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April 2002 Sermons
April 21, 2002 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanApril 21, 2002No Sewage in My Water, Please: Earth Day WishesYou see here a bottle that to all intents and purposes appears to be empty, but this is the absolutely the latest thing in Personal Health Accessories. You say, "No Way!"--but hold that thought. Keep in mind that our air is be regularly polluted with emissions from coal, oil, heavy metals, poisons such as sulphuric acid—most commonly associated with acid rain that has done so much damage to northeastern forests—and a veritable plethora of chemicals, not the least of which may be found at a number of massive area chemical concerns not twenty miles from where we sit today. You just never know, on any given day, how pure your air actually is, and that is the reason I have decided to start marketing Nancy’s O Cool Clean Air, my own brand of pure air, as is contained in this beautiful blue bottle (blue to symbolize the once deep blue unpolluted skies of our earth). You will be so happy to be confident that you have your own ready supply of O, when a cloud of unsightly pollution drifts over your neighborhood. At $5 a liter, it would be cheap, but I’m selling Nancy’s O, for just $1.89 for this special offer. See me after the service. If you find this all a fantasy story, that anyone could bottle and sell what is free for everyone, then I challenge you to think back just twenty years. Prior to the 1980s, or in the 1960s, when I was a young person, if anyone would have told the story above, but made the product H20, I would have said they were crazy. But today the shelves of every super market, convenience story, and even in machines that dispense nothing but water, the ordinary free stuff of my youth has become a billion dollar business. The question is: Why did that happen? Back in 1970, the organizers of the original Earth Day in 1970, Gaylord Nelson and Denis Hayes, started what seemed pie-in-the-sky activism to draw attention to the serious problem of pollution that was threatening not only many species of plant and animal life, but our own human life as well. Next year Earth Day will be 30 years old, and is only growing in importance around the this country and the world. The Earth Day Network has this year designated 2002 the Year of Clean Water. The fact is, we buy bottled water because too much of even our nation’s city- treated water is not as pure and clean as we want. So, what does that say about the sources for that town and city water, the streams, rivers, lakes, and aquifers in this land? My friends we have a problem, but it is still not truly coming home to us precisely because we can go to our area markets and buy clean water; at least most of what we buy has been treated; but some of this pricey bottled water comes right from a city tap. In another thirty years we may find ourselves buying clean air in just the same way that we are today spending hard-earned money on what was free all my childhood growing years where I grew up in the country. The payments for water in towns were primarily to pump it, of course purify and fluoridate, but the original sources were mostly free and clean. No more. No longer would I consider eating a fish from just any stream in the northeast, or dip my hand in a little stream for drink as I did when I was a child camping in the Rockies. How long will it be before our water is many times more costly, and we are buying bottled air as well? It is far from impossible. Today, our own Jim Steffens, until recently President of the Delaware chapter of the Sierra Club, a PhD scientist with Shell Oil and Dupont, and world traveler, I might add (Some of you were here to see the slides of a trip Jim and Esther took to Patagonia) will answer some questions I intend to pose concerning our area water supplies, its problems with purity, and what we can do to help insure our water is clean. For those who read the Grist, our monthly newsletter, you know that I stated in the blurb for today’s service the observation once made that if you put a tablespoon of water (or wine) in a barrel of sewage, you still have sewage, but if you put a tablespoon of sewage in a barrel of water or wine, you also have sewage. A kind of reverse, or anti-miracle, version of the Jesus miracle of turning water into wine. Here are some questions I pose for Jim. I hope you will be thinking of some questions you have for him, too. 1 – What is in this statement (about this water and sewage ratio) that gives us cause for concern about the safety of our water supply? 2 – How are we to know if our water is polluted? 3- What are some of he greatest water polluting agents? 