"Inconvenient
Truths and Blessings"
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Sermon, Sunday, March 23, 2008
Keene Unitarian Universalist Church
Rev. Olivia Holmes
Scoring
By Anne Herbert
As told by UU Rev. Barbara Child
In the beginning God didn’t make just one or two people, she made a bunch of us Because she wanted us to have a lot of fun and she said you can’t really have fun unless there’s a whole gang of you. She put us all in this sort of playground place called Eden and told us to enjoy – and at first we did have fun. We played all the time. We rolled down the hills, frolicked in the wood, hid in the forest and acted silly. We laughed a lot.
Then one day this snake told us that we weren’t having real fun because we weren’t keeping score. We didn’t know what “score” was. The snake explained that we should give an apple to the person who was best at playing and we’d never know who was best unless we kept score. We could all see the fun of that…we were all sure we were the best.
It was different after that. We yelled a lot. By the time God found out about our new fun, we were spending 45 minutes a day playing and the rest of the time working out the score. God was wroth about that – very, very wroth. She said we couldn’t use her garden anymore because we weren’t having any fun.
She shouldn’t have got upset just because it wasn’t the kind of fun she had in mind. But she wouldn’t listen. She kicked us out. To rub it in she told us we were all going to die anyway and our scores wouldn’t mean anything.
She was wrong. My cumulative all-game score is now 16,548 and that means a lot o me. If I can raise it to 20,000 before I die I’ll know I’ve accomplished something. My life has a great deal of meaning because I’ve taught my children to score high and they’ll be able to reach 20,000 or even 30,000, I know. Really it was life in Eden that didn’t mean anything. Fun is great, but without scoring there’s no reason for it. God has a very superficial view of life. We were lucky to get out. We’re all very grateful to the snake.
“Inconvenient Truths and Blessings”
Sermon, Sunday, April 20, 2008
Keene Unitarian Universalist Church
Rev. Olivia Holmes
We’re all very grateful to the snake. And we all keep score. It’s the most toys gene in us all. What is it we count? How many beautiful things we own? How much money we have in the bank? How much a tank of gas costs now, and may cost tomorrow?
I have to say I went through a very depressed stage while working on what I needed to say this morning. Along with the cost of heating my house through this first New Hampshire winter, I was counting Al Gore’s inconvenient truths. In 2003 a heat wave in Europe killed 35,000 people. In 2004 Japan had 10 typhoons. 2005 saw at least 5 major hurricanes, including Katrina. The fact that polar bears now have to swim up to 60 miles to find a patch of ice to rest on, and the fact that some don’t make it really got me down.
So I decided to try to find scores to make me feel better. That’s when I found “The Perfect Minister” scorecard in the mid-April Messenger. It says that “The perfect minister preaches exactly fifteen minutes. He condemns sins but never upsets anyone. He works from 8:00am until midnight and is also a janitor. He makes $50 a week, wears good clothes, buys good books, drives a good car, and gives about $50 weekly to the poor. He is 28 years old and has preached 30 years.” Read your Messenger for the rest of this story.
I congratulate you with all my heart on your choice of Rev. Jane Thickstun as your new minister. At the ministers’ meeting in Texas this past week, her colleagues from Michigan sang her praises to me. She’s funny and thoughtful, a good preacher and pastor, and she cares deeply about the people she is called to serve. She is blessed in having found you. You are blessed in having found her.
Having rediscovered my sense of humor reading about the perfect minister I thought again about Al Gore and his film. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work; not the science price, not the economics prize, but the peace prize. Think about it.
In the film Gore points to the oft heard argument from those who refuse to believe the earth is in trouble and needs our help. The argument is that it’s the economy versus ecology. They say the economy will be in ruins if we try to clean up the earth. Gore responds, with his tongue buried only a little bit in his cheek, that the economy without the planet would be interesting to consider.
Keeping score of what? How expensive the minister’s clothes really are? How much she or he really gives to the poor? Hear the words of our hymn this morning:
On the dusty earth drum, beats the falling rain
Now a whispered murmur, now a louder strain.
Back in the 1980s I spent a lot of time in Africa. For a while I was commuting between Tunisia and a tiny village all the way in the northern tip of Cameroun. In Tunisia it wasn’t hard to keep score of the damage over-population was doing, not just to the earth, but to the economy as well. In the film Al Gore points out that when he was born, the earth was home to 2 billion human beings. Today it is home to 6 billion, and estimates are that it will be home to 9 billion before Al Gore expects to die. Tunisia’s economy could not feed the hungry, could not house the poor, could not heal the sick, could not educate the young. Tunisia was stuck raising a population that had no choice but to cut down every tree for warmth. It was no surprise that when the monsoon season came, roads, villages, and all creatures living in them were washed away. Some lived. Some did not.
