by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given November 5, 2006

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come to this sanctuary today

To remember who we are,

To remember how we want to live,

To create a future worthy of the next generation,

and the next and the next—

Come now, and let us worship together.

A month or so ago I found myself in the airport in between flights, and I noticed that an elderly woman was reading the same book I was reading.  The author was James Howard Kunstler, and the title of the book was The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.  I started chatting with her about the book, and then a young man, probably in his 30s, overheard our conversation, and he pulled out his copy and he said, “Hey, I’m reading that, too,” and the three of us began a lively dialogue.  What is the chance that three people on the same plane in the same seating area will be reading the same book?  Well, this stuff is in the air.  People are beginning to notice.

A few weeks later I picked up a copy of Harper’s Magazine, and saw an essay entitled, “Imagine There’s No Oil: Scenes from a Liberal Apocalypse.”[1]  The author, Bryant Urstadt, is a journalist who had gone to cover a conference at Antioch College, a conference of some of the leading thinkers in the Peak Oil movement.  More than 400 conferees had come from 39 states and five countries.  Urstadt’s article shows his profound ambivalence about his topic. 

He begins by quoting from a speech of the high priest of the movement, a man named Richard Heinberg, who wrote a book called The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, but even as he quotes this man, Urstadt discredits his source by saying that Heinberg “doesn’t have a Ph.D.—he teaches at The New College in California, which is not a Ph.D. kind of place.”  Heinberg says that the global peak will likely arrive in the next five years, and then produces discouraging statistics about the possibilities of various energy alternatives.  As for what will happen when oil runs out, Heinberg predicts that cars will become a luxury item, isolating the suburban millions; agri-business will die, dependent as it is on fossil fuel, so people will be growing their own food or getting it from small regional farms.  And it gets worse.  He says that Northern homes will be too expensive to heat, and Southern homes will be too hot to live in.  Scrambling for scarce resources, the people of the world will form extreme political movements, with various factions warring over the remaining resources.  For this speech, Heinberg receives a standing ovation. 

Urstadt continues in this article to present the Peak Oil folks as extremists—some are survivalists and are forming self-sufficient interim communities they call “lifeboats.”  He quotes some of the most outrageous ideas that are put forward, in particular from the people of New York City, who are the most apprehensive of all, it seems.  One woman suggests tearing up all the asphalt in New York and turning the avenues into gardens with bike paths.  This suggestion is roundly applauded.  As for the skyscrapers, they would be impossible to heat in the winter or cool in the summer, and there might not even be enough energy to keep the elevators going, so a copyright lawyer suggests covering them with solar panels and then putting windmills on the roofs. 

But then as Urstadt continues, I get the feeling that he is kind of whistling in the dark.  By the end of his article, he has already begun to imagine a very different world from the one in which we now live.  He writes:  “After all, though many of our conveniences will vanish, <other things will vanish, too>: McMansions, traffic jams, Circle K’s, golf courses in Nevada, wars on the other side of the world, and maybe even Stone Phillips and Katie Couric.  In their place will be a close relationship to the natural world and perhaps . . .  a return to a more spiritual life.”

Now here is my take on these predictions.  Yes, some of these people are extremists—but they are at least trying to imagine the world as it will be.  They know it will not continue to be the way it is.  They are not in denial.  What are other, perhaps more trustworthy, sources saying? 

Well, Al Gore is not an extremist.  I’m sure many of you have seen his film An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming.  And Bill McKibben, author of the The End of Nature, is not an extremist.  I took part in a forum with him on global climate change just a couple of weeks ago, and he referred to the analysis of NASA’s chief climatologist James Hansen (a brilliant man on his way to the Nobel prize, says McKibben): Hansen says we have ten years—ten years to be emitting less carbon dioxide into the environment—or it will be beyond turning around.  And that goal will be tricky, since India and China are rapidly industrializing, and are just beginning to use power in appreciable quantities—and not for luxuries, but for that second light bulb or that first small refrigerator.  McKibben says that we must make policy change at the highest levels of government, and we must do so now.  The United States must lead.  We use twice as much energy per capita as do Western Europeans—I think it’s ironic that Tony Blair is the one who has done the economic analysis and in a major report to the world has called attention to this crisis.  

