Archive for the 'Ecotheology' Category

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Transcendental Ecology

Published on April 30, 2006 in Ecotheology. Closed

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading this morning is from the book Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter titled, “Sounds”:

“What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

“I did not read books the first summer [I lived at Walden Pond]; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time…. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

The second reading is from the Hebrew prophets, the book of Isaiah, chapter 24, verses 5 and 6:

The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore a curse devours the earth,
and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt….

SERMON — “Transcendental Ecology”

In case you haven’t noticed, the historically liberal churches have been shoved off to the margins in the United States. Historically liberal churches such as the Episcopalians, the Congregationalists, the Methodists, the northern Baptists, the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterians, the Quakers, and yes the Unitarian Universalists, have been losing members and influence for some forty years now. We used to be at the center of things. Forty years ago, during the Civil Rights movement, when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called on church leaders to come stand beside him, we in the historically liberal churches went and stood. Some religious liberals even died for Civil Rights, including two Unitarian Unviersalists: Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Luizzo. At that time, we engaged with the outer world, and our opinions actually mattered.

Since that time, Unitarian Universalists and all the other historically liberal churches have been steadily losing membership and influence. (We Unitarian Universalists have actually been gaining members in the past twenty years, at about one percent a year; which however is not enough to keep up with population growth but at least we’re not shrinking like all the other liberal churches.) I sometimes feel that we religious liberals have spent the last forty years in a kind of a daze; we have spent the last forty years gazing at our navels. Sure, individual religious liberals work harder than ever to make this a better world — but as a group, as a liberal religious church, we are far from the centers of power and influence.

Of course, you know who is at the centers of power and influence. While we religious liberals have been gazing at our navels, the Religious Right, a loose coalition of many of the fundamentalist churches, some of the evangelical churches, televangelists, billionaires, and other conservative Christians, has gained in power and influence. The Religious Right has enormous influence in Congress and in the White House. The Religious Right is extremely well-funded. The Religious Right has charismatic preachers, some of whom have built churches of upwards of thirty thousand members. We are shrinking and increasingly irrelevant; they get to elect presidents.

I think it’s time for us to change. For the past forty years, we religious liberals have been coming to our beautiful church buildings, politely sad because global warming and massive species extinctions are destroying living beings that we consider sacred. Perhaps we even gently wring our hands, and we say we don’t quite know what to do. We know that environmental destruction is a religious issue. We know that one of the roots of the ecological disaster we face today is the simple religious fact that Western religion has mis-interpreted that passage in the Bible, the one where God gives us dominion over all other living beings, to mean that we can rape the earth and destroy at will. We know, too, that the Religious Right is happy for their God to have dominion over the United States, and for men to have dominion over women, and for men in the United States to have dominion over all over living beings — and when they say dominion, they don’t mean it in a nice, polite way, they mean domination. We religious liberals know all that, and when we leave our beautiful churches after coffee hour, we seem to forget all this until we next come to church, maybe four weeks from now. We conveniently forget that the ecological disaster we are now facing has deep religious roots.

I think it’s time for us to change. We no longer have the luxury of sitting quietly in our beautiful liberal churches. We no longer have the luxury of chatting politely with our friends at coffee hour about everything except the religious roots of the ecological crisis (to say nothing of the religious roots of gay-bashing, the religious roots of the widening gap between rich and poor, and so on). We no longer have the luxury of being able to separate our polite religion from the rough-and-tumble of real-world events; we no longer have the luxury of hiding our religious faith from the world.

That being the case, I’m going to try to set an example here this morning. I’m going to speak here publicly about my deeply-held religious faith, a religious faith that drives me to try, against all hope, to save what’s left of the natural world from further destruction. Maybe what I say seems a little raw; maybe I’m making one or two people feel uncomfortable. We have gotten out of the habit of speaking of our deeply-held religious beliefs here in our liberal churches; we have, in fact, gotten out of the habit of being religious. But that’s what ministers are for: to set the best example we know how to set, and to call people to be religious.

So let’s talk religion.

