Sermon on Earth Day and Stewardship Day (for annual pledge campaign)
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
April 23, 2017
HUMANS AND NATURE
An ecology professor gave a classroom of 200 students a survey.
She asked them to rate their understanding of the negative interactions between humans and the environment. These were third-year students who had chosen a career in environmental protection and were well versed in climate change, habitat loss, etc. So perhaps it was not surprising that almost all of the students said that humans and nature are a bad mix.
Later in the survey, they were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land. The median response was “none.” No positive interactions between people and land.
The professor was stunned. In talking with her class, she learned that they had a hard time imagining what beneficial relationships between humans and the earth might look like. The professor is Robin Wall Kimmerer, a professor of botany who is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, an indigenous group.
She was raised on stories that told of beautiful reciprocity between humans, animals and the earth. In response to this survey, she remarked that clearly these students were not raised on such stories!
She wondered: “How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot imagine what the path feels like?”
“DOMINION”
When I think of care for the earth, a story that often comes to my mind is the creation story in the book of Genesis. Growing up, it was probably the only time I ever heard the word “dominion.” The King James Version of the Bible gives this translation of God’s command to Adam and Eve:
Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
There’s a slight element of stewardship there: we are to be good stewards of the earth. But those words “dominion”…“subdue”…make me cringe. They seem right in line with a quite Western tendency to see humans as separate from and superior to the rest of nature. Any sense of humble stewardship seems to get lost.
The environmentalist Bill McKibben gave a sermon at a UU church in Massachusetts where he talked about this sense of human superiority. He said:
The message that comes through [all the] instruments of our consumer society is simple. It’s that “you’re the most important thing on earth. You’re the absolute center of the universe…and everything is going to orbit around you.” If you had to pick one message that was most effective for building a huge, strong economy that would probably be it. …But if you wanted to create a message that was profoundly troubling from a spiritual point of view and one that made progress on issues of great importance, especially issues of the environment, particularly difficult, you couldn’t pick a better one than “You’re the most important thing on earth. You’re the center of the planet.”
So, like Kimmerer said, if we are to find a better relationship with our planet, we need to be able to see the path. We need a better relationship than dominion over.
THE INTERDEPENDENT WEB
In Unitarian Universalism, we talk about the interdependent web of existence. Interdependent. We are dependent on the rest of nature, and the rest of nature is dependent on us.
I believe it is becoming clearer and clearer to us that we are dependent on nature – the fears seem to multiply every day: Will the air we have to breathe stay clean? Will we have enough water? Will bees become extinct and we’ll have no food? The fact of our dependence – when we’re clear-eyed about it – is in fact terrifyingly obvious .
Perhaps what is less clear to us is the way the earth depends on us.
At first, this seems ridiculous. The earth doesn’t care about us! The earth doesn’t need us!
Like those students in that ecology class, we probably think: the earth would be better off without us.
AND YET…! Like, the wonderful environmentalist Wendell Berry says:
The human is neither an addendum nor an intrusion in to the universe. We are quintessentially integral with the universe.
Here’s a story about that:
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s people, an indigenous group in Oklahoma, braid sweetgrass. Sweetgrass is a long, fragrant beautiful grass that is braided and used for ceremonial purposes or woven into baskets. 
Knowing she was a scientist, the basketmakers asked Kimmerer to study the sweetgrass.
One of the elders said to her: “This place always gives good sweetgrass since we tend to it right. But other places it’s getting hard to find. I’m thinking that they might not be picking it right. Some people, they’re in a hurry and they pull up the whole plant. Even the roots come up.” Kimmerer had seen some pickers do this, but like the other pickers they also practiced the old ways of offering a gift of tobacco to the earth before picking, and only taking half of the crop, leaving the rest. They, too, insisted their way was the correct way.
But because they’d asked her, Kimmerer and her students set about to answer the basketmakers’ question. They carefully studied three areas of sweetgrass. In one area they harvested by pulling it out of the ground. In the other area they pinched it off and left the roots. Just like all the harvesters practiced, they never removed all the sweetgrass from either area. The third area was the control area; they didn’t harvest any sweetgrass in that area.
The results were surprising: it didn’t make much difference how the sweetgrass was harvested, whether it was pinched or pulled; both areas thrived with new shoots. The surprise was the control group – the unharvested area. This area looked sickly and brown and became choked with dead stems.
