Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Charles J. Stephens

Responsive Reading
In celebrating life, we must celebrate the earth. This essential element provides the foundation from which all things grow. It provides the bedrock for our very being. We equate it with strength, stability and grounding. At this time of year, we experience it in the budding trees, the soft, thawed garden, the robin’s nest. We honor the essential element of earth and appreciate its vital role in enabling all life to be and be celebrated.

Blessed Be.

In celebrating life, we must celebrate the air. This essential element provides the space in which all things grow. It provides the breath of all existence. We equate it with harmony, purity and infinity. At this time of year we experience it in the morning chill, the fragrant blooms, the bird’s song. We honor the essential element of air and appreciate its vital role in enabling all life to be and be celebrated.

Blessed Be.

In celebrating life, we must celebrate the fire. This essential element provides the warmth that makes all things grow. It provides the call to come outside. We equate it with passion, creativity and determination. At this time of year, we experience it in the early daybreak, the languid afternoon, the lingering twilight. We honor the essential element of fire and appreciate its vital role in enabling all life to be and be celebrated.

Blessed Be.

In celebrating life, we must celebrate the water. This essential element provides the nourishment that lets all things grow. It provides the promise of newness each day. We equate it with cleansing, clearing and feeling. At this time of year, we experience it in the morning fog, the spring rain, the gently rolling river. We honor the essential element of water and appreciate its vital role in enabling all life to be and be celebrated.

Blessed Be.

OPENING WORDS: Zen Koan

Great doubt:         great awakening.
Little doubt:         little awakening.
No doubt:             no awakening.

Readings
Earth Day turned “Middle Aged” this week, 45 years old last Wednesday. Global Weirding has gotten totally out of hand: a long cold winter here in Maine, unending draught in the Southwest and ferocious storms around the world. Our task is not only or even primarily about saving Polar Bears or protecting the environment, it’s about everything; everything is interconnected.

So it is that Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the UN tells us that:
“Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth… these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women’s empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all.

Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course.

Climate change does not respect borders; it does not respect who you are – rich and poor, small and big. Therefore, this is what we call ‘global challenges,’ which require global solidarity.

Climate change, in some regions, has aggravated conflict over scarce land and could well trigger large-scale migration in the decades ahead. And rising sea levels put at risk the very survival of all small island states. These and other implications for peace and security have implications for the United Nations itself.”
“This Changes Everything” by Naomi Klein, p 447
“Living nonextractively does not mean that extraction does not happen; all living things must take from nature in order to survive. But it does mean that the end of the extractivist mindset—of taking without caretaking, of treating land and people as resources to deplete rather than as complex entities with rights to a dignified existence based on renewal and regeneration. Even such traditionally destructive practices as logging can be done responsibly, as can small-scale mining, particularly when the activities are controlled by the people who live where the extraction is taking place and who have a stake in the ongoing health and productivity of the land. But most of all, living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on resources that can be continuously regenerated; deriving our food from farming methods that protect soil fertility; our energy from methods that harness the ever-renewing strength of the sun, wind and waves; our metals from recycled and reused sources.

These processes are sometimes called “resilient” but a more appropriate term might be “regenerative.” Because resilience—though certainly one of nature’s greatest gifts—is a passive process, implying the ability to absorb blows and get back up. Regeneration, on the other hand, is active: we become full participants in the process of maximizing life’s creativity.” 

Sermon
When I first served as the minister here & in Ellsworth, back in the 1980’s, there was a murder mystery author, Jan van de Wetering who lived over in Surry. His wife would occasionally attend the Ellsworth UU congregation.

Van de Wetering studied Zen Budhhism in Japan along with Walter Nowick. Then they both moved to Surry, ME. Along with his murder mysteries, he wrote the book “The Empty Mirror,” about his days as a novice in a Zen Monastery in Japan.

I remember a story from “The Empty Mirror”: the head monk was talking with van de Wetering about driving the motor scooter that de Wetering had just bought.

“Koan study,” said the monk, “leads to understanding that all things are connected. All beings are bound to each other by strong invisible threads. Anyone who had realized this truth will be careful, will try to be aware of what he is doing. You aren’t.”

de Wetering responded by politely asking:     “No?”

“No, the head monk said,” and looked at him discontentedly. The monk continued, “I saw you turn a corner the other day and you didn’t hold out your hand (out indicating that you were going to turn). Because of your carelessness a truck driver, who happened to be driving behind you, got into trouble & had to drive his truck on the sidewalk where a lady pushing a pram hit a director of a large trading company.

