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Covenant on
Environmental Stewardship This morning I’m preaching the sixth in a series of sermons on a Spiritual Covenant with America – treating the Covenant for Environmental Stewardship. There are three parts to this covenant, as I see it… Part one is our interdependence, part two is voluntary simplicity and ethical consumption, and part three is the global economy. The first, most important part, in my humble opinion, is the fact of our interdependence. This congregation, by associating itself with the Unitarian Universalist Association has covenanted to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. It is not that you as members have to believe in the interdependence of all existence – but rather that we as a congregation promise to behave as if we are interdependent and affirm and respect that mutual relationship. This subtle difference between creed and covenant – belief and practice – is important to our faith together. In the reading this morning, Wapner refers to our interdependence when he writes,
The whole is the soul – he means the Over-Soul, which the essay is titled. The connecting spirit or Supreme Cosmic Spirit of Hindu philosophy known as ‘Brahman’, or the Spirit of Life. Whatever that thread is in the web of life that connects us all to all, and makes us, therefore, interdependent. "The earth is not the backdrop for our lives, but is part and parcel with them." Emerson helped crack open traditional definitions of God, broadening our understandings and names for such. He helped us move from a notion of God sovereign and separate from the Universe, the creator and external to the system, to God the tie or the glue or the thread that makes a Universe greater than its parts. As my own personal yoga practice deepens, I have begun to appreciate the significance of Emerson’s father, William Emerson, having published the first Sanskrit scripture translation in the United States. Our ancestors, the Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend, Henry David Thoreau were captivated by the Bhagavad-Gita and other Indian spiritual texts, and you can see the influence of the teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita on their American transcendentalism. I find much of the yogic teaching quite compatible with the Unitarian Universalism I was raised with – and I often think I may have William Emerson to thank for that. Our basic interdependence is what both Wapner and Emerson are referring to when they say we are part and parcelor part and particle of the earth and the Universe. And it is our interdependence that requires us to take environmental stewardship seriously, because our fate is directly tied to that of the planet and all life. Lerner points out, "few people have found a way to connect their caring about the earth to actual life choices that would make a serious impact in saving the planet from destruction." I might put it another way. It’s not like it’s about caring about the earth, as if I am something other than the earth. It’s about caring for myself as a part of the earth – and caring for the earth as a part of myself…. but I agree with Lerner that few people have found a way to connect their understanding of our interdependence and caring for ourselves to actual life choices that would make a serious impact in saving us from destruction. "We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree" writes Emerson, and from that partial view, it is easy to understand the scarcity mentality of the river in our story for all ages this morning, who grieves the loss of the clouds without realizing that she and the clouds are the same substance. Once we realize that we are enough. We are enough, that we have enough, and that there is enough – only then, I believe, can we be proper stewards of the earth and the universe as we experience it as a part of it. As Rabbi Lerner says, "it is our scarcity mentality that drives our rapacious consumption of the finite resources of the planet." This first part – realizing that the earth’s resources are enough to sustain us if we learn to respect and cherish them – is the most important part, and the hardest part, and the part that requires spiritual discipline. Part two Voluntary simplicity and ethical consumption are certainly made easier if we know that we have enough. The key to voluntary simplicity, in my mind, is in the word voluntary. There are folks the world over who live simply, live on little, live on not enough – but that is involuntary poverty and voluntary simplicity is different, though it might look objectively quite the same. When I served in the Peace Corps, I was voluntarily living simply. One way it differed from the poverty around me was that I knew I had a choice. I knew that it was temporary. Your former minister, Tomm Smith, comes to mind. Tomm who, as I understood it from the folks who talked about him at his memorial service, Tomm voluntarily left behind a middle class lifestyle to pursue a life more like his understanding of Jesus’ life. We make choices every day – the choice to drive or walk somewhere, the choice to carry our own bags to the grocery store or have our groceries bagged in plastic – the choice to garden when we can, or clean ourselves with lots or little water. Sometimes when our habits are well established, we forget that we even have a choice, and to change our habits is really quite hard. Changing our habits is really quite hard. This is one reason I