Sermon: So Much More Than Beauty

Unitarian Society of New Haven
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
November 29, 2017

Reading: “Gaia” by Jezibell Anat

Sermon:

For the beauty of the Earth, for the splendor of the skies. It is one of my favorite hymns.

Perhaps one of yours, too. As I thought what hymn we might sing together this Earth Day weekend, I thought immediately of this one. And then, just as quickly, came the title of today’s service. For, when it comes to the Earth, we sing grateful praise for so much more than beauty.

Because, and you know this, this Earth is the only one we have. She is mother and father, parent to us all. She gave birth to us and, when the time comes for us to die, she will receive us into her fullness.

We “grow in her gardens,” “feed on her greens.” “We dance in her meadows” and “build from her mud and stone.”

We are nourished and fed, cared for and sustained.

As a species, we have lived off the bounty of the land for millennia. And how have we offered thanks? Too often, we have stripped and squandered her resources, taken what was not ours to take, farmed and fished and hunted and mined and fracked beyond capacity.

We have blown the tops off mountains and polluted the seas. We have decimated plant and animal species – many to the point of extinction. We have seen ourselves as separate from the Earth, apart from, and having dominion over.

Long ago, humans in dominant Western cultures lost our understanding of ourselves as a part of the Earth, as one among many, as dependent and interdependent with flora and fauna and the land herself. And we lost touch of our connection to the Earth as a sacred source of life— “source of all” one might say.

Much of the worldview that leads to our separation from the Earth comes from Western philosophical and religious traditions.

I have talked before about the creation story in Genesis in which men and women are created on the sixth day, and God says to these creatures “fill the Earth and subdue it.” “Rule—have dominion—over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” And God gives to them the plants and the animals—“everything that has the breath of life in it.” [1]

Europeans took this world view and ran with it. Land and sea, animal and human, they saw everything on Earth as available for subjugation. Expanded notions of dominion led Christian Crusaders to consider non-Christians as enemies of the Catholic faith, as less-than-human and thus subject to conquest and annihilation.

Fifteenth century Popes Nicholas V and Alexander VI expanded the idea of dominion even further to include domination of all non-Christian native peoples on lands “discovered” by European explorers.

In a papal bull of 1452, Pope Nicolas directed King Alfonso of Portugal to “capture, vanquish, and subdue the saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ,” to “put them into perpetual slavery,” and “take all their possessions and property.”[2]

In 1493, after Christopher Columbus returned to Europe, Native American scholar Steve Newcomb tells us, “Pope Alexander VI issued a papal document, the bull Inter Cetera…, ‘granting’ to Spain …. the right to conquer the lands which Columbus had already found, as well as any lands which Spain might “discover” in the future.”[3]

These two documents laid the foundation for what is known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” and in 1823, this “doctrine” was written into United States Law in the case of Johnson v. McIntosh in which Chief Justice John Marshal wrote essentially that “Indian nations were subject to the ultimate authority of the first nation of Christendom to claim possession of a given region of Indian lands.”[4]

Not only did Christian explorers understand their dominion over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, but over the land itself and all its human inhabitants.

Why is this important? Because the understanding of humanity as separate from the Earth has its roots intertwined in the understanding of human beings as separate from each other. Dig down (not even that deep), and we, once again, find white supremacy at the base of the tap-root.

We are now far removed from the fifteenth century, but these ideas remain deeply ingrained in modern capitalist societies all over the world, and especially here in the U.S. The Earth and her inhabitants are still seen by many as conquerable, “subdueable,” valuable only in their capacity to bring a profit to the conquerors.

Some faith leaders are working to reverse these harmful and perverse ideas of human separation from each other and from all that gives us life.

In a September 2015 address to the United Nations, none other than Pope Francis proclaimed that “we human beings are part of the environment. We live in communion with it, since the environment itself entails ethical limits which human activity must acknowledge and respect.”

[Humanity], he said, “possesses a body shaped by physical, chemical and biological elements, and can only survive and develop if the ecological environment is favourable [sic]. Any harm done to the environment, therefore, is harm done to humanity.”

He goes on, arguing “every creature…has an intrinsic value, in its existence, its life, its beauty and its interdependence with other creatures.”[5]

One statement does not override two millennia of devastation, but it is a start.

It’s a start that may be too late. I don’t think I have to or that you would want me to run down a long list of devastating facts about climate change. We know that the Earth has warmed about 1.7 degrees since 1880, which, in the grand scheme of things, is actually quite a lot. [6]

We know that we are in trouble, that sea levels are projected to rise, flooding coastal cities, that agriculture is expected to be affected, possibly leading to wide-scale food-shortages.

The science on this is complicated and not exact, but we know that changes are already happening and will continue: melting of the polar ice caps, loss of habitat, weather changes.

And we know that large changes might happen on the scale of hundreds or thousands of years.

The hope being that we can use our intelligence to adapt – though recent events – pipelines pushed through, threatened pull-outs of the Paris climate agreement passed just last year, and politicians who do not believe in climate change running the EPA – these things do not leave one feeling optimistic.

But, once again, let us remember that hope is different than optimism. Environmental scholar David Orr says that “authentic hope…is made of sterner stuff than optimism….Hope requires the courage to reach farther, dig deeper, confront our limits and those of nature, work harder, and dream dreams.” In the case of climate change, Orr says, hope lies in our ability to face the truth as a world and to “summon the fortitude to act accordingly.”[7]

Summon the fortitude to act accordingly.