Now in spite of this critical need for alternative power sources, according to an Oct. 30^th article in the NY Times, research into energy technologies has not been rising, but rather falling—we spend $3 billion a year, less than half of what we spent a quarter of a century ago (adjusted for inflation).  In contrast, military research has increased 260 percent, and is now at $75 billion a year.[2]

I don’t know what the future will be like—but I do know this: the future is not determined by forces outside human control—not yet, anyway; we have made certain choices which have brought us to this point, and we can make other choices that will shape our future.  As a religious people, it is incumbent upon us to do three things. 

1.    We must face this crisis and no longer live in denial.  We can no longer go on with business as usual, either in our personal lives or in our national policies.  And I think we are in massive denial.  You know, I was reading an article in the Oregonian last week about global warming, and right next to it was this big ad for this eye cream, and the ad said, in large letters, DIMINISH DARK CIRCLES.  And I thought to myself, no wonder we have dark circles under our eyes—the earth is dying!  Could it be that we need something other than eye cream to cope with our anxiety and depression?

2.    We must get in touch with our deepest and truest values, and we must support and protect those places where these values are preserved—the home, the schools, the church, the institutions that are life-giving.

3.    We must become citizen activists in regard to the environment in whatever way our lives allow.  We are way beyond the time when we can say, “My family, my children, my community—even my country.”  We are quite literally in this together.  Right now one of the best strategies seems to be leading from the bottom up, where people have control, and pulling the Federal Government along later.  For example, Oregon and the state of Washington have joined California to lower carbon emissions, so the West Coast will all be together in this effort.  Let’s keep the focus on what is really important.  I’ve got news for some folks—stem cell research is not the core issue of our time.  And neither is gay marriage.  Pay attention—the house is on fire.

I have said that we must respond as a religious people.  We are gathered here today as a community of faith, and that should make a difference in how we approach this critical issue. 

Speaking of people of faith, this past week I was invited along with five or six other local ministers to have lunch with the Executive Director of the National Council of Churches.  This gentleman began to speak about his new book.  He seemed both knowledgeable and pleasant.  Then he said something that profoundly disturbed me.  He said, “Now, I don’t expect Christians to change the world.”  I thought this was a most extraordinary statement.  So I put down my chicken sandwich and raised my hand.  Now you have to understand, this man runs an organization that represents 50 million Christians.  Fifty million.  We Unitarian Universalists have about 250,000 in our fold—soaking wet, as they say—but I expect us to change the world.  What was he thinking?  I mean, Jesus changed the world, big time.  So when he paused for breath and acknowledged me, I said to him, “Why shouldn’t Christians be expected to change the world?  I think history will look back on this time and hold us accountable—people will say, where was the church when the planet was melting?  Every minister in every pulpit in this country should be speaking to this issue.  But are we?  What can you do to help things change?”

Let me be clear.  As I see it, the church is not here to please congregants, as though you were good consumers of a product.  The church is here to be faithful to its mission, to speak the truth to power—yes, to provide a caring community for its members, where they can grow spiritually, but not to participate in the massive denial of this society.  If we do that, why even call ourselves a church?  And for that matter, what makes people feel good, feel strong, anyway?  It’s when we step out of our denial and when we say, “This is the danger, I see it, I’m going to face it head-on.”  Then anxiety begins to go, because we have stepped into our own power.

I’m thinking now of a time when I lived in Lexington, Kentucky—I decided to travel into Eastern Kentucky, into the hills and hollers, because I wanted to see the strip mining that I had heard so much about.  As I left the beautiful Bluegrass of Lexington, and went into the mountains, the poverty was evident—people were living in run-down trailers perched on the sides of hills, in the midst of ruined land.  And mountains had literally had their tops cut off by these gigantic coal-mining machines.  We drove up to one of these machines—I have a picture of someone standing next to the wheel of that machine, and the wheel was two or three times the height of the person, as I remember.  These machines are like skyscrapers.  The topsoil was gone, washed away, and the gain had gone to companies that had no care or concern for the poor of Appalachia.  There is a theological term for this—it is called sin.  Too often have religions emphasized personal sins—you know, those sins that are sung about in country songs: lying, betrayal, and adultery—but churches have not held up to view those systemic sins which wound the earth and sicken the people who live here.  This is not just an economic issue here—this is a moral issue, and the deep pain that we feel with the death of the land or the drying up of the salmon runs is not just economic, it is spiritual.