I’m a Transcendentalist. When I was about sixteen, I had a transcendental experience. I was sitting outdoors at the base of Punkatasset Hill in my home town of Concord, Massachusetts, with my back against a white birch tree. There was this alley of white birches that someone had planted along an old farm road, and the fields on either side were still, at that time, mowed for hay twice a year. So I was just sitting there on a beautiful late spring day, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the oneness of everything. I mean, this was an overwhelming experience, I really don’t have the words to describe it. Since then, I’ve had numerous other transcendent experiences, some more powerful than others.

What do these transcendental experiences mean? Well, I suppose I’m still trying to make sense out of those experiences. When I was about twenty, I found William James’s book Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he describes the various mystical experiences that people have. James said that perhaps a quarter of the population have mystical experiences of one sort or another, and in his descriptions of the various kinds of mystical experiences I could see the outlines of my own mystical experiences. But James’s book didn’t tell me about the meaning of my mystical experiences.

I found something of the meaning of my transcendental experiences in a book by my fellow townsman, Henry Thoreau. I had always disliked Thoreau when I was a child; when you grow up in Concord, and go to the Concord public schools, you get force-fed Thoreau and Emerson, and Alcott and Hawthorne for that matter. I don’t take well to force-feeding and so dismissed Thoreau. But at last I found that Thoreau’s book Walden probably described what I had been experiencing better than anything else, especially when he writes:

“I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, …until by the sun falling in at my west window… I was reminded of the lapse of time.”

I discovered that I, too, love a broad margin to my life. That broad margin is a margin to my life in which I have the time and the space to be able to be rapt in a revery, to reflect on the ultimate meaning of the universe. It is also a margin to my life where I can reflect on the difference between real religion, and religion as it is imperfectly practiced in the world around me.

When I have been able to sit “rapt in a revery,” I have come to the inescapable conclusion that there is a unity which binds all human beings together, which binds all living beings together — which, indeed, binds us human beings to the non-living world as well, to the sun and the moon and the stars above and the rocks under our feet.

I can put this into scientific terms if you’d like: all parts of the ecosystem are interconnected, these interconnections can be modeled in terms of systems theory using feedback loops and non-linear relationships; and to harm one part of an ecosystem will have wide repercussions throughout the ecosystem. I find I am quite comfortable with scientific language. I can also put this into the language of Christianity if you’d like: God’s creation consists of earth, moon, sun, and stars; of the ocean and all the creatures that live there; of the birds of the air; of the plants that grow and the animals that live on the earth; of human beings. And to harm one part of God’s creation is to do violence to God. I find I am reasonably comfortable with Christian language. Or if you like, I can also put this into the one of the dialects of neo-paganism, which might sound something like this: the Goddess who is Gaia, earth mother, mother of all that lives; the Goddess who is the Moon Goddess who sets the rhythms of the seasons; it is she whom we love and must respect, and to harm the ecosystem is to harm the Mother Goddess. I find I am reasonably comfortable with neo-Pagan language, too!

Right now, the specific language is less important than the fundamental underlying insight. In fact, we could even put this in words that the Religious Right might recognize:

The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.

Yes, we have broken our covenant, our promises, to the earth.

I am told by some religious liberals that in speaking this way, I’m not being decorous, I’m not being polite. My religious faith sets me on fire; I know that my faith can transform the world; I know that my faith can change the religious attitudes that lead to dominion theology and global ecological catastrophe; but I am told by some Unitarian Universalists that I am not polite, because I’m trying to change this nice comfortable little religion we’ve had for the past forty years.

Maybe that’s the problem: mine is not a comfortable faith. I have not been made comfortable by having transcendental experiences that cause me to sit rapt in a revery on a summer morning; I have not been made comfortable by the religious realization that my contribution to global warming and habitat destruction is morally wrong; I have not been made comfortable in the knowledge that our churches must grow quickly or sink into complete and total irrelevancy as the Religious Right gains more and more influence in the United States; I am not comfortable knowing that it is up to me and other religious liberals to combat the misguided religion of domination that is the Religious Right.

