SERMON
Feb. 19, 2017
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
A few years ago I attended General Assembly, the annual gathering of thousands of Unitarian Universalists, when we met in Kentucky that year. Our Public Witness event was a public rally for renewable energy.
Kentucky is coal country, and the hot button issues were mountaintop removal and climate change.
At the outdoors rally, next to the river, one of the speakers was Wendell Berry, the immensely respected writer, farmer, and activist. He delivered one of his poems. He stood at the mic, surrounded by musicians standing with their instruments. The musicians had paused temporarily from their mostly upbeat songs. The day was gorgeous, and the tone of the rally was mostly energizing and upbeat.
Wendell Berry, one of my heroes as a writer and an activist, entered this rah-rah mood and read his difficult poem “Questionnaire” with a matter-of-fact delivery that shook me:
Questionnaire
– Wendell Berry
How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.
What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy
In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.
State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
…Then he just turned and walked off the stage! …!
Ahhh! This is how the world sometimes feels, isn’t it?!
Now I’d like to read to this piece by Rev. Scott Tayler, titled “What My Grandchild Would Want Me to Preach.”
It’s really complicated honey. I’m only now understanding it myself. We weren’t really thinking about it like you and your friends do. It’s not that we didn’t care about how it would impact you; we weren’t really thinking about you at all. Oh that’s sounds terrible, I’ll say. I don’t mean that the way it sounds.
Again, honey, it’s complicated. It wasn’t personal; we just didn’t think that far ahead. It was more like a blind spot. Our focus was mostly on our daily living, which felt hard and overly complicated as it was. We had our hands full just trying to think about and find the time to spend with your mama and your aunt and uncle.
I’m not trying to defend it. I just don’t want you to think we were callous or selfish. It’s more like we were overwhelmed. And when you’re overwhelmed it’s hard to have perspective. I mean, a lot was going on. The whole issue of how our military might was destabilizing the world and also undermining our ability to take care of basic services like public schools, and health care was just beginning to dawn on us. And I can’t say I regret focusing on that. Without the anti-war effort and the radical changes we accomplished there, things would be a whole lot worse than they are now.
But I don’t get that, Grandpa, she’ll say. You mean you could only handle one thing at a time? Didn’t global warming also feel huge?
No honey, of course it felt huge, I’ll say. And it’s not that we could only handle one thing at a time. That’s not what I mean. Again it’s complicated. I guess what I’m saying is that we knew it was a huge and scary problem, we just couldn’t feel it. What we felt was worn out. You’re used to things as they are now. These “little things,” as you call them, just didn’t feel little to us. The idea of a smaller house, going without air conditioning, voluntarily paying $5 for gas or finding the $20,000 to install solar panels just seemed too much and too big to wrap our minds and to-do lists around. And nobody else was really doing it.
And more than that: we were hopeful. Ironically that’s a part of it too.
We weren’t just worn out and overwhelmed with our personal lives, we actually believed the tide was changing, that bigger systems would begin to kick in and stimulate the changes for us.
She’ll wrinkle her brow at this point showing confusion, so I’ll try to explain.
Scientists, you see, weren’t just telling us that we were on the verge of causing irreversible and dangerous climate change; they were also telling us we were on the verge of a technological break-through that would soon make alternative energy sources available and affordable…
I think the best way to put it is to say that our optimism and our hope, well, it sort of betrayed us. We had hope in technology. We had hope in politicians. And we had hope in our market system. It really felt like they’d save us without us having to do much.
There was a saying back then: “Let go and let God.” I guess we saw science, politics and the market as our gods—more powerful and knowing than us tiny normal folk. So we gladly turned the problem over to them and waited for them to change us.
RECKONING WITH THE DREAD
I don’t know about you, but I can become very overwhelmed by environmental issues. The regret that I hear in his reflection is an emotion that I often feel when I hear about environmental problems and think about our children’s’ futures.
There is often a lot of paralysis when it comes to actions or changes related to our relationship with the environment.
It can feel:
Too frightening
Too enormous
Too complex
Too difficult
Too late
Too deep… the problem is too deep.
Like all really difficult human problems, it’s not just about finding the correct solution. Problem-solving, scientific analysis, political pressure, activism…all of these are essential. But I think what we sense is that the problem goes deeper.
