Sermon:
I would like to invite you to take a moment to imagine yourself in one of your favorite natural settings. It may be on a mountaintop or in a deep forest or on a lake or ocean or in your garden. You're all by yourself and the weather is perfect. What do you feel? Do you feel that you are a natural part of your surroundings? Do you feel connected, rooted in the Earth in a deep and spiritual way? Do you feel at home?
I assume most of you feel perfectly comfortable and even ecstatic to be in such a natural environment. In fact, you may want to be there right now. Most of us yearn for such moments when we can be at one with the Earth and its creatures, when we can let go of the pretense and expectations of human culture and simply be. For Unitarian Universalists, this is at the heart of our spirituality.
And yet, why is it that when we relate to nature as a species, humanity becomes a cancer, ravaging our planet for its riches with little regard for those who suffer and for our future? Perhaps it's due to our pride that we have become so destructive to the web of life.
Pride is the seventh deadly sin we've explored this year both in our sermon series and in covenant groups. And it's said to be the worst sin of the lot, the original sin of rebellion against God, and the source of all other sins. It's the belief that, “I know better than God,” which means of course that I am God, and all the world revolves around me. In fact, this is one of the definitions of sin we've been working with this year, the assumption that the individual is the center and all others exist for that person's benefit.
Isn't the struggle against this plague of pride the reason we celebrate Earth Day? Our sin – or feel free to substitute “failing” -- is that out of a sense of pride, we human beings have put ourselves at the center of the universe, and all other life forms, as well as the planet itself, are used as tools to serve our egocentric needs.
Though pride is the deadliest of sins, Christianity must also accept responsibility for being a cause of this sin. Western religion has made the fatal mistake of putting God outside of nature, even creating “him” in our image. So it's no wonder we see ourselves as outside and against all that is of the Earth. And it's no wonder that we see the world around us as mindless and soulless and therefore not entitled to ethical consideration. The environment is ours to exploit, a gift of God, proclaims this theological perversion.
This sin of pride has helped us to gain great material wealth, but at the expense of our forgetting who we are and where we belong. We've become lost, not remembering that the Earth is our home. And we've neglected the ancient virtue of humility.
Humility is the virtue that counteracts pride. The derivation of the word "humility" actually means "from the earth". To be humble is to recognize and celebrate that we are from the Earth. To be humble is be able to reclaim faith in ourselves as creatures of nature, living fully in harmony with all other forms of life. And to be humble is to realize that as our carbon footprint shrinks, our spiritual lives expand.
The famed environmentalist, Thomas Berry, compares our society today with the Titanic on its maiden voyage in April, 1912. There had been warnings of icebergs in its path, but pride in the superior technology used to build the “unsinkable” ship caused everyone to neglect the dangers and sail blithely into disaster.
Today we're passengers on our own blue boat home, working, playing, living, but largely unaware of the the huge obstacles in our path that threaten our very existence. The vast majority of scientists proclaim that, “Human Beings and the Natural World are set on a collision Course. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and Animal Kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.” This statement made by over a thousand of the most illustrious scientists over ten years ago was prophetic, and yet it has been largely ignored, denied, and undermined by our government.
“Scientists tell us that the average global surface temperature increased by 0.6 degrees centigrade over the twentieth century, with accelerating increases projected for the twenty-first century,” writes David Korten. “The polar ice cap has thinned by 46 percent over twenty years and may begin melting entirely in the summer months as early as 2020. The ocean thermals in the Atlantic that drive the Gulf Stream that warms Europe have substantially weakened, creating concern that it may slow or stop entirely-- with devastating consequences for European nations and agriculture. Even small increases in temperature can have major climatic effects, as demonstrated by a steady increase over the past five decades in severe weather events such as major hurricanes, floods, and droughts... Agricultural disruption and major population displacements are now imminent because of climatic change and a resulting rise in the sea level.”
The evidence is overwhelming, but apparently President Bush didn't get the memo. He unveiled a new plan this week to cap U.S. emissions by 2025, which scientists say is too little too late. Europe has set a more aggressive goal to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 to half of 1990 levels. The White House sees that as completely unrealistic, even though it's becoming clear that if emissions are not cut back soon we may not be able to halt a global calamity.
With China building an average of one large coal-burning power plant a week, and India and other developing nations marching headlong into the modern world of cars and electric consumption, and our own government doing little to reign in emissions, the opportunity to save our planet is slipping from our grasp.
And the little we are doing seems at times more harmful than helpful.
Did you see the political cartoon in the Post yesterday that showed a man in a suit with an “Agri-business” briefcase standing in front of an emaciated boy with an empty plate and a big barrel of biofuel in front of him, and the man says to the hungry child, “Eat your dinner – children in America are running out of gas!” Are we really going to fill our SUVs with cheap biofuel at the expense of those around the world who are now rioting because of inflated food prices and shortages?
We cannot afford to pass this crisis on to the next generation; we must recognize global warming – or global chaos as some call it -- as the most critical issue of our time. But it will not be easy. It will require a new spirit of humility, tremendous sacrifice, and a wise plan for the future.
William McDonough, an architect and futurist from Charlottesville, Virginia, claims that our current economic system measures prosperity by how much natural capital we’re able to burn, how many smokestacks we’re able to build, and how few people are working, without consideration of the biological diversity we are destroying and the manufacture of toxic wastes that requires thousands of generations of constant vigilance to dissipate. Is that our intention? Is that what we really want? Is this our plan for the future?