I suspect that I’m probably passing along some of my discomfort to you. I keep challenging you, I know; I am not the warm, cuddly pastor that I would kind of like to be. I would love to be able to stand up here week after week, and be able to preach warm, comforting sermons. I would love to be able to sit with you each week and pass on comfortable religious thoughts as you live out your life. It would be so much easier if we could just keep on with our small, comfortable little church; for after all, growth just means more work for us. I wish I could be a warm comfortable cuddly pastor, in a nice relaxed sleepy little church; but I don’t think either you or I have that luxury.

My friends, the world is changing around us. Very rapidly. Ten years ago, I would have laughed at the idea that these United States could turn into a theocracy run by a Religious Right who distorts Jesus of Nazareth’s message of love into a message of hate and intolerance, who use the Bible to justify ecological disaster. Ten years ago I would have laughed at this idea; now I believe such a theocracy is a remote but all-too-real possibility. It will be a theocracy based on a religion of domination: men dominating women, the rich dominating the poor, straight people dominating gays and lesbians, and above all humanity dominating and destroying the rest of the natural world. Because, they will say, it is God’s will.

If such a theocracy comes, we in the liberal churches will have no one to blame but ourselves. We have let our religion become optional, sort of like joining a country club, or supporting National Public Radio. We have let the Religious Right steal the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus and the other Jewish prophets away from us. We have let the political liberals to completely separate environmentalism from religion. We have let our churches dwindle in size, even though we are told that our churches get more newcomers and visitors, relative to our size, than the churches of the Religious Right. And we have been coming to church when we feel like it, staying comfortable, looking always inward.

My friends, I know that many of you are facing serious personal challenges. There are people in this congregation who have are facing so much that they don’t have any energy left over for anything except staying alive. But that, too, is a very different thing from having a country-club church; when life is that overwhelming, you are not in a position to have a safe comfortable religion; life is not letting you have safety and comfort. If we could start remembering that the world is not a comfortable place for most people, maybe we could offer each other a lot more comfort.

I’d like to invite you to join me in remaking liberal religion; in remaking this liberal church. I invite you to be on fire with your liberal religious faith. I invite you to feel your religion so deeply that when life overwhelms you, your religion becomes a source of strength. I invite you let your religious convictions of love, compassion, and justice draw you into passion and commitment to heal the world. I invite you to be moved by your deeply-held religious belief that all living beings are sacred, that the whole ecosystem is sacred.

If we did that, this church, First Unitarian in New Bedford, would once again become a force to be reckoned with. As it stands now, a few people are impressed with our beautiful building, and maybe with our past exploits; but aside from that, our little congregation of less than a hundred people is safely ignored. But if we choose to do so, we could change the world. We could do it, if you choose to….

The Garden

Published on January 8, 2006 in Christian texts & traditions, Ecotheology and Jewish texts & traditions. Closed

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The scripture reading this morning is from the Pentateuch or Torah, from the book we know as Genesis, chapter 1 verses 27-28:

“27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

“28 God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ ”

Next, a commentary on the reading from Rosemary Radford Reuther, a Christian ecological theologian, in her book Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing:

“First, I assume that there is no ready-made ecological spirituality and ethic in past traditions. The ecological crisis is new to human experience. This does not mean that humans have not devastated their environment before. But as long as populations remained small and human technology weak, these devastations were remediable by migration, retreat from to-heavy urban centers, or adaptation of new techniques. Nature appeared a huge inexhaustible source of life, and humans small…. The radical nature of this new face of ecological devastation means that all past human traditions are inadequate in the face of it. Whatever useful elements may exist in, for example, Native American or Taoist thought, must be reinterpreted to make them usable in the face of both scientific knowledge and the destructive power of the technology it has made possible.

“My second assumption is that each tradition is best explored by those who claim community in that tradition. This does not preclude conversions into other traditions or communication between them…. But the plumbing of each tradition, and its reinterpretation for today’s crises, is a profound task that needs to begin in the context of communities of accountability. Those people for whom Taoism or Pueblo Indian spirituality are their native traditions are those best suited to dig those roots and offer their fruits to the rest of us. Those without these roots should be cautious in claiming plants not our own, respectful of those who speak from within.” [p. 206]

SERMON — “The Garden”

We all know that wonderful old story about how God created the heavens and the earth, and all living beings including human beings; and then God tells the human beings that they will have dominion over all over living things; and then God has the human beings live in the Garden of Eden until they get themselves thrown out by eating a piece of fruit. We all know that story; that is, we all think we know that story; because when you really start looking at the actual story as it is written in the book of Genesis, it really isn’t the story you think you know.

