Hold on. Change is comin.’
Change is comin. Yes. We got that message…even the most resistant of us. Even those of us who want change the least. Those whose age or stage or condition will make change…well, for some of us change is going to make life more complicated…and less comfortable…
But we know that we will not be returning to some pre-Covid world in which we live pre-Covid lives…
We got the message.
As this church …and this faith…prepares for change and gathers itself to help each of us personally deal with change…
There are some things that are clear…including our basic ideas about how the world works…and how our lives work…
Our central theological idea about the world is that change is natural…
It was reflected in early Unitarianism in Eastern Europe…Francis David…proclaimed that revelation is not sealed…that there is more truth being revealed all the time…
Change is coming.
It was reflected in the birth of Unitarianism in this country…I call that mind free…free to explore and discover new truths…free to receive new truth “as an angel from heaven”… those were William Ellery Channing’s words…
And our Universalist ancestors believed that change had to come…because those notions of the saved and the damned…those notions were not God’s plan…they had to change…
Our faith has a harder time dealing with the persistence of evil…but we are clear…theologically… that a constant process of change is how the world works….
Change is comin’. Amen…that is our religious answer. Amen. Yes.
It is those next phrases the choir sang…”You can make it… everything’s gonna be all right”…
It’s those next phrases where the rubber starts to meet the spiritual road for us…
Because that “Amen” to change does not predict and certainly does not guarantee that change will follow any particular path…
It is our religious ethics that ask us to work for, to hope for and pray for change in particular directions…along particular paths…
The path, the direction of change is not promised in our theology.
Earth Day was Friday…the 52nd Earth Day…5 decades…
And the question is whether we have found a path to sustainability…whether we are on a hopeful path forward. Whether we just have to push for the changes we’ve already identified…
Are we on a hopeful path forward?
“No” “Maybe” “We’ll see.” All of those answers to that question are on the table.
First, the maybe.
I am not a scientist, but Climate Action Tracker is a European research group that evaluates energy policies worldwide and then estimates the effect of these policies and calculates how much of a temperature increase the world can expect.
They argue that there is reason for both hope and alarm.
In 2014 the Tracker estimated that the world was headed for nearly 4 degrees of warming, vs pre-industrial levels, by 2100. [Less than 80 years from now. One life-time]
The World Bank called that scenario catastrophic with cascading crop failures, famine and mass migration the most immediate results. Total collapse of the world we have known.
But this year, that Tracker believe current policies put the world on pace for roughly 2.9 degrees of warming, not 4.
There has been some genuine shift over the past decade.
They believe it is even possible to imagine bending the curve down to 2 degrees…
But to get to the goal of 1.5 degrees…to limit the increase in warming to only another ½ a degree…
The International Energy Agency has laid out what would be required: by 2030, electric vehicles would have to make up more than half of new car sales…up from 5% today. By 2035 wealthy countries would have to shut down virtually all fossil-fuel power plants. And new technologies would be needed to clean up some sectors like air travel…that are just hopeless ecologically.
The IEA writes: “The pathway forward is extremely narrow. We really don’t have much time left to shift course.”
A narrow path forward.
Let’s complete that sentence. A narrow path forward to prevent worsening of the climate crisis. A narrow path forward to sustain some version of the story in which we have been living…
The news for me in their report was that real progress has been made. The drop of a full degree in their estimate is huge.
And it is not enough.
Is it conceivable that we…our world…could gather the energy to hold global warming to “just” another ½ degree?
Well, maybe. It looks like the next car most of us will buy will be electric. That change does seem to be coming.
But here is the challenge…here is why “maybe” is the most optimistic answer we can get to…
Because the impacts of how we have been living…right now…may well have created changes that are self-reinforcing…changes that cannot be reversed…
Because the polar ice sheets are melting…now. The perma-frost is thawing and releasing methane.,..now. The forest fires are raging…now. The droughts are happening…now…The climate fueled migrations are coming our way…now…
The die may already be cast…
The goal of 1.5 degrees warming…may be functioning as a kind of psychological or spiritual relief valve…so that we are not forced to see more of the truth.
That is the belief of folks who are called “doomers,” who believe that we are already doomed. We may be able to delay the disaster a little bit. We can possibility prevent the disaster from coming faster by changing our ways now…
That is the best we can do, they believe.
All of that while we watch in horror and intense sadness, as a brutal war of empire building fueled by profits from our addiction to fossil fuels plays out in Ukraine…
And our national politics are still held hostage by a system that allows the fossil fuel industry to prevent even modest national policy initiatives to change the story we are living out.
Is there anyone here today that believes Build Back Better with good but modest support to move us away from fossil fuels…do any of you believe that Build Back Better is going to be passed?
We have demonstrated virtually no ability to liberate ourselves into a different narrative…
I am not a scientist and we would do well to listen to voices of skilled scientists about the science here. But as I read and listen, it seems the answer to whether we have found a path toward sustainability…the honest answer to that question is in the range from an absolute “no” to a “hail Mary maybe.”
And the temporary respite that the Covid shutdown provided…well, the planes are full, again, as are the gas stations, despite the rise in prices.
“No” to (wince) “Maybe.” Maybe is the very best answer we can honestly get to.
And there are also serious theological questions for us in all of this and we have a responsibility to take those questions seriously here in this Sanctuary.
The Earth Day sermon…every year…is a real challenge. A real challenge for me. I need to start with that confession.
There is an old saying that every minister has only one sermon…that we give in different words, using different stories…over and over.