4 – What can we do to be activists in protecting this vital resource? [Unfortunately, the tape did not pick up Jim’s comments, so I cannot include them here. For local information, contact your water company, the DE Extension Office, and <www.EarthDay.net>] If you read our Principles, always found on the back of your Order of Service, you will see that the 7th Principle states that we Unitarian Universalists affirm and promote "respect for the interdependent web of which we are but a part." Which is a very compact, even poetic, way of saying that we agree with this principle; and, further, encourage its promotion in practice in our spiritual focus as we live our daily lives. Caring for our souls, or spirits, or minds cannot be done without caring for the world that nurtures us, feeds us, for we are truly dependent upon this earth, upon all the natural resources. What we do, or fail to do, will impact our lives and many generations that come after us, just as we are now buy bottled water because of the last 50-75 years of polluting that is our legacy. With that in mind, I ask you to read with me the declaration you find on your chair today, as a reminder of the work we have to do as citizens of the world who act with love and caring—the highest of spiritual acts—for our children, and our brothers and sisters in the world. Earth Day Declaration: Declaration One: Recognizing that the Earth and the fullness thereof is a gift, and that we are called to cherish, nurture and provide loving stewardship for the Earth’s resources, and recognizing that life itself is a gift, and a call to responsibility, joy and celebration: All: We declare ourselves to be world citizens.
(adapted from Church of Brethren handbook)
April 28, 2002 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanApril 28, 2002Recognizing Our True Nature: Spirituality in the WorldLenny Bruce once commented: “Every day people are straying away from the church, and going back to God.” As is most often the case, humorists like Lenny Bruce, tell the truth in more palatable ways for the ordinary of us. It has been said that humor is the front side of tragedy, and I am inclined to agree with that, for as with this statement which was probably said in the late 50s or early 60s, it was a changing time for us in this land. Great prosperity, full employment in most sectors, peace after a brutal war, and a whole generation of newly educated men and women as a result of the GI Bill, followed soon by yet another generation who had grown up with this prosperity and peace. Perhaps it was the unfortunate, even foolish, nature of the Vietnam conflict, though usually it is a whole set of ideas, thoughts, behaviors in confluence, but for whatever the reasons, lots of men and women were starting to challenge the status quo in government, education, and most certainly in religion. People began to leave mainstream religions in record numbers in American religious history. Looking for something less establishment- and more heart-oriented. These changes always, have always down through human history, produced the physics principle of an equal and opposite reaction. As I mentioned, the sorts of confluence that came together during the 1960s with love not war attitudes, the so-called Jesus freaks (Jesus Christ Superstar comes to mind), peace marches, sit-ins, love-ins, all that seems to mark that period of social and spiritual unrest in the country, certainly had roots, in the real sense of a wide network not seen, in words of Lenny Bruce, and well before him, Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a reminder for those not immersed in Unitarian history, Emerson was ordained and served as a Unitarian minister in Boston, his father was the minister of the First Parish Church in Concord, MA; a Unitarian, too. The big difference between Emerson the younger and his father, was not unlike the differences between my generation and our parents. Sometimes, though, change is more radical, and leaves a deeper mark on the society; yet, it is happening in one way or another all the time, from generation to generation. Right now in the world around us—but, let’s stop right there. I ask you: What is the world around you? As you go from place to place in the normal course of your days, what is your world view? Who are you thinking about? This one might be a trick question: Who is the center of your world? The correct answer: Me/ myself/ I. That each of us is the center of our world is only logical. Everything that we do, everything that comes from us, be it good, indifferent, or bad, comes from our very own selves. So, it is only as it should be that we see the world through, as it were, specialized lenses. I can do no other that see the world through my Nancy Dean eyes, from my Nancy Dean spiritual center. How else could it be? The issue is not that you and I start from a world view that places each of us at the center; but, rather, that we enlarge our center enough to see that there are others out there, too. That is not so hard to do with spouses, children, parents, dear friends, dear pets. The hard part comes in including those from whom we do not receive immediate love, support, amity, or just plain good-vibes. Like caring even a little about the east African, Somali War Lords. Now, I agree, that is a stretch, even for the noblest among us. For instance, what circumstances