For example, you know that God created male human beings in God’s image, right? –and then God took a rib out of the first man to make a woman, right? Well, wrong. That’s the way the story is told in a later part of the book of Genesis, but we get quite a different story in an earlier part of the book of Genesis, which we heard in this morning’s reading:

So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

In other words, there are two stories of the creation of human beings in Genesis. In this first story, both male and female human beings were created in God’s image. Take this a step farther: if a God identified as “he” or male can create female beings in “his” image, we are not talking about a living being made into a literal copy of God’s image; this is not a literal statement, but a mythic or poetic statement; and the opinions of our fundamentalist brothers and sisters notwithstanding, none the less true for being poetic and religious truth.

Genesis is a big, sprawling, complex book. It’s really a collection of myths, tales, poetry by several different authors living in several different eras, and eventually collected or redacted together by an anonymous editor or editors. We think we know the wonderful old story told in the book of Genesis, but when you actually read it carefully you find that maybe you don’t know it quite as well as you think you do. Our culture tries to reduce Genesis to a simple linear narrative, but when you do that you wind up with all kinds of things that simply aren’t in the book. “Original sin” is another example: not a phrase that appears in the book of Genesis, it’s an invention of Augustine and Milton. Another example: the belief that Genesis presents one unified story of how human beings came to be, when you can find three different stories of the creation of humans [Gen 1.27; Gen 2.4-7 & 20-23; Gen 6.1-4]. You can’t reduce Genesis to a simple, linear narrative; you have to approach it with mythic poetic thinking. Genesis is a story written by poets, it is not a blueprint written by engineers or a mathematical proof written by physicists.

Which brings us to the second half of this morning’s first reading:

“God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”

In our second reading this morning, the one by Rosemary Radford Ruether, we heard her say, “there is no ready-made ecological spirituality and ethic in past traditions; the ecological crisis is new to human experience.” She also charges us with the task of reinterpreting our religious tradition in light of the ecological crisis.

Now if you ask me — not that you did ask me, but anyway — if you ask me, this passage in Genesis where the God of the Israelites says to the two freshly-made human beings, “Subdue the earth, and have dominion over it” — this passage is one of the roots of the current ecological crisis. If it’s not the taproot, it’s definitely one of the big, main roots. Because this passage, my friends, has been interpreted over and over again as giving human beings license to “subdue” the non-human world by any means at all; it has been interpreted over and over again as giving human beings the right of dominion, or domination, over all other living beings and over the inanimate world, too. This passage from Genesis has been interpreted to mean we get to do whatever we want with the world, no matter what the consequences. I’d say this attitude towards the world lies at the root of our current ecological crisis; this attitude towards the world is why New Bedford harbor is a Superfund site, it’s why the Bald Eagle is an endangered species, it’s why Georges Bank fishing stock continues to be threatened.

It is my belief that one of the deepest roots of the current ecological crisis is, in fact, a matter of religion. A certain narrow interpretation of Genesis from our Western Christian tradition has legitimated actions that cause ecological problems. Obviously, as Rosemary Radford Ruether would say, we need to do some reinterpretation here. And we Unitarian Universalists are perfectly placed to do exactly that kind of reinterpretation: because we are a non-creedal faith, we’ve gotten pretty good at questioning and reinterpreting religion; and because we have our roots within the Western Christian tradition, we are perfectly placed to reinterpret this particular tradition.

So let’s see if we can do some reinterpretation of this passage from Genesis. In a twenty minute sermon, we’re not going to finish the task, not by any stretch of the imagination. But we can make a start at it, see what it feels like, and see if we want to go on and do more of this.

Back to the passage from Genesis. The first question that occurs to me is this: what does it mean, in a poetical-mythic-non-linear sense, when the God of the Israelites tells the first man and the first woman that they have “dominion” over other living beings?

