One of the things for which we should be grateful here at JUC is that we have a Green Task Force that connects us with programs like the Eco-Justice Ministries of Colorado and promotes within our congregation an “awareness and involvement in green and sustainable practices,” many of which we’ve adopted, such as installing solar panels and making use of a unique heating and cooling scheme for our Mills Building. These and other things save us a substantial amount of energy and reduce our carbon footprint by a significant amount. Our Green Task Force also reminds us that not only was last Thursday the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day but that the Earth needs more than just a day to honor it.
I remember when Earth Day began. It was at a time when, in spite of the horrors of what seemed like an endless conflict in Vietnam and the traumatic aftermath of the outbreaks in America’s ghettoized inner-cities, groups of activists brought our attention to the beautiful Earth that’s our home and the destructive things we were doing to spoil its resources and demean its beauty. There was a strong critical side to the movement, particularly when it came to looking at the harm being caused not only by corporate greed but the insensitive practices of some of us. Who will ever forget Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring? But there was also a positive side to the movement, just as there was in Carson’s book. There was a call to change habits, like our habits of consumption, and to become more careful of the kind of food we ate. There was a movement to create community gardens and projects were put in place to glean leftover produce from orchids. There was the beginning of recycling and reducing waste, and a renewed interest in an earth-centered spirituality that honored the Earth as the source of life that it is.
In the beginning, Earth Day was a major event, with huge rallies, festivals and celebrations. Members of the Peace Center at the church I served in California organized the first Earth Day in Northern California and within a couple of years they had to hold it in a huge outdoor amphitheatre, it had gotten so big. Today, though we’re more aware than ever of issues like global warming, the destruction of rain forests, the depletion of soil, the using up of fossil fuels and the degradation of the beauty of much of our environment, the spirit of Earth Day doesn’t seem as alive as it was in the beginning.
One of the reasons for this, I suspect, is a feeling that in spite of all the positive things people have tried to do to protect the Earth, including a lot of personal decisions to simplify their lives and to care about “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part,” as our UU Seventh Principle puts it, we’ve hardly made a dent in the environmental problems faced by our Earth. It’s not that personal things we’ve done don’t matter. They do. But the countries whose environmental policies make the most difference, countries like ours – along with the rest of the developed world, and developing countries like Brazil, China and India – don’t yet seem to have the political will to face up to the huge changes needed to bring life on this Earth back into balance. The rhetoric is there, but not yet the scale of actions needed. And the situation is even worse among the poorest of our nations.
One of my favorite interns, when I was working back in California, was Caroline Patierno, who is now the minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Congregation in New London, Connecticut. Carolyn is among the brightest of the younger ministers in our movement. In an Earth Day sermon she preached not long ago, Carolyn said it was time that not only countries but churches like hers began to take seriously the mounting threats to our environment. Carolyn said this is because caring for the environment is not just a political issue. It’s a religious one. Reading Carolyn’s sermon got me thinking about how the religious institutions of our country, when it comes to the environment, have been ignoring a term they use in thinking about a lot of other things, the good old biblical notion of stewardship.
We use that word a lot here at JUC, particularly when talking about money. For instance, when we talk about our annual solicitation for the pledges of financial support we often refer to it as a “Stewardship Campaign” This has a more positive sound to it than using a term that just refers to money. It helps us to think about how to make good use of whatever personal resources we have to share, whether it’s ideas, time or money. All of them have value.
But when it comes to thinking about the Earth in religious terms what we’re talking about isn’t money, although money lies behind a lot of our bad practices. When it comes to the Earth what stewardship means is caring about the Earth as though God or Life had placed its well being in our hands. It has to do with our responsibility for what becomes of it. In the Judeo-Christian tradition out of which Unitarian Universalism has come, it’s assumed that God or Life expects us to be good stewards of the Earth rather than exploiting it. But there’s a rival view that’s also contained within this tradition. Some believe that because human beings came last in the biblical story of Creation, Who- or Whatever Created Us gave us dominion over the rest of what was created, meaning we can do with it whatever we want, including robbing it of its resources and destroying its beauty, as though it could endlessly supply us with whatever we want from it.
What this view ignores is that major stories in the Bible, like the story of Noah, the Creator expects of us behavior that’s very different. If you remember the story of Noah, God says to Noah, who is the patriarch of the human race – a symbol for all of us: “You human beings I’ve created have screwed up this place where you live and that makes me so mad I’m going to send a flood to destroy it. But once I’ve done that I’m going to give you another chance. I’m going to give you a set of all the animals I’ve created and once I’ve washed all the muck away I’m going to let things dry out. After I do, you better not screw up again because, if you do, I’m not going to take care of things this time. You’re going to have to live in that muck.”
The story of Noah is based on a theology of covenant – a covenant I believe is central to not only the Judeo-Christian tradition, but to our Unitarian Universalist faith. The idea is that God says – or Life implies – that we’ve been given the gift of being alive and, in response to that gift, we are called to join with Whatever Gave Us Our Lives to further the creation of which we are a part. If we don’t, if we break our covenant with God or Life, we’ll be broken ourselves – or if not us, then those who follow us will be broken. In other words, if humanity screws up the Earth enough, it will no longer be able to sustain us. Good-bye human beings; hello roaches and termites.