A religious vision is one that sees the natural world as a gift, a kind of grace that we have neither created nor earned.  On Sunday mornings I get up early, just as the day is breaking—and I often go out on my front porch and watch the morning light coming through the leaves and branches of the huge big-leaf maples on either side of my house.  I see how the sun comes up every day, and how life is renewed, and what a miracle even one leaf is, and my soul, which is restive, begins to settle down.

Our religious life gives us little room for arrogance and self-righteousness in our work—our Social Justice Director Kate Lore emphasizes this in our social justice programs.  We know we are complicit, we know we are imperfect—we know that each of us has “fallen short of the glory of God,” as my saintly grandmother used to say, so that humility must be a part of our justice work at all times.

The religious traditions of all people ask them not to turn away from what disturbs them, but to try to be with whatever is—as eco-activist Joanna Macy says, it is essential that we learn to “sustain the gaze.”  If we want to deepen spiritually, we have to open our hearts to the suffering of the world, and we have to be present with our own fear and grief.  Sometimes I just have to stop and cry when I listen to the radio or read the newspaper.  I just have to let that grief come, before I can get on with my day.  And so here we are today, talking about this hard stuff.  How can we bear it?

What sustains us is our spiritual grounding, the roots that we have put down in this community, and the values that we have chosen to live by.  People are always saying to me as a UU minister, do you believe in God?  Who is God to you?  Sometimes I think that the God-stuff is what emerges from the community as we come together to try to do the right thing—this is the God that is the source of our strength to resist.  This is the God that gives us the collective power to imagine a different way.  We are a religious community, not a bunch of interest groups, not a bunch of people vying with one another for our various causes.  No, we have a radical devotion to the whole of creation, which we see as sacred.  We know what touches one touches all.

If you are here today, and you are thinking that you want to be more intentional than you have been in living out of these principles, then we do have some help for you.  After the service, go downstairs to the Community for Earth table in the social justice corner of Fuller Hall.  We will have suggestions for alternative choices for individuals—for example, we’ll tell you how to give carbon rebates—and also you may join our very active Community for Earth group by signing a sign-up sheet.  It’s so much easier to sustain this work in community.

In this church we work from a positive vision—a prophetic alternative.  Here at church we ask, “What gives health?  What gives life?  What gives hope?”  And always we must ask, “And how are the children?”  How can we not think about the kind of future that we’re creating for the children among us?  It just breaks my heart when I think about it. 

We must re-imagine our world, according to spiritual values, human values.  And as we do, a new world will arise, as it always does, out of the human imagination.  As we keep that vision before us, we see that healing one part of the planet means healing another: that racism is related to poverty is related to war is related to global warming.  Remember that the present system is completely dependent on our obedience to it, and our faith, like the faith of other faithful people in the past—like Channing, like Theodore Parker, like Margaret Fuller and Dorothea Dix, like James Reeb, who died at Selma—like these it is our faith that will give us the courage to resist and the vision of a new way. 

Yes, the turning will be difficult, and it will not come easily, but “with this turning, we put a broken age to rest.  We begin the new habit, getting up glad for a thousand years of healing.”[3]

PRAYER

For my closing prayer, I’m going to use the words of Starhawk:[4]

We give thanks for all those who are moved . . . to heal and protect the earth, in small ways and large.  Blessings on the composters, the gardeners, the breeders of worms and mushrooms, . . . those who cleanse the waters and purify the air, all those who clean up the messes others have made.  Blessings on those who defend trees and who plant trees, who guard the forests and who renew the forests.  Blessings on those who learn to . . . renew the streams, on those who prevent erosion, who restore the salmon.

May all the healers of the earth find their own healing.  . . . .  May they know their fear but not be stopped by fear.  May they feel their anger and yet not be ruled by rage.  May they honor their grief but not be paralyzed by sorrow.  May they transform fear, anger, and grief into compassion and into inspiration to act in service of what they love.  Blessed be the healers of the earth.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now, in deep thankfulness for the blessings of our lovely earth, and vow today to do your part to conserve what has been so freely given us by grace.  Go in love, and go in peace.  Amen.

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Copyright 2006, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.