have led to the poverty, strife, hatred between groups of people in a land that is so desolate, if most of were dropped down in the middle of Mogadishu, we would be about as frightened and helpless as if we were dropped on a distant planet. The simple fact, from my point of view, is if we do not spend some time, even if it is only on Sunday morning, considering our nature, our own spiritual center of the world, then we have much less hope of seeing and maybe spreading the healing gift of spirituality in the world. Last week I made a late Saturday night change in my sermon topic from talking about one of our great Unitarian leaders, indeed a great national leader, the Rev. William Ellery Channing, to speak about the sadness and anger in my heart about the terrible conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinian people on the West Bank. The only way I can hope to even develop an opinion that is meaningful at all, is if I first think about my center of the world, in relation to the center of the world for those people. This is true for any people that I might seek to know or understand. Such an effort does not imply that we will agree, or necessarily be compassionate, but at least it brings to the front and center what tends to be the problem in the first place: Self-centeredness. My assertion is not intended to be a paradox or a conundrum, but I do believe wholeheartedly that before we can become intellectually or compassionately centered in the larger world, the whole world, we have to acknowledge, examine, and honor our self-centered nature. Which means--and this is the part that gets really scary for most people, most of us—that we will only be able to grow in our spirits when we can see the narrowness of our beliefs, how they serve us, and how they exclude others. Emerson left the ministry to practice what had become far more important to him, which was the truth of his spirit, his soul, that the church of his day could not contain. One hundred and fifty years ago, even Unitarian churches, though liberal in that time, was still a church not quite up to stepping out of the surface traditions of the Christian religion. Religion as an institution was Emerson’s problem, for he felt that the religion of his time was too constricting, too limiting to permit the whole world of the spirit that he saw. Keep in mind, Massachusetts in the early 19th Century, was still highly influenced by its Puritan past: staid, formal, frugal--even in its spirituality. Speaking of the Puritans, H.L. Mencken, a crusty, often caustic, newspaper editor whose fame was wide-spread during the first half of the 20th Century, was often heard to make fun of religions of any sort, mocking behaviors he saw as hypocritical, and repetitive from one to another in their desire for absolute power over what was the capital T, Truth. He was especially hard on the Puritans, many of whom had been cast out of the Church of England, then some of that group, our famous Pilgrims, migrated to America, where they endured many hardships and took a narrow, self-righteous view of life. This Puritanism, which he saw alive and well in the backbone of the country and in American leadership, seemed to rankle more than most, such that it caused Mencken to define Puritanism as “the lurking, lingering fear that somewhere, someone may be happy.” Emerson believed that all we needed to know of God was to be found in the world around us, especially in nature; and, that all we needed to know of the spirit came from honoring our spirits more than we honor institutions. He talked of the “universal decay and now almost death of faith in society. The soul is not preached.” He called this lack of the soul or spirit in the churches, as in the hearts of human beings, “the famine” of religious institutions. It seems a kind of chicken-egg debate: is it the famine of religious institutions that leads to the famine of the human soul, or vice-versa? This past Wednesday, I talked with a group of ten young parents in a class I called, “Positive Parenting: Raising the Spirit of Your Child.” I brought to this discussion the basic principles of the Unitarian religious educator, Sophia Lyon Fahs, from whose work came the reading this morning. Fahs, a national treasure in the realm of the Sunday School movement in this country, which came to its fullness by the middle of the 20th century, said: “It matters what we believe.” And: “That is matters how we gain our beliefs.” This is to place emphasis on the problem that Fahs could still see, that Emerson was decrying a hundred years before, which is that “most people now equate ‘being religious’ with ‘believing’.” The problem being that if you do not accept a proscribed set of beliefs (that is, a doctrine), you have a harder time with being accepted. Or as she said, such acceptance “has been made the condition of membership in most religious societies . . .” It is no accident that it was about the time of her book, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage, published in 1952, that the