First part of the answer: clearly human beings are somehow different from other living beings. We are told explicitly in this passage one way in which human beings are different from other living beings. God tells the human beings to “be fruitful and multiply,” but God has already said that to every winged bird and every creature that lives in the sea; so here again, the human beings are not unique. But then God says to the human beings that they will “fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion” over every other living being. Human beings are to be different from other living beings: they will fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over every other living being. This in fact tallies with our own observations of the world: we human beings certainly have been fruitful, we have multiplied, and we do indeed have dominion over other living beings. Right away, this passage is beginning to make a kind of poetical sense.

A second part of the answer seems to lie in the word “dominion.” For those of us who speak English, the word “dominion” has some specific connotations. Were these connotations part of the original Hebrew text? For the Western Christian tradition, it almost doesn’t matter one way or the other, because in the Western tradition we trace our understanding of the Bible back to Jerome’s translation of the Greek text into Latin, and his translation uses “dominamini” in this passage, to rule over, to govern, to be master of. No matter what the original sense was, we wind up understanding that God gives human beings dominion over other living beings in the sense of mastery, domination, non-democratic rule. And as we look at the place of human beings in the world today, we see that in fact is true; we have dominion over the rest of the world; we have dominated all other living beings to the point where we find it quite easy to drive them to extinction. And in the old interpretation of this passage, that’s fine and dandy — God put it there for us to do with what we want.

In our new interpretation of this passage, however, we like to point out a poetical, mythic truth that was ignored in the old passage. We like to point out that God does not say: use everything up, and destroy it too if you want. We like to point out that God does not say: all this used to be mine, but now I’m giving it to you humans to use any way you want. Nor does God say, now that you’re rulers over every other living thing, be sure to act like the worst kind of tyrant, torturing and abusing all those other living things.

In our new interpretation of this old passage, we readily admit that human beings have subdued other living things, and we do indeed have dominion over other living things; we’re pretty much rulers of this planet. But we also like to point out that we can be good rulers, or we can be bad rulers; we can be benevolent tyrants or we can be malicious dictators.

Then there’s the third part of our answer to the question: “when the God of the Israelites tells the first man and the first woman that they have “dominion” over other living beings?” For this third part of the answer, I’d like you to suspend your own personal beliefs about God for just a moment: if you don’t believe in God, forget about that for a moment; and if you do believe in God forget about whether you believe in the God of the book of Genesis or not. Remember that we are reinterpreting this influential passage from an influential book; and to reinterpret the mythic poetry of this book, we have to suspend whatever disbelief we might have. At this stage of reinterpretation, we have to take the book on its own terms. Once you’ve suspended whatever disbelief you might have, we’re ready to take the next step.

God gives the human beings in this story dominion over all other living beings, over the fish in the seas, the birds in the air, every growing thing on earth, and all the animals of the earth. God gives the human beings dominion over all other living beings, but God does not give total possession to the human beings. In other words, it is quite clear that God still owns all living beings Godself. I’m sure you see the logical conclusion of this. If we human beings cause some living being to go extinct, God is not going to be happy. God created that living being that we caused to go extinct. God looked at all those living beings at the end of one of those days of creation and said, “It is good.” What do you think is going to happen if you cause one of God’s creatures to go extinct? Trust me, it won’t be pretty. You read the rest of the Torah, and you’ll see what I mean. Remember what God did to Sodom and Gomorrah? When the God of the Israelites gets angry, you’re going to want to run and hide.

Good thing I’m a Universalist, because we Universalists believe in universal salvation, where everybody gets to go to heaven. What with all the extinctions going on right now, if I believed in God, but I didn’t believe in universal salvation, I’d be seriously worried about facing the consequences of God’s wrath. To quote the old bumper sticker: “God is coming, and boy is she teed off.”

So you see, we have begun to reinterpret that old passage from our Western religious tradition, just in the way Rosemary Radford Ruether said we could. We could go much further than this, too, and I’ll quickly sketch out one direction in which we could go much further.

One of the great things about the Christian tradition is that, at its core, it is specifically designed to resist and overcome domination; this in spite of the fact that Christianity got coopted by Roman imperialism, and became a tool of oppression. Most of what we dislike most about Christianity today has to do, not with the teachings of Jesus, but with the later appropriations of Christianity by imperialists.