This is how Wendell Berry described it. This quote from him comes from earlier on that same day that I described at the rally. This time he was speaking inside at the main hall at General Assembly:
He said:
[These environmental problems] are not the sort of simple problems that can be solved by what we call problem-solving. They are summary evils, gathered up from innumerable causes in the bad economy that we all depend upon and serve. It is not as though we have not been warned. The advice against waste, extravagance, selfishness, hubris, falsehood, and willful ignorance is old. But people of religion have entrusted questions about economy– about how we live– to economists and industrialists. ((http://www.uua.org/ga/past/2013/business/iii))
He explained that even some environmentalists have a narrow focus on alternative technologies as our savior…
If we had a limitless supply of free non-polluting energy, we would use the world up even faster than we’re using it up now.((http://www.uua.org/ga/past/2013/business/iii))
He said that of course political change and technological change are important, but…
…[R]esponsibility for…the better life belongs to us individually and to our communities. The necessary changes cannot be made on the terms prescribed to us by the industrial economy and its so-called free market. They can be made only on the terms imposed upon us by the nature and the limits of local ecosystems. If we’re serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. …If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we, ourselves, must be prepared to become poorer. …But we must do this fully realizing that our success, if it happens, will change our world and our lives more radically than we can now imagine. … For the necessary political changes will be made only in response to changed people.((http://www.uua.org/ga/past/2013/business/iii))
I think this is one reason environmental issues can feel so difficult, because deep down we know we need to change.
And, because we are so embedded in these lives of consumption, our days give us so many reminders of how we could be doing better: all the multiple daily choices we make about eating, purchasing, transportation, waste, energy use, consumption…
How can we begin to measure up? …especially in a world where the needed changes often seem so out of reach, so burdensome on our already stretched time and energy?
So in the midst of all of that weight, all that complexity, the question becomes: how can we sustain ourselves in this work?
SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS
This is where religious and spiritual teachings can help us.
Religious, spiritual, ethical teachings can address some of those stubborn human tendencies Wendell Berry mentioned like hubris, selfishness, wastefulness…
So, as we undertake this effort as a congregation, to work for environmental sustainability, we will for sure need good science, good economics…
We will also need good religion – which for me, means, in part, the tools of spiritual practice, the practices that grow our humility, our responsibility, our generosity, our courage, our wisdom, our hope.
And hope is not the same as optimism.
There are some elements of the future of our planet that are already beyond our control – forces already in motion that cannot be reversed. But what is still within our control is what legacy we will leave as humans… Did we learn to say “Enough?”
The UU writer Kimberly French says:
We don’t have to be optimistic about the future. …But hope — the belief that our future will be better with our action than without it — is not negotiable.
So, I’d like to end with two ways we can sustain hope.
SUSTAINING HOPE
The first is to hear the stories of what has been done – stories of people educating themselves about the environment, seeing a specific need, setting specific outcomes, creating change within themselves, and taking decisive action beyond themselves.
These stories help us know it can be done.
In this room, there are already stories of work that you all have already accomplished together related to environmental sustainability. You became a Green Sanctuary several years ago, so I know there were many steps related to that process. Let’s hear about some of the environmental work you have done as a congregation…
…
And you are not alone!
The Unitarian Church of Evanston Illinois created rain gardens on their property: channeling the rainwater from their roof into the ground and back into the water table instead of into the storm sewers.
The UU Fellowship of Boca Raton in Florida is working with low-income communities in particular who in Florida are already seeing the effects of climate change. They received a $30,000 grant from the EPA to create the Resilience Adaptation Community Tool Kit to help people in coastal communities understand health issues that are caused or worsened by climate change.
The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Flint, Michigan has been responding to the clean water crisis in their city. They have lobbied legislators, donated funds, collected and distributed water, and teamed with community organizations working to help.
And there are many other stories, of fellow Unitarian Universalists, and others, working to fight despair and apathy, and do what they can do.
The second way I’d like to talk about sustaining hope as we work for environmental sustainability can be found in the Wendell Berry poem you have already heard twice this morning:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
What a gift that the earth itself provides us with the hope to sustain us!
The earth itself provides us with the reminder that we are woven into this interconnected web, and, although yes, that means the earth requires something of us, it also means that it gives to us, it holds us.
…And so we can receive grace in the many earthly moments available to us: as we breathe in the gift of fresh air, as we eat food that nourishes our bodies, as we dig our hands in the dirt, as we hear bird song, as the morning sun rises each day without fail to let us start anew.
Let us always remember that, for a time, we can rest in the grace of the world, and be free.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