Though I don’t believe that is true in the very strict sense…I think I have a couple…you all know that I am a love preacher and that the heart of my message is about Beloved Community. It is about liberating ourselves from the many ways we have been held down so that love can live within us and among us. It is about racial and economic and gender justice.
And the environmental movement has struggled to hold those concerns…the transition to environmental JUSTICE has been difficult…I need to speak honestly now.
But, you know this is true.
And the racial and economic justice movements…Black Lives Matter, the Poor Peoples Campaign… have struggled to hold environmental and climate concerns, once you get beyond the differential impacts on communities of color and poor communities…
You know that is true, too.
We have tended to see those two urgent priorities as competing stories…
And that sense of competition…between environmental concerns and the concerns for equity…
that sense of competition has served those in power…those who benefit the most from the current system…that competition and distrust has served those at the top so very well.
I want to take this opportunity, one of my last in this pulpit, to search for a response that can hold them both…not as competing priorities… but as results of a story that is still holding us all in bondage…that is still keeping us all from being free…
So here goes.
Our commitment to Beloved Community…draws most heavily on our Universalist religious heritage that rejected a theology in which a few were saved and most were damned.
That theology gets you to the work of justice and equality, to the dismantling of racism and sexism and homophobia…
It does not necessarily get you to environmental justice or climate justice…not necessarily…
Bill Schulz, when he was UUA President, back when Earth Day was much newer, wrote this:
“We affirm that…no one is saved until we are all saved, where ALL means the whole of creation.”
You hear the Universalist premise…and the attempt to bring creation into the equity, the equality conversation.
There is an understanding of our world that grounds our lives in gratitude…”this is the day we have been given…”
This world…our lives…they are all gifts…that we did not create…that we have received.
We need a story that begins in gratitude…not in guilt.
The story of the Garden of Eden tells us that we began in sin…we got kicked out of the Garden for misbehaving…
That story begins in guilt and punishment…
We need a story that does not center on our sinfulness…or see our failures as inevitable and therefore unavoidable…
Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, from which I’ve preached before: “Gratitude…lends us courage to refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the beloved earth to line the pockets of the greedy, to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it.”
But she says that is much easier to say…than to do.
Yes? Oh, yes.
Because so many of us want to skip over the harms that have been done…
We want to avoid responsibility…I’m not talking about guilt…I’m talking about knowing the truth of the harm that has been done…
Stan Rushwood, Cherokee elder, even argues that guilt can sometimes be a healing emotion. But the heart of his message is that responsibility is a required practice. He describes what is needed as a “cultural connectedness that crosses time and space.”
That it is not possible to simply reclaim the rituals of indigenous peoples…to go to the sweat lodge…without acknowledging the cultural and physical genocide manifest destiny tried to impose on those communities. And the on-going-ness of that oppression,.
It is not possible to just love gospel music without telling the story of slavery and Jim Crow and the New Jim Crow…and the on-going- ness of racism.
We want to skip the hard work of discovering how the culture of white supremacy is a part of us.
But passing laws banning Critical Race Theory and “Don’t Say Gay” ordinances can never change the need to acknowledge how we got into this mess.
There is only one culture in which we live…racism and patriarchy and homophobia and using up of the earth…its one culture in which we live and that lives in us.
We cannot skip over the work of acknowledging…the work of confessing our responsibility…and the work of repairing…so that we can reclaim a way of being that points to a genuine path forward.
We can’t skip over that work…
And we don’t need to wait. Right here in Portland…the Portland Clean Energy Fund is functioning right now… It taxes the largest corporations that are making money here…1% of their profits…it supports and empowers front-line communities to address their priorities for sustainability…
It is working. You can tell because of the push back. PCEF is being criticized because that tax is generating more money than planned. Ooops. Because the profits these corporations make are enormous.
It is being criticized for the various neighborhood efforts not being perfect in terms of accounting and reporting…
It is being criticized, I believe, because it is being successful.
The solution here may well be in the practice of centering the voices and lives of the most marginalized among us. The solution here may well be to bring together environmental and racial and economic justice…
In the practice of Beloved Community…not just the theory.
This won’t be perfect. Why would we even believe that we could get it perfect…first time out?
And I do find it ironic that a system which has failed us so systematically on almost every justice front…still feels free to hold our hope hostage to a system of perfectionism and control that has demonstrably failed to keep us safe.
The choice is ours.
We can refuse to repeat the same problems that got us into this mess. We can make that choice.
And we can build power in the process.
Build our capacity to be with one another. Build our spiritual and collective strength to withstand whatever the future may hold.
Because even if the doomers are likely right and the die is pretty well cast cast…
We still don’t for certain…
To claim that we know how this will all play out for certain would he hubris at a high order…
The skies over New Delhi and Los Angeles cleared after just a few months of Covid shut down…
But even if the die is cast…which it may be…
Even if we are headed toward catastrophe…
Even if our climate and our culture is on life support and we simply have not been willing to recognize it…
Even if the world we have known is really in hospice care…
We know something about hospice case…in this community.
We know that love can hold us even during that final change…that final transition…
And that even in a world that is dying, new love is being born…
And we know that our hope is in living the way we want to live…
We can still love each other…learn not to fear each other…
We can still love the earth…remember how to love the earth…with gratitude and care…
We’ve gotten it so wrong…most of us have had it backward…in the words of our reading…the great shortage is not a shortage of petroleum…it is a shortage of love.
We can join with the earth AND with each other…as embodiments of one loving mystery.
We can join together for the healing of the earth AND for the liberation of all of our lives.
Topics: Liberation