think that the spiritual awakening to our interdependence and enoughness must be a part of a simple living plan. We can temporarily shame ourselves and others into scarcity thinking and simple living – but I don’t think the good we do by living simply out of shame is the same as voluntary simplicity from a place of wholeness and enoughness, if for the simple reason that we don’t attract others to the lifestyle if we’re doing it from a place of scarcity and shame. I think of Wendell Berry here, whose words I opened with – a champion of both simple living and ethical consumption. "The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light." In the book, The Left Hand of God, Rabbi Lerner gets quite literal with the term ethical consumption. I want to read to you a section from the book that I didn’t include in the reading this morning, but I think is really important:
A similar concept is behind the slow food movement so named to contrast itself with and "counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions, and people’s interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world." (www.slowfood.com) Food is a powerful place to start since it’s so basic to our survival. Rabbi Lerner and the network of spiritual activists advocates taking this same concept and expanding it beyond food to cover all products. Part three Change the global economy so that it is ordered in rational and sustainable ways. I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week after Tuesday’s drop in the stock market. When I was an English as a Second Language teacher in Washington state, I had a student from Russia who had experienced the economic devastation of his country – and my relationship with him made me keenly aware of the tentativeness of our entire economic system, the vulneratibility of it. The Gross Domestic Product is probably the most widely used indicator of economic growth and well being. It measures the total value of all products and services bought and sold. It makes no distinctions between productive and destructive activities – and so rises even as the quality of life declines, say because we’re spending money to repair damage from Hurricane Katrina. The gross domestic product doesn’t measure resources until they are consumed. Trees are not measured as having value until they are cut down for timber, and then they count. The GDP celebrates consumption rather than conservation and encourages unsustainable depletion of finite resources. The GDP ignores all activities and services that have no price attached to them. So when churches have to hire staff because their members no longer have discretionary time to volunteer – there’s a positive value placed on the loss of your discretionary time, or the quality of life. This measure of our economy values growth at all costs over the things that really matter to people, such as clean air and water, a healthy and safe community, and the free time to enjoy them. It’s time to change the way we measure progress…. I return to the Social Responsibility Amendment that I preached about in a previous sermon of this series…This proposed Social Responsibility Amendment would require corporations to get a new corporate charter once every ten years –and that charter would only be granted to those corporations that could prove to a jury of ordinary citizens that it had a satisfactory history of social responsibility. And yes, this is really out there in terms of being hard to imagine getting from this point – where natural disasters get measured by the gross domestic product as positive – to where Walmart would have to prove to a jury of ordinary citizens that it had a satisfactory record of social responsibility in labor practices and environmental sustainability in order to renew its charter. But we’re not going to get from here to there without advocating and pushing for some radical changes to the way we do business in this country and around the world. That’s the third part of this Covenant of Environmental Stewardship . The second part of this covenant is that we can connect our interdependence and caring for ourselves to actual life choices that would make a serious impact in saving us from destruction. When we do that, our belief in the possibility of environmental salvation can become self-fulfilling. We can make some different choices – and break some bad habits. We can choose simpler lifestyles and make ethical choices in consumption, and in so doing, arouse in others their own awareness of the need and desire to act as stewards for this incredible living earth of which we are a part. Writes Wendell Berry, "The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light." And the first part, the most important part, is that we have to do it, because it is a closed system – we are it, we are enough, and we are all there is. Our interdependence means that our every action matters. Global warming couldn’t make that clearer, could it? "The earth’s resources are enough to sustain us if we learn to respect and cherish them." Since happiness cannot be obtained through endless consumption, we can stop now. We can stop killing ourselves, killing the planet, killing us. Writes Berry, "This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility."
* Sermons are meant to be spoken and not written. I have not edited this homily to written form. Sermons copyright 2007, all rights reserved. Unitarian Universalist
Church of Greater Lansing
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