The man, who was in a bad mood already, fired an employee that day who might have stayed on. That employee got drunk that night and killed a young man who could have become a Zen Master.”

In disbelief, de Wetering said, “Come off it.”

The monk continued: “Perhaps it will be better if you hold out your hand in the future when you turn a corner.”

All things are connected. This is often discovered after the fact, when some change is made and only later we discover that there are surprising impacts from that change. Farmers eliminate a bothersome weed, the milkweed plant, only to discover that the Monarch Butterfly population plummets. DDT is used to eliminate mosquitoes and other insects, only to discover later that we are also poisoning the songbirds. Lead is put into paint and gasoline as a helpful additive, only to discover that it is damaging the health of our children.

The list goes on and on. Only now are we beginning to recognize how much damage is being done by the massive extraction of and then the combustion of fossil fuels, which now includes the increase of earthquakes from the fracking process.

We don’t tend to notice these impacts at first. We are so pleased that life is made so much easier for us because of all the things fossil fuels do for us: warmth in the winter, cool in the summer, transportation to near and distant places, trucks to plow snow and build roads and electricity to power our televisions, toasters, computers and an endless list of things we appreciate

But we as Unitarian Universalists recognize, affirm and promote: “respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.”

And as Adlai Stevenson, who served as the Moderator of the American Unitarian Association, said: “We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.”

Children who grow up or even visit rural areas learn to love the natural world as they play in the nearby fields, forests, ponds, streams and along the coastline. I remember as a child, walking out behind our home and in a minute or two, I could be alongside a pond, in the woods or the middle of a field. I could ride my bicycle a few miles to a number of different lakes and rivers. As I grew older, I camped, hiked and canoed in northern Wisconsin.

These were times when I especially felt at one with the natural world. One special time was in 1967 after my first year of college.

At the ripe age of 18, my younger brother Bruce and two of our friends went camping for 2 weeks. We drove 500 miles to Winnipeg, Manitoba (from Northern Wisconsin) and then another 500 miles North of Winnipeg to a large lake near Flin Flon. We drove continuously for 24 hours to get there.

Arriving at the lake, we loaded our small boat and went out to an island on the large lake and camped on that small island. We ate pancakes for breakfast and fished until after dark. We ate walleye or northern pike for dinner. As we ate our dinner at night, we watched the northern lights dance around above us, flashing in various colors. Then we crawled into our sleeping bags. We woke in the morning and started all over again.

I learned to cherish the earth from my father and mother. They grew up on North Dakota farms. Dad was born in 1907 and Mom in 1910. They cleared their Wisconsin land with horses, not tractors, and they didn’t have electricity while in North Dakota or for awhile in Wisconsin. They literally built a log cabin in Wisconsin with trees they cleared from their land and lived in it with dirt floors and a hand-dug well.

Dad was very fond of and proud of his horses. My sister Bette told me a story she heard from someone she had dated in high school and then met years later at a ballroom dancing class. The guy told her that his father had worked in the same Wisconsin lumber camps as our Dad had in the 1930s.

He told the following story about our father. Dad was hired to skid logs out of the forest with his horses. Dad had raised his horses and had a close working relationship with them and always took good care of his team. During the winter, he had to find a way to dry out the wet and smelly horse blankets before using them again the next day. The only place he could find to do that was right there in the bunkhouse where all the workers stayed. They, of course, for good reason, complained about the smell of those horse blankets. But Dad cared for the well being his horses and felt a oneness with them. He said to his fellow workers: “If you want my horses to skid out the logs, they need dry horse blankets.” Things are connected.

Another farmer but better known as a poet, Wendell Berry wrote, “The earth is what we all have in common. The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope. Finally we must see that we cannot be made kind toward our fellow creatures except by the same qualities that make us kind toward our fellow humans.” Things are connected.

At an early age, I learned to appreciate the earth, the literal ground we walk on through gardening with my parents. As you know, there is nothing like going out to the garden and picking fresh strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers or string beans and eating them within minutes of picking them. For me, something that approaches that kind of satisfaction is going down into my cold storage room in the depth of winter or even now before my garden yields anything and select some canned or frozen vegetables for dinner and see the food processed from last summer’s garden.

I feel most at home when in the natural world. I love being with the trees, rivers, streams, lakes and the ocean. I feel most at peace when I am near to that which I call holy.

Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval mystic, wrote of the God she experienced:

I am the one whose praise echoes on high.
I adorn all the earth.
I am the breeze
That nurtures all things green.
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams.
I am the rain
Coming from the dew
That causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I call forth tears,
The aroma of holy work.
I am the yearning for good.