McDonough insists we desperately need a strategy for change that grows out of humility, a humility that admits it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage, so how smart can humans be? When we design the future, he says, we should ask two fundamental questions. The first question is, “How do we love all the children of all the species of all time?” The second question is, “When do we once again become native to this place? When do we truly become indigenous people?”
Can you imagine using these two questions to design our future? This is the green lens we need to be using, a lens that looks to the needs of all the children, of all the species, of all time. Not just our children, not just our species, and not just for now. And a lens that seeks ways in which we may become native to our Earth.
At the Hanford Nuclear plant where we make plutonium for bombs and missiles, they had a symposium where they discussed how to mark the ground where they stored the plutonium so that even an ET 5,000 years from now will not dare to dig it up. Can you imagine that as a design assignment? Can you imagine a society that is willing to create that kind of problem for future generations? Today we are practicing intergenerational tyranny, one generation tyrannizing another by leaving behind a toxic, depleted, insecure, world for those who follow us.
In Genesis it says that man has dominion over the earth, but we have confused dominion with domination when in actuality it means stewardship. Stewardship requires that we be responsible stewards of our planet, that instead of acting out of pride to dominate and control nature, we act out of humility and find ways to be in kinship with nature. This kinship means that instead of assuming natural resources are for our benefit only, we will be like the Native Americans who call the resources of the Earth our relatives. True humility requires that we become at home on this Blue Boat Home of ours, accepting ourselves as part of the natural world while recognizing that we are tools of nature instead of nature being our tools.
We need to join in the struggle to save our planet and future generations. I'm sorry but changing light bulbs and recycling are not nearly enough. We need to do so much more. We need to change policy and we need to wake people up to the seriousness of this crisis. This will be perhaps the most difficult struggle in all of history, and we need to be willing to enter it in the spirit of the ancient Hebrews breaking away from their Egyptian masters.
Yesterday was the first day of Passover for Jews around the world. The traditional Passover Haggadah teaches that in every generation a pharaoh will attempt to enslave and destroy life and that in every generation, every human being -- not just Jews -- must look upon themselves as if it is we, not our ancestors only, who must struggle for freedom. Passover is about personal change but also political and social change. Can we face the pharaohs in our world -- those institutions that are turning the great round earth into a narrow place, or the Mitzrayyim, which is the Hebrew word for Egypt, meaning "tight and narrow space"?
Are we going to allow our planet to be such a tight and narrow space for future generations that they will be unable to live fruitful and happy lives? Or will we create a wide and vast future where we once again become native to the Earth and where all the children of all the species of all time are loved? If so then let us make a pledge to the Earth in the words of Gary Snyder:
“...I pledge allegiance to the soil...
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful [interdependence] for all.”
May we make that pledge, and may we live by it today, tomorrow, and always.
So may it be.
“I Believe” Statement – by Martin Ogle
My beliefs fall in three regions, I think – the esoteric, the truth as I know it, and action. The second seems to drive the others.
During graduate school, at Virginia Tech, I was invited to the home of a biology professor. Over dinner, he and his wife told me that one night, their 4-yr-old son had climbed into bed with them and asked – “Mommy, Daddy, is God a part of Nature or Nature a part of God?” We reveled in the profundity of that question – especially since, at age 4, the boy was already a published author of poetry!
But, I also identified, for as the son of a Methodist missionary in Korea, I had similar questions often. As when we’d go hiking in the mountains, encountering ancient gravesites or Buddhist monasteries. Or, when upon hearing wailing and moaning from our neighbors, my mother told me very matter-of-a-factly that it was a shaman – a woman – who was in touch with the spirits of Earth to ask the evil spirits to leave that house of sickness. In these and many more cases, Nature and God seemed to blend as one.
So, at an esoteric level, my beliefs are fairly open ended – I believe that different faiths and different traditions offer much of value to the human quest for truth and meaning. It is rather like the Chinese Dao Te Ching in which we read: “Nature can never be completely described.” We need every angle we can get to grapple with the large questions of God and Nature.
But the same chapter in the Dao Te Ching goes on to say that “since, in order to speak of it, we must use words, we shall have to describe it as “the ultimate source of all.” This is that second level I was mentioning earlier. At a very practical level, all of my senses and all of my scientific knowledge lead me to believe that Nature is, for us, the source of everything, and we are absolutely, inextricably, seamlessly . . .a part of nature.
So what does this second level of belief compel me to do? It leads me to find ways to live that are in conformity with “the ultimate source of all.” I believe we must find ways to mesh everything we do in a seamless and sustainable harmony with life around us – in our personal lives, here as a church and as communities and a nation. To be frugal, honest and deliberative in everything we do and to feel content and enjoy ourselves in doing so.
Thus, in closing, it is fitting that I help make the first announcement about what your “Green Sanctuary” committee of this church is planning for the coming year and to urge you to become part of its success, monetarily and otherwise.
Last year, the committee successfully managed the changing out of all of the lights here with Compact Flourescent light bulbs. This year they intend to enable the church to purchase 100% recycled paper for all of the white paper requirements. And they will be issuing the UUCA CUUL Project challenge. Please look for more information on that project and please know that your offering today goes towards the “Green Sanctuary’s” efforts.