Indeed, we find that over the centuries some Christians have used Christianity, not as a tool of domination, but as a way to understand that if you’re in power, if you in fact do have dominion over other beings, you had better understand how to use that dominion wisely. Jimmy Carter comes to mind as one such Christian leader, although perhaps he became better at this after he was President. Martin Luther King is a wonderful example of someone who gained power and influence, understood that he was a steward of that power, and used that power to effect good in the world.

We do have dominion over other living things, and we have started asking if we are using that dominion wisely. The Christian tradition places a moral and ethical burden on having dominion: we haven’t taken dominion by ourselves, bootstrapping ourselves into power; rather we are given dominion over other beings by God, and ultimately we are going to be answerable to God. Even if you personally don’t believe in God, you’re still within the Western tradition, and you can put the same concepts into different words: dominion is as a gift that has been given us as a result of the quirks and chances of evolution that happened to give us opposable thumbs and a big brain and great social skills including language; ultimately we are answerable to ourselves, and our children, as to how we use the dominion that chance has thrown in our way. We know that ultimately we are answerable for our actions — and that, my friends, lies at the root of our reinterpretation of the Christian tradition.

This kind of ecological theology, or ecotheology, is going on all around us. Many liberal Christians, like John Cobb and Wnedell Berry, are already doing ecological theology, and some evangelical Christians are also starting to do ecological theology. Then, too, many neo-pagans are doing ecological theology from yet another Western religious perspective. Our Unitarian Universalist congregations — this Unitarian Universalist congregation — should be at the center of the ecotheological movement. We are really good at reinterpreting old mythic texts. we have already done pagan/Christian dialogue, and we also know how to have productive theist/non-theist conversations. It fits into our commitment to social justice, because ecotheology has the potential to really change how people behave; and it also ties in to our historic commitments to feminism and anti-racism work.

I’m offering this as a possibility for you, for this congregation. I’d say we’re looking for a new theological direction, a new direction for this community. Ecotheology could be that new direction, it could be an important contribution this congregation makes to the greater New Bedford community, and to the wider world.

Ecotheology at the Pond

Published on November 7, 2005 in Ecotheology and Unitarian heritage. Closed

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2005 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The reading this morning comes from the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau:

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows….”

SERMON — “Ecotheology at the Pond”

The story of Henry David Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond has entered our common mythology. Even though not many people actually read the book Walden, probably most of us know the outlines of the story. I’ve begun to think that story is pointing us in the direction of a new theology, and ecological theology or eco-theology. The story as it’s written in the book goes something like this.

Henry Thoreau had grown frustrated by a society that drove the divinity out of human beings: it is bad enough to be a slave in the southern states, but, said Thoreau, it is “worst of all when you are the slavedriver of yourself.” Thoreau looked around and saw that his neighbors were enslaved by owning farms, and holding down jobs, and having to work, work, work without time for reflection, without time for oneself. So he decided to try an experiment: he would go off into the woods where he would build himself a little cabin, and grow some of his own food, and pick up work as a day laborer when he needed some cash. His experiment was designed to show that it was possible to live comfortably while working only a few hours a day, leaving plenty of time for reading, contemplation, and spiritual growth.

With that object in mind, Thoreau got permission to live on some land near Walden Pond. He borrowed an axe from a friend and set to work building himself a cabin, which appropriately enough he moved into on July 4th, Independence Day, thus celebrating his independence from the slavery his neighbors suffered under. He planted a couple of acres with beans and other vegetables (he was a vegetarian, so he didn’t need to keep any animals) and picked up the odd job here and there. But mostly, he was able to devote his time to long conversations with friends, reading and study, writing, and (most importantly) spending time in Nature.

And then at the end of two years, two months, and two days, Thoreau decided it was time once to again become what he ironically termed “a sojourner in civilized life.”