This love of the Earth is one of the major reasons I choose to move back to the Maine woods. Ian McCallum wrote, “The human animal can make choices that no other creature, as far as I am aware, can make. We can choose to drift into oblivion, to turn our heads, pretending we did not see, or we can refuse to be victims.

We can choose the hard path-the one that demands accountability: the one that demands that we give beauty and meaning, in our own way, to the Earth and to the countless living things that share it with us. Let’s become conscious of the animals that we have on board with us and of what they mean to us–that we need them as much and probably more than they need us. If we are divine, then so is every other creature on this planet. We have no right to drive any of them into extinction. Instead, let’s learn to say thank you to these older brothers and sisters.”

Of course not every one of us can live nor wants to live in the same way. Wherever it is that we settle and live and however we are in the world it is important for each one of us to become more conscious of all the plants and animals that share our space. We need to become more aware of their meaning to us and to the natural order of things. We need all the forms of nature far more than they need us. It is time we realize that and not only thank our older brothers and sisters the trees and the animals, but rather it is time to celebrate and cherish the good and sustaining earth we share with one another.

We dare not assume that we are separate from nature simply because we have built air conditioned cars and centrally heated houses, and other buildings that are heated in winter and cooled in summer. Let us not drift into oblivion, thinking that the natural world is here for us to use and abuse. Everything is connected.

Here is a bit of historical background, courtesy of Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s): Why Some Profit-Hungry Corporations Hate Earth Day 

He wrote that the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, “. . . represented a surge of protests and activism that pushed our government to respond to “We the People” and protect our common interest over special interest groups.

The government formed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a unified Congress – something rarely seen today — passed countless acts to safeguard our air and water; defend consumer product safety, pesticide control, and more. . . . But by end of the 1970s, slick pro-business operatives had distorted the victories of environmental allies and anti-corruption reformers.

With the help of a tobacco industry lobbyist and soon-to-be Justice Lewis Powell, corporations turned their profit-hungry rancor into an ideological fight with spin-doctor Powell calling reformers Communists in a famous memo. Supporters of pollution regulation became welfare-mongering Commies who wanted to attack the American free enterprise system. If you believed in equal opportunity to clean air, Powell’s acolytes would accuse you of hating freedom –brushing past our country’s historic efforts towards striking a balance between freedom and equality.

Corporations recognized they needed to obtain political power to really start hacking away at the “public” part of our public servants’ role to protect the environment. And they did so with the help of the Supreme Court. Justice Powell, who by 1976 sat on the Supreme Court, pushed forward the doctrine of “money equating speech” in the Buckley v. Valeo ruling and later wrote a decision that said corporate donations in state ballot initiatives were protected under the first amendment as political speech.”

James Hansen said “I have been described as the grandfather of climate change. In fact, I am just a grandfather and I do not want my grandchildren to say that grandpa understood what was happening but didn’t make it clear.”

So it is that we must work to change what Naomi Klein calls “the extractivist mindset—       of taking without caretaking, of treating land and people as resources to deplete rather than as complex entities with rights to a dignified existence based on renewal and regeneration.”

It’s about balance and moderation: When I eat or drink too much I don’t feel so good. When I work without taking a break or do strenuous work without preparation, my body hurts.

At our home in New Jersey, we had a shallow well. When I tried to water my garden during hot spells, I would soon be running muddy bathwater water. That is what California and other drought areas are discovering. Extraction carries a significant price. Everything is connected.

Eveline Beumkes wrote the following:

Clouds are flowing in the river, waves are flying in the sky.
Life is laughing in a pebble. Does a pebble ever die?
Flowers grow out of the garbage, such a miracle to see.
What seems dead and what seems dying makes for butterflies to be.
Life is laughing in a pebble, flowers bathe in morning dew.
Dust is dancing in my footsteps and I wonder who is who.

Clouds are flowing in the river, clouds are drifting in my tea,
On a never-ending journey, what a miracle to be!

Earth Day celebrates our human awakening to fact that we are part of an interdependent web of existence. If we are fully conscious of our interconnectedness with our older brothers and sisters: the plants and animals. Then, just possibly we can bring about a change in our world.

When we truly recognize that everything is connected, we can ever so gradually replace fear & hatred with compassion. Caring for the earth, after all, is a pleasing responsibility. Let us cherish what remains of it & foster its renewal.

Doing so will help preserve the very fragile spacecraft we share with all sentient beings. May the true blessings of the Earth be with you today and forever. Let us strive to “…become full participants in the process of maximizing life’s creativity.” (Klein) 

Closing Words:   Job 12:7
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.