Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: ecotheology

  • Kingdom of Heaven, Interdependent Web

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    This reading is from a small book titled Unfoldings, lectures by Bernard Loomer.

    “The Synoptic Gospels [that is, the Bible books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke] should be the possession of the Unitarian Universalists as much as any other group. What I perceive may be “old-hat” to Biblical scholars, but if so, they have failed to make it clear to us peasants….

    “In the Synoptic [Gospels] we have the situation of a man born out of [or] within a covenantal tradition, a tradition in which the laws and statues of God were important. This God was the god of the people who were to follow these laws, and they were to be his people. This is the tradition out of which Jesus came, and out of this tradition arose the historical notion of the Messiah — the one who was to redeem Israel.

    “Jesus has been accorded many titles. He has been called Savior, Leader, Shepherd, Counselor, son of god, Messiah. But his intellectual gifts have not been recognized (even when the term “intellectual” has been more carefully defined). It was he who discovered what he called the “Kingdom of God” — what I call the Web of Life — surely one of the great intellectual and religious ideas of the Western world.

    “As I define it, the web is the world conceived of as an indefinitely extended complex of interrelated, inter-dependent events or units of reality. This includes the human and non-human, the organic and inorganic levels of existence.

    “Jesus discovered the reality of the Web. He began his public ministry by announcing its presence and its fuller exemplification [which he called], the “coming kingdom.”…

    “…In the Synoptic [Gospels], Jesus is not the central reality. The Kingdom is the central reality. He describes this reality, but the Kingdom does not exist for his sake. He serves the Kingdom and draws his power from it. The Kingdom was not created because Jesus was of supernatural origin. The Kingdom was never created. The discovery was that the Kingdom is a given of life itself. It was not created by Jesus. It was not created at all. It is simply inherent in life itself.”

    Sermon

    According to the retailers, Christmas started right after Hallowe’en. According to the traditional Christian calendar, the Advent season, the lead-up to Christmas, began last Sunday. However you figure it, the Christmas season is full upon us. You can’t walk into a store at this time of year without hearing sugary-sweet renditions of various Christmas songs, you can’t drive down the street without being assaulted by over-the-top Christmas decorations, you can’t listen to the radio without hearing Christmas songs written and performed by fading rock stars.

    I realize that I’m letting my cynicism show through. I admit it, I’m a Scrooge. I’ll spend the next few weeks going around saying, “Bah! Humbug! Christmas humbug!” every chance I get. I know that there are plenty of people, probably many of you in this room, who love Christmas — who love the songs, who love the over-the-top decorations, who love to shop — and if you love Christmas, well then (as my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother used to say), bless your heart. We all get our joy in different ways at this time of year — some people like to shop, some people like to wear reindeer antlers on their head, and people like me enjoy saying, “Bah! Humbug!”

    Yet all of us, the whole range of people from Scrooges and Grinches, all the way to Santas and Christmas elves — all of us usually stop at some point in the frenetic Christmas season and say something like this: “But you know, it’s important to remember that Christmas is really about the birth of Jesus.” I do that about once a week — for example, I’ll see some particularly egregious Christmas display in a store window, and I’ll stop and say to myself, “But you know, Christmas isn’t about consumerism, it’s really about the birth of Jesus.” That’s about as far as I get before I burst out with “Bah! Humbug!” and all thoughts of Jesus leave my brain. If you are a lover of Christmas, perhaps it happens to you when you’re singing along with the car radio, “Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane,” and you’ll pause in your singing and think, “But you know, this isn’t about Santa Claus, it’s really about the birth of Jesus” — and then the chorus will come around again, and you’ll start singing, and all thoughts of Jesus leave your brain.