Using conventional theological terms, you could say that Walden is a book about salvation. But Thoreau does not offer a conventional salvation story of the kind we’re used to hearing in our culture. Thoreau isn’t saved by his belief, and he doesn’t have to make an altar call. No angels descend from some heaven to redeem him, nor is he saved by the influence of some other person. Instead, he is saved by profound encounters: he is saved by deep conversations, by reading and writing, and above all by transcendent encounters with Nature. I happen to think this unconventional salvation story has a lot to offer us as Unitarian Universalists, so I’d like to explore this a little further.

First and foremost, Thoreau’s story of salvation suggests to us Unitarian Universalists that we don’t need to work so hard. I suspect this is the hardest message for us to hear because we Unitarian Universalists like to take the weight of the world on our shoulders, thinking that we have to solve all the world’s problems by ourselves. We are obsessed with doing social justice work, to the point where we believe we are bad human beings if we are not working on at least five all-consuming issues. We are obsessed with social justice work sometimes to the point where our entire lives become consumed with social justice, where we have jobs doing social justice and where our leisure time is consumed with doing social justice and our families become laboratories for doing social justice work and where all our friendships are centered around social justice projects — or if we’re not living our lives that way, then we think we’re bad human beings. We judge each other by these high standards.

But in Walden, Thoreau challenges this notion of ours. If you read Walden carefully, you realize that Thoreau is in fact engaged in social justice work the whole time he lived at the pond. In the chapter titled “The Village,” Thoreau writes:

“One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house.”

In other words, Thoreau engaged in civil disobedience because of his opposition to governmental practices. Then in the chapter titled “Visitors,” Thoreau writes in his characteristic mix of levity and dead seriousness:

“Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say, ‘O Christian, will you send me back?’ One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the north star.”

In other words, Thoreau’s cabin functioned at least once as one of the stops on the Underground Railroad. We’re also pretty sure that he was involved in the Underground Railroad in other ways, beyond helping that one real runaway slave to freedom.

Thoreau was deeply involved in social justice work, but I feel his social justice work arose from his religious convictions, not the other way around. It’s tempting to believe that your duty to doing social justice work is more important than religious introspection and reflection. But I’ve seen what happens to a person who fills his or her whole life with such duty: his or her whole life fills up with social justice work and there is no more room for him or her; the self disappears leaving an empty husk enslaved to social justice work. It’s one thing to go to jail and lose your freedom because you know what you’re doing; it’s another thing to become enslaved to duty, to be a slave with the hounds baying on your track and you wishing for an Underground Railroad to save you from yourself. Equally troubled are the people who are enslaved by guilt, who think (rightly or wrongly) that they don’t do enough social justice work. Guilt can put you in chains stronger than any iron.

So it is that Thoreau warns us against enslaving ourselves, warns us against living lives of quiet desperation, and he gives his own story as one example of how we might escape from all kinds of such slavery.

Which brings us to something else Thoreau’s story of salvation offers us Unitarian Universalists. Once we clear some space in our lives by freeing ourselves from the quiet desperation of always having to do something, we have the time and the space to engage in deep conversations. Thoreau said that was one problem with his small cabin:

“One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words…. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head.”

That’s one of the blessings of our huge old building: we have the space for our big ideas to ricochet around a little bit before we hear them. And it’s not just this big old grand room, but the other rooms, too. I’m always glad when I go into Social Hour that the ceilings are so high and the rooms so broad, notwithstanding the fact that we can’t afford to heat them adequately this winter, because I feel the need for all that room; I love Social Hour best when I hear big thoughts uttered in big words, in those big old rooms.

Nor need we limit our conversation to each other. One of the most remarkable things about Thoreau’s Walden no longer seems so remarkable: he wrote the book just a few short years after the first English translations of such classic religious scriptures as the Bhagavad Gita, the Confucian Analects, and the Koran; and in those few short years, Thoreau had already started deep conversations with all those texts. We forget how radical he was, having a religious and spiritual conversation that went beyond the Bible, and the Greeks and Romans, to include all the great scriptures of the world. No wonder he needed so much space for his conversations.

That’s two reasons why we need lots of space in our own lives. It requires lots of space to have a real conversation with another human being; we can’t have those conversations in a cramped space, because our thoughts will just plough through each other’s heads. And it requires lots of space to have conversations with the wisdom of the ages, with the great religious scriptures of all ages and all cultures. Lacking both these kinds of conversations, we become less than human. Lacking these deep conversations, we become automatons who thoughtlessly carry out tasks with which we have enslaved ourselves.

