispensable ideology of the state nearly everywhere,” in Speth’s words. Until we begin to think our way past that model, our planet will remain critically endangered, and “it will hurt the economy” will remain the show-stopper for everything from individuals’ acting to live a sustainable lifestyle to state participation in global agreements limiting the causes of climate change. It’s hard for us to think past this assumption that economic growth is necessary and good -- because the economists and social theorists who came after Adam Smith decided that happiness was to be measured in money. So Jeremy Bentham’s idea that governments should strive for the “greatest good for the greatest number” became locked in a moneybox.

         There is, as Thomas Friedman has said, no Dow Jones index for Mother Earth.

         The good news is this: many, many theorists are working to overturn that presumption, to come up with measures for happiness that do not rely on ever-greater levels of spending for consumer goods. Smart people are thinking about this, but their influence will be limited until we push political leaders to risk using these measures of well-being. We should invite our elected leaders to model themselves on the leaders of Bhutan. That’s right, Bhutan, a tiny, landlocked Asian nation, whose rulers have set the course of their country by the values in the Happy Planet Index. In Bhutan, progress is charted by a Gross National Happiness index, not by Gross National Product.

         All around the planet, these ideas are being pursued on a grassroots level, as well as a theoretical level. In “Blessed Unrest,” the businessman Paul Hawken writes that people are coming together around environmental activism, social and economic justice, and resistance to economic globalization by indigenous peoples around the world. More and more, the people in these movements see how economic justice and environmental care are intertwined, and how the modern world has lost a kind of earth and communal wisdom – the wisdom of the interdependent web – that the tribal peoples of the world may yet retain. Google “13 grandmothers,” and you come up with a worldwide council of 13 indigenous grandmothers, who have come together to promote wisdom about how we can save our Earth.

         But here we are, inside the Beltway. For most of us, our individual and institutional lives are interwoven with the systems that we needed to change yesterday. The shadow looms. What must we do? We put stickers on Carbon Man and uneasily go about our lives.

         The stickers do matter, though. With these stickers, people in this congregation are testifying to changes in their lifestyle that, taken together, eliminated the production of 600 tons of carbon emissions. That’s equivalent to taking 170 mid-sized cars off the road, and if every family in the U.S. reduced carbon emissions by as much as this, it would be as if we took 100 million cars off the road. That’s a chunk -– and I am grateful to Green Action for creating this opportunity for us in this congregation to notice what we can do to reduce our carbon footprint.

         I’m also grateful to you for making it fun, because “laughter is immeasurable,” and we won’t be able to save the planet without it.

         But we can’t stop with individual action. That would be as if Martin Luther King thought he could lead a civil rights movement by giving his children a vote on what to have for lunch. Hooray to Michele Obama for planting an organic garden in her backyard, but I’m sure she understands that what is needed here is a great social change, an upheaval even, and we have to join our voices collectively and demand justice and sustainability for all of us and for the Earth.

         It is time, as Speth put it, for a great amount of civic unreasonableness.

         Here in the Beltway, we know how to make our voices heard in collective advocacy. We know how to lean hard on the Obama administration to act aggressively on climate change, as he promised during the campaign. How great that Van Jones is advising the president on creating a green economy that is sustainable for all of us – starting with those who have been too long left out of the prosperity of this country. Now we need to pressure Congress to pass cap and trade legislation, limiting the total amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that can be emitted into the atmosphere.

         It’s time for a Green Action. Cap and trade: Stop by Green Action’s table in Fellowship Hall, and they’ll take your picture with a cap of your choosing to send to your representatives in Congress.

         We can’t do this without laughter, and we can’t do it without poetry either. Laughter and poetry are what we need to break open those boxes that imprison our minds.

         Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into mold. Call that profit. … Be joyful though you have considered all the facts …

         It used to be said by a certain type of neo conservative that technology would provide the answer to saving the planet – don’t worry, we’ll figure out an alternative type of energy before it’s too late. Well we certainly can’t stop looking for clean energy alternatives, but hardly anyone still believes that will be enough to head us back from the cliff. No, what is needed is a change of heart, a change of consciousness, one we all participate in, from the children of this congregation putting stickers onto Carbon Man to all of us working to change the cultures of our families, our nonprofits, our government offices, our businesses.

         And yes, keep changing light bulbs to compact fluorescents, keep printing on both sides of the paper, do what you can do as an individual, but do it as a practice, do it to prepare your heart for the change that is to come. No one of us will force its coming, but together, we can dream it into being, and together, we can act for the common good.

         We are saved by love and imagination. We are saved by collective action. We are saved by poetry and laughter. And in that spirit, I’ll close with words from a poem I found on You-Tube, though I don’t know the author and I couldn’t find it in print. Here are the poem’s closing lines, slightly modified:

         We’ll fight the problem from the top and build solutions from below

         With humor, hope and energy, and this is how I know,

         That if you want to stop the tales of climate doom that’s coming fast,

         YES, reduce your carbon footprint, then use it to kick some … politicians into action.

         Can I hear an amen?

BENEDICTION

         We are saved by love and imagination. We are saved by laughter and by poetry. So in benediction, these lines from the poet Marge Piercy:

         Where does it begin?

         It begins when you care to act.

         It begins when you say “we,”

         and know who you mean,

         And each day you mean one more.

Sermon Sources and Inspirations

• Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America

• Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in H9istory Is Restoring Gracer, Justice, and Beauty to the World

• Joanna Macy, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World

• James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

• The work of Green Action, which leads this church to Green Sanctuary practices that reduce our carbon footprint, individually and as an institution. The Green Action Steering Committee is Lavona Grow, Mary Ann Lawler, Bob Olson, Mary Pike, MJ Schmelzer-Hoekstra, and Sharon Sundial