Because this is a religious issue I believe, as Carolyn has said, religious institutions should be taking the lead in insisting that all of us, including the businesses and governments we create, become better stewards of the Earth. And we should do this not just for our sakes, but also for the sakes of our children and grandchildren. If we don’t, it says in the Bible, we’re “going to set their teeth on edge.” We’re going to leave them with a mess it may be impossible to clean up and we’re not going to be able to build an Ark this time to wait out the flood.
So, if we claim to be religious people, which we should if we come to a church like this, we can’t just sit back and wait to see what’s going to happen. We can’t assume that since what’s going on isn’t “our” fault we don’t have any responsibility for doing something about it.
In a not-so funny comic strip in The Denver Post, one of the characters in Doonsbury pointed out recently that the Tea Partiers who seem to be getting so much attention these days from politicians and the media aren’t so different from those who began Earth Day, although you’d never be able to tell it from their clothes. The Tea Partiers are angry that government isn’t solving our problems. But the solution they are seeking is different from those who began the celebration of Earth Day. Rather than seeing themselves as part of the problem – and wanting to change – the Tea Partiers seem to want to have everything for themselves and to hell with anyone or anything else, including the Earth.
A lot of the Tea Partiers, like the followers of the Gospel of Prosperity about which I talked last week, seem to believe that what God wants us to do is exploit the Earth for our own personal benefit, rather than seeing ourselves as the stewards of it. They forget about Noah or the justice-seeking message of the Prophets. They forget that Jesus said we should care about least among us. They seem to believe that Jesus had it wrong when he said how hard it would be for the wealthy to get through the eye of a needle.
What these anti-stewards don’t seem to understand is how off base is their theology, not compared to Unitarian Universalists but to that of their fellow Christians. Our position is clear. According to our reading this morning, which was taken from the a UU Resolution of Social Witness on Climate Change, caring about the Earth is, for us, a matter of faith called for by our Seventh Principle. It is something, as UUs, we’ve “covenanted to affirm and promote.”
What’s interesting is that our statement isn’t all that different from one adopted by the American Baptists. These Baptists believe that though, in the beginning, God created “heavens and an Earth” that would “yield grain and fruit and all the animals on it,” the Earth, now, as foreseen by Isaiah: “lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore, a curse devours the earth and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt.”
The Baptists say: “These two passages of scripture present a stark contrast.” The one shows the joy and anticipation with which the Earth was created; the other shows we’ve harmed it. Although we still live on a beautiful planet, there is a lot of the Earth that is no longer the garden as Genesis portrays it. Our “irresponsibility as creatures is destroying the creation” of which we are a part, say the Baptists, and this is wrong because: “God delights in the creation and desires its wholeness and well-being. God created the Earth, affirmed that it was good, and established an everlasting covenant with humanity to take responsibility for the whole of creation.”
The Baptists go on to say that the: “resources of the Earth can provide for all its inhabitants, or they can be greedily swallowed up or poisoned by a few.” In response to this what we are called on to do is establish a “right relationship” with each other and the Earth. As it’s put in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Holy One says: “I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live.”
The statement by the American Baptists says we should understand that the Creator has given us the ability to make choices. But in making choices human beings can as easily choose to be destroyers as stewards of the Earth – and they’ve made the second choice, even though the Baptists believe that doing so is a sin, meaning: “It is an unfaithful refusal of the responsibility entrusted to us.”
To avoid such sin, say the Baptists, we must affirm the goodness and beauty of creation and acknowledge our responsibility for the well being of the Earth. We must become aware of the environmental dangers facing the planet and realize the effects of what we’re doing to the environment and make whatever changes we can to stop it. We must exert our influence in shaping public policy and insist that industry and business, farmers, consumers and governments, alike, begin to relate to the environment in ways that enhance it, rather doing it harm – and that we become involved in organizations committed to doing something about this. In doing so, we must make use of “the hope that is within us” as an antidote to the despair and apathy that surround us, so we can promote an attitude that affirms that all of life has value.
As Unitarian Universalists – as people of faith – I don’t know how we could improve on what’s been said by the American Baptists’ – nor do I know how we could not feel obliged to respond to the suggestions they’ve made. It seems to me we’ve got to do this if Earth Day is going to be than just a time when we talk about what we might do. This is a time to be reminded of the sacredness of the Earth and our responsibilities to it – and to be jogged into doing something about what we see. So, thanks be to those who decided to create a day devoted to the Earth – and thanks be to us for being willing to continue to live out its spirit not just on Earth Day, but on each day there is – and not just on this 40th anniversary, but on all the days ahead.
Reading Taken from the UUA’s General Assembly Resolution
On Global Climate Change
As Unitarian Universalists, we are called by our seventh Principle to affirm and promote "respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." We envision a world in which all people are assured a secure and meaningful life that is ecologically responsible and sustainable, in which every form of life has intrinsic value. In other words, Unitarian Universalists are called to defer to a balance between our individual needs and those of all other organisms. Entire cultures, nations, and life forms are at risk of extinction while basic human rights to adequate supplies of food, fresh water, and health as well as sustainable livelihoods for humans are being undermined. To live, we must both consume and dispose. Both our consumption and our disposal burden the interdependent web of existence. To sustain the interdependent web, we must burden it less while maintaining the essentials of our lives. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are painful omens of how racism, sexism, and poverty worsen the effects of global warming/climate change. Our world is calling us to gather in community and respond from our moral and spiritual wealth; together we can transform our individual and congregational lives into acts of moral witness, discarding our harmful habits for new behaviors and practices that will sustain life on Earth, ever vigilant against injustice.