word God was placed into the Pledge of Allegiance. This was in the post-WWII era of President Eisenhower, of the Cold War, McCarthyism, the nuclear threat. As has been shown repeatedly down through history, the greater the sense of threat a people feel, the more they cling to beliefs, often superstitiously, in the hopes that this believing, or some recitation of beliefs, will be a talisman, a protection against the evils from without. All of this is exemplified in the behaviors and actions of the people we label fundamentalists, and clearly among terrorists. The classic good vs evil conflict, becomes the equally classic believers vs unbelievers. A group mentality that both fails to honor the larger world and the world of the self. It does matter what we believe, but it matters just as much how we gain those beliefs. If any institution, be it religious, government, or some other place where believing means following a set of proscribed beliefs, then I suggest caution. What does the institution (even our own here at UUSMC) gain from our meekly following? What do we gain, and what do we lose? With Emerson and many others, I feel strongly that we must weigh the beliefs that are handed to us against our own moral authority. Each of you, all of us, have the ability, the right, the very great need to pay attention to our own moral authority, or spirit, or gut instinct, if you will. What leads you or me to think that a president, minister, pope, boss, has a greater gift for knowing what is right or wrong than we do? One of most insightful of the modern philosophers we call comedians, is George Carlin, who once said: “I have as much authority as the pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.” He is absolutely right. He does have just as much authority when it comes to matters we call religious or spiritual. And so do you. Carl Sagan observed: "It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English--up to fifty words used in correct context--no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese." Sagan was pointedly saying that humans are self-centered. I am also reminded of one of the Star Trek movies, all my family are Star Trek fans; anyway, one of the movies is based on a threat (a horrible sonic impulse that could blow the world apart) from outer space that the crew has to “seek out” and find a way to stop. After much frustration, trying all kinds of solutions that do not work, and coming close to giving up, Spock (the ultra-rational alien in the crew) figures out that the sound is really an Intelligence from another planet talking Not to humans, but to whales. Science fiction writers also have a way of pointing out our innate self-centeredness as a species. A self-centeredness that gets us into trouble on Earth, and undoubtedly would get us into trouble with any so-called alien beings from another world. Our innate self-centeredness as a species is reflected not to us as individuals, but from us. And the only way that we reverse this pattern comes from us moving outward, not the other way around. For whatever reason, I suppose simply that it comes from our culture, the way we are raised, but for whatever reason, most people, including myself, often accept that when someone in a position of authority (note the emphasis on the world position) says this or that is right, all too often we accept it. And, further, if anyone questions the “authority figure,” that questioning person is likely to be called a traitor, unfaithful, unreliable, or simply told he or she doesn’t have “team spirit.” Maybe we like to be led, at least some of the time, but I say to you: You must lead. Lead your own life in a way that you recognize the truth of your own moral authority. Help in leading the life of you family. When you and I start to recognize our own, very real, very powerful spiritual nature, then we can begin to truly make the world a better place. From Sophia Fahs: Can our religious beliefs continue to be of vital concern to us while at the same time we try to cultivate tolerance of opposing beliefs and appreciation of a variety of points of view? Can it matter to the individual which beliefs he holds, while at the same time he feels no concern for what his neighbors and friends believe? A refusal to delve beneath or behind activities and deeds in order to recognize the ideas, the thinking, the beliefs that motivate those activities surely is superficial. How can worth-while doing and living come without worth-while thinking and believing? As Unitarian Universalists, we value, as our first principle states quite clearly, the worth and dignity of every person. That is, if we practice it, our starting point. We begin with the belief that all people are capable of being good and decent, but that this does not happen if we are not free to examine our hearts/minds against the hearts/minds of others. For it matters what we believe and it matters how we gain our beliefs, and it matters what we do with what we believe. So be it. |
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