The village in Cameroun where I worked was very, very poor. Keeping score? Nobody had much of anything to keep score of; except, except, the happy faces of healthy children. In that village there was an enormous rock that had a strange green streak down the middle of it, where there appeared to be a gully. I wondered about this until I saw, one day, about 10 little boys climbing up that huge rock with great big banana leaves in one hand. When they got to the top, they’d sit down on the banana leaf and push off to a rapid slide down the gully to land in the soft sand that was everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa..
Right next to that rock there was a grove of mango trees, and another group of squealing, shrieking little boys with home-made slingshots. They were keeping score of who could hit a mango in the perfect place to shake it loose from the tree. Not just any mango, but one just right for eating.
It wasn’t just the boys who were having fun. The girls wove supple vines into dolls. Then they scavenged all over the village for bits of cloth to dress their dolls in. They didn’t need needle and thread, nor buttons, nor zippers. The dresses their mothers wore were just panels of material tucked in at the top. Nobody was keeping score on who had the best clothes; they were too busy being creative, having fun being more than satisfied with what they had.
On March 25 I read a New York Times article about the environment and what we’re not doing about it. The article said that we’re not good at short-term sacrifice for long-term goals. It’s true, we’re not. But we used to be.
My brother worked for Goodyear his entire career. Goodyear used to be the industry flagship for investment in research and development. When I first started doing consulting work with General Electric, they, too, were the best in their industry in long-term research and development investment. It used to be the customer came first, and the best products scored the best on the measure of success and consumer satisfaction.
Now it’s short-term profits that score, and investor satisfaction that counts. When was the last time you had a really satisfying meal on an airplane? In coach class?
I am not satisfied any more. All over the world people of faith and of no faith are not satisfied. The world’s religious writings are full of our yearning for a healthy earth. The Sufi tradition proclaims that there is no greater scripture than nature, for nature is life itself. Well, this book of scripture is heating up. Gore tells us that if the Antarctic ice sheet melts, which is beginning to happen already, the world sea level would rise 20 feet, and millions and millions of city-dwellers by the sea would be displaced to refugee camps at best. At best.
Slender, silvery drumsticks on an ancient drum, beat the mellow music bidding life to come.
Another country in Africa where I’ve spent a lot of time is Ghana. When you work as a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development, which I did, they give you a couple of hours near the end of your consultancy, to go to the local market and shop. I’ve always loved African drumming. I am so heartened that John Hughes is with us today. Often, whether in Ghana or Cameroun, when out in remote villages, I’d go to sleep at night listening to the drums beating their messages from village to village. Call and response; it’s a conversation that drains nothing from the earth’s resources. The sound of the kora touches my soul; wakens my heart; makes me want to live.
When I was in Ghana, I had a small collection of drums that I’d collected in Africa. I was always looking for new and different ones. So I was delighted when, as I entered this village market, I heard a funky high-pitched drumbeat. I went straight to the source, and found a man playing this instrument. (It’s called a hand drum, and this is its sound.)
I told the man I would buy 5 sets of these little hand drum gourds if he would teach me a song that would help me remember the rhythm of the drumming. He was game, and started off on a long, long, many, many verse song that lost me utterly. I said, could you think of another, easier song, please. He tried again. I asked again. He tried again, and this time he sang a song I knew. The words are these: Thula klazeo, nale passé kaio. It’s a song to sing when working hard in the fields. It’s in our new supplemental hymnal. In English, the words mean, “Be still my heart, even here I am at peace.”
Be still my heart, even here I am at peace.
There is a prayer for the earth in the Hindu tradition that says, “O Mother Earth, you have ocean for clothes and mountains and forests on your body. You are the wife of Lord Vishnu, the Creator of the world. I bow to you. My feet are touching your body; please forgive me.
There’s a Sioux prayer that says, Grandfather Great Spirit, fill us with the Light. Give us the strength to understand, and the eyes to see. Teach us to walk the soft Earth as relatives to all that live.
One of my favorite books about all our relatives on earth is “When Elephants Weep,” by Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy. The book is all about the emotional lives of animals. There are stories about elephants sharing their food with mice living in their cages in the zoo. Stories about an elephant saving a rhinoceros baby stuck in the mud by lifting the baby out with its tusks, despite the terrified protestations of the mother rhinoceros.