    When I do actually find the time to think about Jesus during the Christmas season, about all I think about is that well-worn, familiar story that we tell about the birth-night of Jesus: you know the story, with angels and shepherds and the three wise men, and the stable with the animals who can talk and mean old King Herod and the star that shone above Bethelehem. None of which actually has anything to do with Jesus, when you come right down to it, and much of which isn’t even in the Bible. Baby gets born, miraculous things happen — these are myths about Jesus, but they really don’t say much about who Jesus actually was. I guess if you’re a traditional Christian, at Christmas time you can think about how Jesus was the son of God, but as a Unitarian that has very little emotional resonance with me. Even then, I’ll bet most traditional Christians are like me and spend very little actual time thinking about Jesus.

    So this year, I wanted to take one Sunday during the Christmas season when I didn’t talk about the usual Christmas story, and when I didn’t just completely ignore Christmas. I wanted to take one Sunday this year to talk about the really amazing accomplishments of the adult Jesus.

    I’ve decided that what really impresses me about Jesus of Nazareth is not his spiritual accomplishments, admirable as those might be; not his concern for the poor and marginalized people of the world, as much as I find that worthy of emulating; definitely not the myths about being a son of God nor the myths about supposed miracles nor the story of his miraculous birth. These are all wonderful stories, but I’ve decided that what really impresses me is Jesus’s intellectual accomplishments.

    1. The first time I seriously considered Jesus’s intellectual accomplishments was when I read a short lecture titled “The Synoptic Gospels” by Dr. Bernard Loomer; and we heard an excerpt from that lecture in the second reading this morning. Bernard Loomer was a professor of theology at the University of Chicago, and later professor of theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. While he lived in California he started attending the Unitarian Universalist church in Berkeley, under the influence of his second wife, and shortly he was invited to give a series of informal talks to members of the Berkeley church; the second reading this morning is an excerpt from one of those informal talks.

    In this lecture, Bernard Loomer tells us that “It was [Jesus] who discovered what he called the ‘Kingdom of God’ — what I call the Web of Life — [and this is] surely one of the great intellectual and religious ideas of the Western world.” Loomer tells us that once you understand Jesus’s concept of the Web of Life, you will be transformed by a realization of how everything is interconnected — humans are interconnected with humans, with other life forms, even with the rocks and soil — and as you understand more and more about the Web of Life, as you trace out all these interrelationships and connections, you will continue to be transformed.

    Furthermore, in another one of these informal talks, Loomer tells us that to understand the Web of Life in this way forces us to think about morality and ethics in new ways. Loomer says, “Holding the notion of the Web that I do, I do believe that what I do makes a difference…. Once I have done something, there is a sense in which that act becomes public property….” So you see, understanding the Web of Life isn’t some dry, meaningless intellectual activity — understanding the Web of Life doesn’t just change the way you understand the world, it changes the way you live your life.

    When Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, he was talking about the Web of Life. Forget what the orthodox Christians and the fundamentalists tell you about the kingdom of God — they have missed the main point. The Kingdom of God isn’t some place you go to after you die — it is a state of being that is available to you here and now. The Kingdom of God is the Web of relationships that requires you to understand how you are linked to a Web of existence that includes all other people and all other beings; the Kingdom of God is a way of understanding that what you do with your life matters a great deal.

    2. Once we start to take Jesus seriously as a great thinker, once we peel away layer upon layer of ritual and creed and dogma and orthodoxy with which the church has plastered Jesus for hundreds of years — once we consider Jesus as a great thinker, suddenly some of the things he says begin to make more sense. Like the parables of Jesus, those short, pithy stories that he told to his followers — some of those parables of Jesus don’t seem to make much sense when you first hear them. Oh, you know what you’re supposed to believe they mean, because the traditional Christian churches have told us what we’re supposed to believe — but often the things the churches tell us don’t make sense. Take, for example, this misinterpreted parable:

    Jesus told this story. He said: “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in the shade.” [Mt. 13.31-32] Now I don’t know much about traditional orthodox Christian interpretations of the Bible, but I think most churches interpret this parable to mean something like this: have faith in God, believe in God, and your faith will grow, and you’ll get to go to heaven after you die — or something like that. To my way of thinking, that’s a narrow and even wrong-headed interpretation of this parable.