If you’ve ever mowed your lawn, perhaps you’re not surprised to hear that picking sweetgrass stimulated growth. Even pulling out the roots was good for sweetgrass: they found that breaking the stems that connect the shoots underground caused buds to send out more shoots. It turns out that these meadows of sweetgrass actually needed humans to thrive. The sweetgrass had evolved in harmony with their human neighbors.
Likewise, when a herd of buffalo grazes on grass, it grows back faster in response. There’s an enzyme in buffalo’s saliva that stimulates grass growth! And free-range buffalo do not overgraze an area.
In the end, the study found that the places where sweetgrass wasn’t doing well were the places more removed from the Native communities, where the sweetgrass wasn’t being harvested.
WHAT IF…?
What if it is not inevitable that humans and nature are a bad mix? What if we could be as good for the earth as the bees are for the flowers? And flowers are for the bees?
Perhaps this climate change catastrophe could make us finally reckon with our relationship to our earth. Perhaps we could evolve ourselves so that our relationship with the rest of nature was a thriving, mutually beneficial relationship?
RETURNING TO THE STORY
I want to return to that story in Genesis, which we heard through the King James translation. The journalist Krista Tippett interviewed Prof Ellen Davis, Biblical scholar at Duke University about this passage in Genesis. I’ll jump into the middle of their interview. Davis says:
Of course, we know human beings are blessed on the sixth day, but we often overlook the fact that the creatures of sky and sea receive exactly the same blessing, pru u’revu, “be fruitful and multiply.” And so we are living amongst creatures who are blessed before we even come into existence. I think that’s an important thing to recognize.
Krista Tippett asks her about the “dominion” part, and Davis says:
The Hebrew word is a strong word, and I render it “exercise skilled mastery amongst the creatures” because I think the notion of skilled mastery suggests something like a craft, an art, of being human [from what the writers saw as] a special place of power and privilege and responsibility in the world. But the condition for our exercise of skilled mastery is set by the prior blessing of the creatures of sea and sky that they are to be fruitful and multiply. So whatever it means for us to exercise skilled mastery, it cannot undo that prior blessing. I think that’s pretty convicting for us in the sixth great age of species extinction.
So, what if “exercise of skilled mastery” meant knowing the earth, learning about our part in it, understanding how to create even richer, even more evolved cycles of mutually beneficial giving?
A BEAUTIFUL MUTUALITY
Returning to sweetgrass, Kimmerer describes this beautiful cycle of mutuality:
“The grass gives its fragrant self to us and we receive it with gratitude. In return, through the very act of accepting the gift, the pickers open some space, let the light come in, and with a gentle tug bestir the dormant buds that make new grass. Reciprocity is a matter of keeping the gift in motion through self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving.”
STEWARDSHIP AMONG US
For those of you who are thinking: “I thought this service was supposed to be about church stewardship..? …About those pledge cards we members are supposed to turn in…? Here I go, shifting into the money talk.
Let me say Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words about sweetgrass again, and invite you to hear it in relation to this church and its members:
“Reciprocity is a matter of keeping the gift in motion through self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving.”
This church could not exist without the gifts of its members: your time, talent, and treasure. Over half of our budget comes from the pledges of our members and friends. At this time every year, members say: “I’m going to give this amount in the coming fiscal year” and then they follow through on that giving. Members who are incredibly stretched financially sometimes say, “I can’t commit to a certain amount each month, but I can commit to serving on this committee; I can commit to giving of my time in this particular, regular way.”
All these ways of giving are valued. I pledge 3% of my salary because I believe in this church, because I see the way coming together enlarges all of our gifts, because I think a people that live out these values in the world can transform – even save – lives.
So today we are inviting members (and anyone else who feels moved) to pledge their time, talent, or treasure to this church by filling out one of these cards, which were mailed to members some weeks ago. ….
….
I’ll close by bringing us back to the sweetgrass.
The sweetgrass needs to give for its own thriving.
We gratefully, respectfully take from it – not all – but half.
And this way both we and the sweetgrass thrive.
How can our own giving and receiving – to the earth, to this church, and to each other embody that beautiful mutuality?
-Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon