Soul Force

The Web

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

April 18, 2010

^{Opening
Words}

^{We come together today seeking a reality beyond our
narrow selves that binds us in compassion, love, and understanding to other
human beings, and to the interdependent web of all living things.}

^{May our hearts and minds be opened to the power and the
insight that weave together the scattered threads of our experience and help us
remember the Wholeness of which we are a part.}

^{—WAYNE B. ARNASON}

^Readings

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 6-8

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood....

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear....

Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.... I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.[i]

“We Give Thanks for the Earth,” from The Bible According to Noah: Theology as if Animals Mattered, Gary Kowalski

We give thanks for the earth and its creatures,

And are grateful from A to Z:

For alligators, apricots, acorns and apple trees,

For bumblebees, blueberries, bananas and beagles,

Coconuts, crawdads, cornfields and coffee,

Daisies, elephants, and flying fish,

For groundhogs, glaciers, and grasslands,

Hippos and hazelnuts, icicles and iguanas,

juniper, jackrabbits and junebugs,

Kohlrabi and kangaroos, lightning bugs and licorice,

For mountains, milkweed and mistletoe,

Narwhals and nasturtiums, otters and ocelots,

For peonies, persimmons and polar bears,

Quahogs and Queen Anne's Lace,

For raspberries and roses,

Salmon and sassafras, tornadoes and tulipwood,

Urchins and valleys and waterfalls,

For X (the unknown, the mystery of it all!)

In every yak and yam:

We are grateful, good Earth, not least of all

For zinnias, zucchini and zebras,

And for the alphabet of wonderful things

That are simple as ABC.

[Hymn #1068]

^Sermon

I had the good fortune to grow up on a farm in Wisconsin; two farms, actually. We lived on the first farm until I was ten; for the year before we left, my brother and I had fun watching the big earth-moving equipment that was used to put through two new interstate highways. We watched emerging before our eyes a complex intersection of I-90 and I-94 which merged on one edge of our land and then cut straight through the middle of the farm and separated two now-unusable pieces, making it impossible to get to the back of the farm and no longer viable for farming at all. Since it was on the edge of Madison, it was quickly developed into new neighborhoods full of houses. I loved our new farm, where my parents still live. There was a hill with a stand of trees on top, and I believe I was the one who named the farm (for the purpose of having a sign on the barn) “Oak Crest Farm.” When the sign went up, I had no intention of staying in the farming business while my brother did, so I insisted that the sign should read “Ed Sprecher and Son.” A few years ago, when my boys and I repainted the barn after some forty years, my dad and my brother insisted on adding an “s,” so it now reads “Ed Sprecher and Sons.” My brother and I were fascinated with the forested ridge and thought we would make a kind of clubhouse for ourselves up there. We dragged an old chicken coop up the hill to serve as our hideaway; unfortunately, long after chickens have flown the coop, the smell lingers on. The coop came back down soon after. I remember how much fun we had after a rainstorm creating trenches for mud puddles which formed at the top of rises so that the water could flow downhill, and then farther down, and finally find its way to our creek. [although I believe in these parts it’s proper to say “creeeek.”]. The creek kept us busy, too. We were desperate to find a way to navigate it into the wider world and find adventures. Once we dragged an old cow tank down to the creed and managed to get as far as the farm on the next road over before running aground. I was frightfully jealous when my brother and some friends borrowed our Uncle Gibby’s small motorboat and navigated it all the way to the first of Madison’s charming lakes and from there through three of the other four.

As Emerson says, “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.” I will never regret the opportunities for freedom and adventure growing up on a farm, and it is true that the sun shines more deeply into us when we are young. I’m sure most of you could recall similar pleasures growing up, in a time before children’s lives became so scheduled and busy with activities. In those olden times, we made up our own activities. Emerson says, “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” There is a certain resonance with what Jesus said when he was trying to describe what the Kingdom of God would be like; he said, [NRS Mark 10:15] “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it."

Next Thursday is the 40^th annual Earth Day. I want to suggest that this might be a good opportunity to think of the earth, its beings, and our role in this web from the perspective we all would have shared as children. Our sense of the connection of the whole was not of course as sophisticated as it is to us as grownups, but there certainly was a feeling that things were interconnected; one bug leads to another, one plant can be seen as food for some being even as another depends on it and it depends on the earth to grow. Without thinking too hard about it, children learn to care for the earth and all that is on it. Indeed, when a child destroys animals for no apparent reason, parents and friends are rightly concerned about what this might mean about that one’s ability to care for other humans as well.

The founder of Earth Day in 1970 was Gaylord Nelson, who just happened at that time to be one of my senators from the great state of Wisconsin. Gaylord Nelson spoke during the first earth day of the broader implications of spending a day to consider the earth and our stewardship of it; he said,

Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.

Our goal is a new American ethic that sets new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste, more pollution.

Are we able to meet the challenge? Yes. We have the technology and the resources.

Are we willing? That is the unanswered question.

Establishing quality on a par with quantity is going to require new national policies that quite frankly will interfere with what many have considered their right to use and abuse the air, the water, the land, just because that is what we have always done.[ii]

These broad purposes are of course directional rather than attainable in the immediate or even the middle future; like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, they call us to examine how we are living and point to a better way. One important perspective on how we ought to care for the earth is provided by the account of the creation of humans in the first chapter of Genesis:

^NRSGenesis 1:26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."

That word “dominion” has been a source of difficulty in helping to define how humans ought to relate to the web of life all around them. Another translation uses instead the term “rule,” and I would understand both of these terms to mean that we are instructed to be benign rulers, obligated to use the fruits of the earth for our own sustenance while ensuring the continued vitality of the rest of creation – for indeed it is only thus that we can hand on this earth as a legacy for our own descendants and all other beings. There are those who would disagree with this sense of “dominion.” Ann Coulter, in a typically bombastic and caricatured way, expounds that other point of view; while she exaggerate, she is not the only one who holds such a view. She says:

The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet – it's yours. That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars – that's the Biblical view.[iii]

I for one don’t find support in the text for the view that to have dominion is to “rape.” I don’t think many children, or many of those adults who, as Emerson puts it, “have retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood,” would take this view either. As Jesus put it, “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it."

The seventh principle of our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to “affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” Or, in the children’s version, “We believe that we should care for our planet earth.” The sociologist Robert Bellah spoke to the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in 1998 about the importance of this principle for our faith and for our message to the world. He said:

Beneath the surface glitter of American culture there is a deep inner core, which, I have argued, is ultimately religious: the sacredness of the conscience of every single individual. Nothing I have said tonight takes away from the enormous power for good of that idea. But it opens the door to the worst in our culture. It easily leads to the idea that humans are nothing but self-interest maximizers, and devil take the hindmost. It is that version that we see all around us. I don't think we can challenge that version until we come to see that the sacredness of the individual depends ultimately on our solidarity with all being, not on the vicissitudes of our private selves.[iv]

This perspective is a challenge to the individualism we have cultivated for much of our tradition’s history as embodied in our first principle, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Much as we treasure each person’s freedom and worth, we need to see it in the context of the whole, the whole web of life, of neighbors both human and otherwise. Bellah suggests that our seventh principle ought instead to be the first, providing the context for all that follows. Our children’s story of the creation of all things by Spider Woman is a myth which conveys the rich interdependence of all that is and all that can be. All are indeed related, and in some ways all are one. What affects one touches us all. Kenneth Collier, one of the original proponents of our Seventh Principle, reminds us that

Interdependence is an energy that flows in both directions....

It is an old and universal theological doctrine. The Hindus and Buddhists call it karma. Jesus said, "That which you sow also shall you reap.” The Taoists say, "Returning is the motion of the Tao." And folklore says, "What goes around, comes around." When we get stingy and greedy with people we do not know, that greed and stinginess rebounds on us and makes it easier for us to be greedy and stingy with each other.[v]

What we humans do results in what is done to us. When we pollute the skies with the emissions of our cars and our power plants, we suffer from smog, from stinging eyes and from asthma. When we carelessly pollute rivers, lakes and the ocean over which we exercise dominion or rule, we poison our own supply of precious water and kill or make inedible the fish and other creatures of the water from which we ourselves draw sustenance. When we emit large quantities of CO₂ , we cause climate change which will over time affect all life, including our own.

We have indeed achieved dominion over the earth and all living things. We don’t of course have complete control; recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now on the Tibetan Plateau in China remind us that the earth itself contains enormous destructive potential which we can neither control nor escape, but those events also demonstrate that awareness of such possible catastrophes can enable us to build more responsibly and thereby alleviate to some extent the damage caused by such tragedies. The eruption of a volcano in Iceland has shut down all air traffic in western Europe. We humans have the capability to destroy all that lives upon the earth with nuclear weapons and with destructive use of her resource – by “raping” the planet, as Ann Coulter puts it. These abilities cheapen our sense of the beauty and the wonder of this web of all existence of which we are a part. [NRS Luke 18:17] “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” This is an important element of our faith, of the theology we as a religious tradition hold dear.

How, then, shall we live? We need to remember that, as Emerson puts it, “In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through [a] man, in spite of real sorrows.” I have been blessed of late to be taken into the woods and the countryside all around us by our puppy Annie’s need to be exercised – as well, of course, as my own need. But there is more to such ambling than exercising the body; it is also an opportunity for immersion in the wildness which still remains all around us. Then, we need to consider how our own actions affect all that is around us – recycling and composting where possible, of course, but also using only the resources we need to live on, avoiding waste and excess wherever possible – and wearing sweaters to allow us to turn our thermostats down, despite Ann Coulter. We need to place ourselves within the sacred reality of our interdependence on and with all things, and to experience the the fulfillment which comes from consciously and with awe taking our proper place within all that is and all that can be. Finally, we need purpose in our lives, and part of what gives us purpose is exercising dominion with awe and trembling, promoting such commitments to those around us, and committing ourselves to doing what we can to preserve and to honor the interdependent web of all things of which we are only a part. Let us have the spirit of a child, and may the sun illuminate not only our eyes but our hearts as well.

In so doing, may our lives be enriched; may our ways be illumined, may our works be blessed.

May it be so, and Amen.

www.secondparish.org

Benediction

Reminded that we are part and participants of the Universe, let us go forth from the quiet of this hour encouraged to strive toward faithfulness to the best in ourselves, in others, and in the whole creation. - NORMAN V NAYLOR