    Bernard Loomer tells use that the Kingdom of God means the same thing as Web of Life, and with that in mind let’s reconsider this old familiar parable. This parable is not about what happens after you die, this is a parable that uses a vivid and convincing image to tell us what is happening all around us in the world. When you plant a seed — and I mean literally plant a literal seed in actual dirt — a plant will grow from that seed, and that plant will be a heck of a lot bigger than the original seed. And when a plant grows, it does not grow in isolation from other living beings — when a person plants a seed, the plant grows out of the soil under the influence of sun and heat and rain, and other living beings live in and under and around that plant; and all these things are connected in the Web of Life — the human being who plants, the seed which grows, the soil and sun and rain, the birds which nest, all these interrelationships are revealed in the simple act of planting a seed. Which brings us to the moral or ethical point: someone sows a seed; some human being takes action; and like every human action, this act of sowing the seed has effects that ripple throughout the entire Web of Life. This is the Kingdom of God, according to Jesus — the complex interrelationships that connect us with all other human beings and all other living beings and all non-living things. This is why harming the ecosystem is evil. All this is revealed in a simple parable about a mustard seed.

    This is a different way of thinking about Jesus, isn’t it? Jesus was more than some guy wandering around in the desert dressed in a bathrobe, getting born in a stable with frankincense and myrrh, and growing up to perform supernatural miracles. Jesus was a profound religious and ethical and moral thinker. And when you start to consider Jesus as a powerful religious thinker, even some of the so-called miracles begin to make sense. Take, for example, the story of the feeding of five thousand [Mk. 6.32-44]:

    3. Jesus and his disciples are trying to get away from the crowds that follow him everywhere, so they take a boat and go out to this lonely place, far from any village. But the people figure out where they’re going, and by the time Jesus and his friends land, there are five thousand people waiting for him. So Jesus starts to teach them, and this goes on for hours. By now, it’s getting late, and the followers of Jesus pull him aside and say, Hey, send these people away to all the nearby villages to get some food. Jesus replies, No, you get them something to eat. His followers say, What, you want us to take a thousand bucks and go buy some bread and bring it back to them? No no, says Jesus, how many loaves of bread we got right here? His followers say, We got five loaves of bread, and a couple fried fish.

    So Jesus tells everyone to sit down on the grass, and all five thousand people sit down. Being a good Jew, Jesus blesses the bread, using the traditional Jewish blessing: Blessed are you, O Holy One, Creator of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth. Then, so everyone can see, Jesus breaks the bread, and cuts up the fish, to be handed around. Miracle of miracles, there’s plenty of food to go around, and indeed there’s twelve baskets full of food left over when everyone has eaten enough.

    Traditional Christians believe that Jesus did something magical to the bread so that it somehow multiplies. If you want to believe that old traditional interpretation, feel free to do so. But instead of some supernatural miracle, I believe what happened was an even bigger miracle, and it went like this:

    Jesus had spent the whole day teaching people about the Kingdom of God (what we call the Web of Life), teaching them about how every person and every thing is interrelated. And while he’s teaching them, he’s looking out at the crowd, and he sees that some of the people have brought food with them, and they’re surreptitiously nibbling away on their food, ignoring the fact that many other people have no food at all. Jesus also knows that his followers brought along five loaves of bread and two fried fish, enough food for the thirteen of them, as long as they don’t have to share it with anyone. So what does Jesus do? He gets all five thousand people to sit down, and he says to them: OK, now we’re gonna eat — here, we got five loaves bread and two fish; being a good Jew I’m going to bless them, then I’m gonna break them up and share them with all five thousand of you — and you know what? if you’ve been listening to what I’ve been saying all day, we’ll have plenty of food for everyone here.

    As Jesus says this, I’ll bet you could see the truth dawning in people’s eyes. They had been listening to Jesus teach about the Kingdom of God, and now he’s telling them to follow what he taught. So everyone who has food shares it around; the followers of Jesus help distribute everything. In the end, everyone has enough to eat, every single person there, with plenty of food left over.