What does that look like? In a 2015 New York Times article, Justin Gillis summed up what we can do to combat climate change, saying: “fly less, drive less, waste less.”[8]

“Perhaps the biggest single thing individuals can do on their own,” Gillis says, “is to take fewer airplane trips; just one or two fewer plane rides per year can save as much in emissions as all the other actions combined.”[9]

Drive hybrid or electric cars, or better yet, bike, carpool and take public transportation.

Waste less food; eat less meat. Buy certificates to offset the emissions you do produce from flying and driving. Save power at home by plugging leaks and installing a smart thermostat.

Use efficient light bulbs. Turn off the lights when you leave a room.

But ultimately, Gillis says, “experts do not believe the needed transformation in the energy system can happen without strong state and national policies. So speaking up and exercising [our] rights as a citizen[s] matters as much as anything else [we] can do.”[10]

Here at USNH, your Green Sanctuary team has been providing opportunities to speak up and let your voice be heard, to contact your legislators, to learn about legislation in CT and at the national level. We thank them for that effort. Keep it up Green Sanctuary!

We have another opportunity to make a difference here at USNH. You may have noticed that our parking lot is, shall we say, a little bit crowded. It’s so crowded in fact that your lay leaders, staff, and I have been in conversations about whether and how and when we will need to go back to two full services on Sunday morning.

Now, there are a lot of advantages to holding two full Sunday morning services, but we hate for our cars to be the reason we do it.

So, a group of folks from various committees: Membership, Worship, and Green Sanctuary, are working to put together a carpooling system by which you can be matched up with other USNHers from your neighborhood to explore the possibility of coming to Sunday services together – in one car.

A few carpools would not only allow more of us to worship together on Sunday morning – safely, without blocking the fire lane – carpooling would lower our collective carbon footprint as well.

Now it might not be as convenient as coming to USNH on your own. You might need to leave a little earlier or a little later than you might like. You might miss your morning meditation on the way in because you are communing instead with your carpool buddy. You might even need to wait for your buddy to have a meeting after services.

But I think that all these things add to the spiritual practice of the experience. Making choices that get us out of our comfort zone and might even be considered inconvenient, are part of how we stretch ourselves to keep covenant with the Earth.

We create covenants because we need each other. We need each other and we need and want to be in right relationship. So, we think carefully about the promises we can make to one another, about how we will be together, about how we will treat one another, about how we will hold each other accountable and about what undergirds our connection.

Fact is, we need the Earth so much more than she needs us.

“Stand on me, I will sustain you. Dig your roots into me, I will nourish you”

 Would that we could return the love of this living, breathing, complex and beautiful organism that literally holds us up.

Perhaps we can.

What promises would you make to mother Earth?

How might you re-enter right relationship?

Could you, as one of our wise members suggested to me the other day, match your breathing to that of the Earth?

The rhythm of your heart to her heartbeat?

When one does that, when one feels the rhythm of the Earth in one’s body, it is hard not to feel a glimmer of hope.

The truth is, I am hopeful.

I am hopeful with Michael Bloomberg and Carl Pope who just published the book Climate of Hope. In it, they claim that cities and business and citizens, not Congress or the President, cities and business and citizens will stem the tide of climate change because we know it is in our interest to do so. They are hopeful. They are even optimistic. And I’m willing to go with that.[11]

I am hopeful with the hundreds of thousands of people who marched for science yesterday in over 600 cities around the globe.[12] I am hopeful that scientists and those of us who love them are dedicated to truth, to facts, and to pragmatic adaptation to those inconvenient truths and difficult facts.

And I am hopeful with our children who are learning from us a different way of understanding their connection to the Earth, one grounded in mutual interdependence rather than dominion.

I am hopeful and I have faith – in the Earth and in us.

James Baldwin wrote:

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them because
we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
[13]

Friends,

Let us cling to our Mother as our children cling to us.
Let us be faithful to her.
Let us walk gently.
Let us cry out in her honor and her defense.
Let us be mindful of and exercise our power
Let us make and keep promises,
And remember the promise she has made to us:
That we might live and love upon her shores
That we might stand and grow and put down roots.
That we might be nourished and sustained.

May we do the same for her.

Amen

Notes

[1] Genesis 1:28

[2] Davenport, Frances Gardiner, 19l7, European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648, Vol. 1, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington. 20-26.

[3] Newcomb, Steve, Five Hundred Years of Injustice: The Legacy of Fifteenth Century Religious Prejudice

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Pope Francis’s speech to the UN in full.” The Guardian, 25 September 2015. 

[6] Gillis, Justin. “Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change.” The New York Times 29 November, 2015. 

[7] Orr, David W. Hope is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2011. pp.326, 232.

[8] Gillis, Justin. “Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change.” The New York Times 29 November, 2015. 

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Bloomberg, Michael R. and Carl Pope. Climate of Hope: How Citizens, Businesses and Cities Can Save the Planet. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

[12] Smith-Spark, Laura and Jason Hanna. “March for Science: Protesters gather worldwide to support ‘evidence.’” CNN 22 April, 2017. 

[13] Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963.