And the authors tell a story about Geza Teleki who worked with chimpanzees at the Gombé Reserve. Teleki took a break from his work “to climb to the top of a ridge to watch the sun set over Lake Tanganyika. While watching the sunset, he noticed first one and then a second chimpanzee climbing up toward him. The two adult males were not together and saw each other only when they reached the top of the ridge. They did not see Teleki. The apes greeted each other with pants, clasping hands, and sat down together. In silence Teleki and the chimpanzees watched the sun set and twilight fall.
The authors go on to say that “The chimpanzees who watched the sundown with Geza Teleki were not unique. The primatologist Adriaan Kortlandt recorded a wild chimpanzee gazing for a full fifteen minutes at a particularly spectacular sunset until darkness fell. Some who have observed bears in the wild speak of them sitting on their haunches at sunset, gazing at it, seemingly lost in meditation.
It’s not just the beauty of our earth we’re destroying; it’s the beauty of the earth that is home to all creatures. We are just not alone in appreciating its beauty.
Chords of life awakened, notes of greening spring, rise and fall triumphant over everything.
I decided you didn’t need a depressing sermon any more than I did. And Bless him, Al Gore gave me the uplift I needed. He stresses the reality that we have all the technology we need to heal the world and ourselves. I stress that we used to be able to set aside short-term gain for long-term goals. We can do it again. We can. We’re just lacking the political will, Gore says, if we can get to the tipping point, to the point of overwhelming critical mass to change the way this country thinks, we can do the job that needs to be done.
Our own Joan Roelofs has been working on getting the word out for years. In 1996 she wrote a workbook for students at the undergraduate and graduate levels called Greening Cities, Building Just and Sustainable Cities. That book has been important to activists, government officials, and other leaders in the green movement as well. Always remember that the efforts of every person make a difference; every person.
Suzanne Butcher, Kay Delanoy and Sarah Harpster have led our own KUUC Green Sanctuary movement. I am proud of their efforts to have tables of literature available during the Keene Earth Week events this week. I am proud of them for holding this church community to account for our own impact on the earth; holding us to account to do something to make it better. Carl Jacobs and Molly and the Property Committee are all working on getting us to recycle more, turn the thermostats down, change the light bulbs, and conduct an audit to best know how we can do more in the most economically efficient way.
I’ve turned down my own thermostat. My neighbors, the farmers, keep theirs at 60. I’m not there yet, but I’ve gone from 68 to 65, and then to 62. I’m working on it. I’ve unplugged every appliance that uses electricity when it’s off…usually to tell time in a place where I don’t need to know (I do have a watch). Keeping score? How about we start to keep score of the things we are doing right, individually, as families, and as a religious community, to heal the world and ourselves in the process.
Did you know that the whole idea of Earth Day came from a Unitarian Universalist? His name is Mort Hilbert. When he was a professor at the University of Michigan, he took the Earth Day idea to his senator, Gaylord Nelson – who failed to credit Hilbert/.
Slender, silvery drumsticks beat the long tattoo – God the Great Musician, calling life anew.
Al Gore says we need to reach critical mass. He says that when we have done this in the past, we:
· fought the oppression of an absentee king who saw us as nothing more than a source of income for his counting rooms. And we won.
· fought the oppression of slavery – when we began to believe all humans are equal in need, in suffering, and in hope. And we won.
· fought the oppression of women and African Americans as lesser citizens – too insignificant to deserve a vote in the public square – and won.
We know how to fight oppression…and win. What we need is the political will. And that comes from the people in this country.
· When mothers of children killed by drunk drivers organized in this country, we reached the tipping point. The laws and people’s behavior started to change. We can do this.
· When just about everyone who knew that smoking causes cancer; not just in the smoker but in the people who love the smoker; we reached the tipping point. The laws and people’s behavior started to change. We can do this.
I say we know how to let go of short-term gains for long-term goals; we’ve done it again, and again.
We are reaching the tipping point on caring for our earth. I googled a wide variety of environmentally focused websites to discover how much activity there actually is. Here are the reasons I think we’re getting to the tipping point:
I found 160,000 web references to the Green Sanctuary Movement, 263,000 to the Green Earth Ministry, and 864,000 for Healing the Earth.
I found 6,310,000 for Reducing Fossil Fuels, 12,100,000 for Renewable Energy, and 24,900,000 for Environmental Protection.
People’s behavior has changed and will continue to change. Just like the earth, our hearts are waking up and calling to our prodigious brains to solve this problem and save our beloved earth. We can do this. Blessed be.