    As I say, if you want to believe in some supernatural miracle, please do so. To me, that’s a good way to let yourself off the hook — if some all-powerful daddy God is going to solve all your problems, then you don’t have to take personal responsibility. I believe Jesus is teaching us to take personal responsibility for all our relationships within the Web of Life.

    And in fact, the early Christian church lived out this kind of teaching. You all know about the Christian ritual of communion, right? If you go to a Catholic church and take communion, it’s all symbolic, right? — I’ve never done it, but I’m told you get a little wafer of bread, and it’s all a symbol. Same thing in most Protestant Christian churches — you get a sip of wine or maybe grape juice, and a little crumb of bread, and it’s all a symbol. But in the early Christian church, records show that communion was a real meal — they talk about bringing olives and cheese and bread and wine and lots of other good things to eat. It was a symbolic meal, but it was also a real meal, because some of those early Christians didn’t get enough to eat all week, and they really needed that big meal on Sunday that was communion. So it was that those early Christians truly lived out the teachings of Jesus — they truly lived out their understanding of the Web of Life by sharing their food with each other.

    Our church is definitely not a traditional Christian church. We stopped doing traditional Christian communion more than a century ago. Yet if you want to see a Jesus-type social-justice-oriented communion, come to our social hour after the worship service. Maybe we don’t have communion, but if you come to social hour after church you will discover that someone has made soup, and you can get a hot meal after church. And on some Sundays, we’ll have pizza of some other food out for a nominal cost, but if you don’t have any money, we don’t mind if you take some anyway. (We do ask people to come to the worship service first, to be a part of the religious community.) In other words, we live out the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand right here in our church. This is why I don’t need a supernatural explanation for that story of feeding the five thousand, because I’ve actually seen with my own two eyes how a community of people can share food among themselves, and have plenty to go around. By the way, any time you want to bring food to church, you can sign up to make soup, or just bring some good food to share.

    I should add one last thing about the story of feeding the five thousand: if you really think about, which is harder to believe:– the supernatural explanation, that God made food appear? — or the other explanation, that if you give them a chance, people will be amazingly generous? Contemporary American society would rather believe the supernatural explanation than believe that we are all are capable of being amazingly generous. No wonder the traditional Christian churches emphasize supernatural miracles. But I’d rather believe people are capable of amazing generosity. And the funny thing is that each year at Christmas time, it seems to me that I see acts of generosity that equal to the story of the feeding of the five thousand. So maybe we do live out the teachings of Jesus at Christmas time, even if we don’t think much about it.

    I started out by saying that each Christmas season, most of us try to stop and remember that Christmas is actually about Jesus. Now we’ve taken our obligatory time to reflect on Jesus. We’ve done it a little differently this year: we have taken the time to think about Jesus as a great intellectual leader, someone who discovered what he called the Kingdom of God, which we may prefer to call the Web of Life.

    Now you’ve spent your time reflecting on Jesus. Now you can go out an indulge yourself in however you like to celebrate this holiday — shopping, decorations, saying “Bah humbug,” giving gifts, being generous to charities — whatever it is you do. And don’t forget to indulge yourself in the constantly growing knowledge that you, too, are an essential part of the whole Web of Life, that you are essentially connected with all that is.

  • God in Nature

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. 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 a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, titled “Blight.”

    Give me truths,
    For I am weary of the surfaces,
    And die of inanition. If I knew
    Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
    Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain, and pimpernel,
    Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
    Milkweeds, and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,
    And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
    Draw untold juices from the common earth,
    Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
    Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
    By sweet affinities to human flesh,
    Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,–
    O that were much, and I could be a part
    Of the round day, related to the sun,
    And planted world, and full executor
    Of their imperfect functions.
    But these young scholars who invade our hills,
    Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
    And travelling often in the cut he makes,
    Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
    And all their botany is Latin names.
    The old men studied magic in the flower,
    And human fortunes in astronomy,
    And an omnipotence in chemistry,
    Preferring things to names, for these were men,
    Were unitarians of the united world,
    And wheresoever their clear eyebeams fell,
    They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
    Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
    And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
    And strangers to the plant and to the mine;
    The injured elements say, Not in us;
    And night and day, ocean and continent,
    Fire, plant, and mineral say, Not in us,
    And haughtily return us stare for stare.
    For we invade them impiously for gain,
    We devastate them unreligiously,
    And coldly ask their pottage, not their love,
    Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
    Only what to our griping toil is due;
    But the sweet affluence of love and song,
    The rich results of the divine consents
    Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
    The nectar and ambrosia are withheld;
    And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
    And pirates of the universe, shut out
    Daily to a more thin and outward rind,
    Turn pale and starve….