Which brings us to yet something else Thoreau’s story of salvation suggests to us Unitarian Universalists. In traditional Western culture, we have two most important types of relationships. First, there’s the relationship we have with each other; second, there’s the relationship we have with God. (These two types of relationships apply to atheists, too, because for Western atheists it’s critically important to show that humanity has a null relationship with God because there is not God.) These two types of relationships are summed up by Jesus, a figure of central importance in Western culture, when he says that we only have to worry about two commandments: we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to love God with all our hearts and minds.

Thoreau adds a third type of relationship: the relationship of humanity to Nature, to the natural world; and he puts this third type of relationship at the center of his book. In Thoreau’s story of salvation, our relationship with Nature is a saving relationship. In our reading this morning, Thoreau almost anthropomorphizes the Natural world, making a pond seem like an eye:

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows….”

Yet Thoreau says it looks like an eye because in it we measure the depth of our own nature. So it is with any deep and abiding relationship: we become more human and more who we are through that relationship. To say this is to link our personal salvation with the salvation of Nature. With the Arctic ice cap melting and rain forest disappearing and species after species of animal slipping into extinction, we’re not just talking about some kind of abstract salvation, we’re talking about literally saving endangered species and whole ecosystems — we’re talking about literally saving ourselves.

The dominant theology in our Western culture is quite explicit: we human beings have dominion over the natural world, and we are told by God to go out and subdue that natural world. But Thoreau says we don’t have to dominate Nature in this way; instead, we relate to Nature as a source of wisdom, as a place for healing and reflection.

I am captivated by Thoreau’s story of Walden. He lives by a pond for two years. There he finds that a satisfying life does not require him to work constantly. There he finds that a life where he’s not constantly working allows him time for deep conversations with other people, and with the wisdom of the ages. There he finds that instead of having to fight against the natural world and subdue it, we can live in Nature, that we can as it were engage in deep conversations with Nature.

At the end of the book, Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and goes back to take up his life in Concord village. He ends the book by saying, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” The end of the book is but the beginning.

I started off this sermon by saying that Henry Thoreau had grown frustrated by a society that drove the divinity out of human beings. I, too, have grown frustrated with a societey that drives the divinity out of us human beings. Our society drives the divinity out of us by keeping us constantly busy, and constantly working. Even when we retire, we are expected to keep busy by immersing ourselves in innumerable projects. This constant busy-ness distracts us from our true natures, from our true humanity; we enslave ourselves with our busy-ness; and the result is that we constantly complain that we have no time. We don’t have any time, enslaved as we are, because our time does not belong to us any more.

Because we have no time, we can no longer take the time to engage in deep conversations. Nor do we have time to cultivate three kinds of relationships: relationships with each other, relationships with whatever it is that is divine in this world, and relationships with Nature. When we don’t cultivate these relationships, we become less than human; we are lost, not saved.

In order to reclaim our humanity, eco-theology calls on us to save ourselves, to liberate ourselves from being slaves to busy-ness. If we lose our basic humanity, we will continue to be enslaved; and we will continue to enslave other people because we can no longer know their basic humanity; we will either lose our connection with the divine or become enslaved by a warped notion of divinity; and we will continue to enslave and exploit Nature.

Thoreau offers us just the beginnings of an ecological theology, just a glimmer, as when the first light of the sun begins to light up the sky behind the morning star. A hundred and fifty years after he wrote his book, we can still glimpse that beginning; we haven’t done much more than glimpse that beginning; and while we have managed to end the legalized slavery of African Americans, we still are far from liberation.

A path of ecological theology seems to open before us. It appears to be a path of liberation. I believe ecological theology may help us understand better the links between the destruction caused by racism, and the destruction caused by exploiting Nature, and the destruction of our very souls by dehumanization. I believe this kind of theological exploration will be the most important conversation we have together as Unitarian Universalists — but there’s still a lot of exploring to do. You can be a part of this exploration — all you have to do to start is to clear a little time in your life to call your own, time when you can come here and be a part of this conversation.