    The second reading this morning is by Bernard Loomer, Bernard, from his essay “The Size of God” [in The Size of God: The Theology of Bernard Loomer in Context, ed. by William Dean and Larry Axel. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press]:

    “In our traditions the term ‘God’ is the symbol of ultimate values and meanings in all of their dimensions. It connotes an absolute claim on our loyalty. It points the direction of a greatness of fulfillment. It signifies a richness of resources for the living of life at its depths. It suggests the enshrinement of our common and ecological life. It proclaims an adequate object of worship. It symbolizes a transcendent and inexhaustible meaning that forever eludes our grasp. The world is God because it is the source and preserver of meaning; because the creative advance of the world in its adventure is the supreme cause to be served; because even in our desecration of our space and time within it, the world is holy ground; and because it contains and yet enshrouds the ultimate mystery inherent within existence itself” (Loomer 1987, 42)

    SERMON — “God in Nature”

    In case you’re wondering, I’m not going to preach about Christmas this week. It’s only NOvember, and still too early to preach about Christmas. Instead, this sermon is the third in a series of sermons on Unitarian Universalist views on God.

    I’ve been thinking about the current hullabaloo raised by Richard Dawkins’s latest book, The God Delusion. Dawkins, as you probably know, is an evolutionary biologist; he is also an atheist who delights in pointing out the ridiculousness of believing in God; and as a result he has been getting lots of coverage in the popular press. I have to admit, I don’t even plan to read his book. Tending towards cynicism as I do, it’s hard for me to take Dawkins seriously, because it’s clear that the more he fulminates against established religion, the more books he will sell. In today’s world, iconoclasm can be very profitable.

    Come to think of it, maybe I should read Dawkins’s book, and learn how to write my own bestselling book in which I trash-talk religion from a minister’s point of view.

    On the other hand, while the media has been giving Dawkins lots of coverage, but they have not been covering how theological scholars are responding to Dawkins’s book; popular culture doesn’t want to hear experts on religion talk about religion. The theologians are politely saying that Dawkins’s book simply displays his ignorance of theology: that the God Dawkins describes is not a God that any theologian would take seriously either. They are also saying Dawkins should know better: in order to write seriously about a subject you should read up on the subject first, and Dawkins clearly knows nothing about theology.

    On the other other hand, the theologians are probably jealous that their books don’t sell as well as Dawkins’s. Which may be because too many of the theologians write about a traditional, abstract God that I can’t believe in. So where does that leave someone like me? I don’t believe in the cartoon-caricature of God that Dawkins vilifies; who does? Nor am I interested in the traditional God of the theologians, a lifeless God which I sometimes find even less believable than Dawkins’s cartoonish God.

    I suspect there are quite a few you out there who find themselves in this same position. The cartoon-God of the God-bashers, while entertaining, is also faintly embarrassing because it’s too easy to bash a cartoonish God. The traditional concepts of God hold little interest for us any more. The academic God of the theologians seems simply irrelevant. Yet here we are, sitting in a church; we’re still religious. Whether or not we believe in God, we still take religion seriously.

    So this morning I’d like to talk about one concept of God that I find I can take seriously; and that’s the idea that God is inextricably intertwined with Nature, with the natural world. Not that you or I or anyone should unquestioningly accept this concept of God-in-Nature;– but I do think it’s worthy of our serious attention, for at least three reasons: first, because many people find personal religious inspiration in Nature; second, because it seems easy to reconcile such a God with the insights of science; and third, because it seems that such a God could help us understand the current ecological crisis, and help us understand why we should do something about that crisis.

    Let’s start with that first reason:– It’s worth considering God as Nature because many of us find personal religious inspiration in Nature. By “religious” inspiration, I mean an experience of awe and wonder, or an experience a sense of the sublime; a personal sense of religion often grows out of such experiences. Not that these experiences lead necessarily towards one narrow religious viewpoint. You can experience a religious awe and wonder at the coming of springtime and the rebirth of the natural world; but that doesn’t mean that you will necessarily fit that experience of awe and wonder into the traditional Western Christian celebration of Easter and the risen Christ; no more does it mean that you will fit that experience into the celebration of the ancient Celtic pagan holiday of Beltane. Or you can experience a religious sense of the sublime when you are in the eye of a hurricane, when you see and hear the storm raging all around you but overhead there is that small, quiet patch of blue sky; but that sense of the insignificant self being overwhelmed by the sublime power and grandeur of the universe does not lead to any specific religious theological belief system.

    I get a good deal of my own religious inspiration from Nature. When I’m in the White Mountains, hiking above treeline into the alpine ecosystem, being in the midst of the low shrubby trees and tiny delicate flowers, that is a religious experience for me. Or the other day when I was out on Pope’s Island, I flushed a Cooper’s Hawk out of some shrubs near the city marina, and the surprise of its sudden appearance, and the sight of it flying off low over the waters of the harbor, was a religious experience. I don’t know how to explain that feeling of connection to another living being except as a religious connection; I’m not going to eat a Cooper’s Hawk, nor will it eat me; seeing a patch of lichen above treeline is not going to give me some evolutionary advantage that will help me pass along my genes to the next generation. These powerful experiences of nature don’t move me to believe in the traditional God, but my personal experiences of the natural world make me think that it might make sense to describe Nature as God.

    And this is related to the fact that it is possible, even easy, to reconcile such a God, God-in-Nature, with the insights of science.

    Science can provoke awe and wonder and sense of sublime; at least, I suspect it can do so for nearly everyone in this room. Haven’t you ever been thrilled by one of those science programs on television? Admittedly, some of them are terminally boring, but I do get excited by the programs about astronomy. How can you not get excited when you hear about the Big Bang that (so it is theorized) was the beginning of our whole universe? How can you not react in awe and wonder when you learn about the vast distances in our universe? What’s even more thrilling is when you get to experience science first-hand. Last winter, one of the local astronomy clubs brought their telescopes out for AHA! Night one month, and I got a chance to look through their telescopes at Uranus and Mars — that was far more memorable than a television program, and it was certainly an experience of awe and wonder for me.

    On a more personal level, as an avid bird watcher I’m thrilled by bird biology. When you see two different kinds of sandpipers feeding side by side at the edge of the ocean, almost identical to one another except for the length of their bills, and you know that they evolved from a common ancestor, evolving different bill lengths so one could dig a little deeper in the sand and mud and exploit a slightly different ecological niche, I find that thrilling. Those two birds are living, breathing examples of how evolution works, which I find awe-inspiring and wonderful. Now I had better stop talking about birds before your eyes glaze over in boredom. The science of ornithology happens to fill me with awe and wonder; even if you find birds mind-numbingly boring, I trust that you will be able to think of other examples of science that fills you with awe and wonder.

    Richard Dawkins notwithstanding, many religious people have no problem reconciling God with science. Liberal Christians find it easy to reconcile a fairly traditional Christian God with science, as long as you don’t take the Bible literally. Pagans, Jews, and many other religious faiths say that science is completely compatible with belief in Goddess or God. But I would like to tell you about “religious naturalism,” a religious position which I probably adhere to.

    Jerry Stone, a philosopher of religion who is affiliated with Meadville Lombard Theological School, came up with the term “religious naturalism.” I went to hear Jerry give a talk about religious naturalism last June at General Assembly, our big annual denominational meeting. Jerry says that ‘naturalism’ means “a set of beliefs and attitudes that focus on this world,” whereas ‘supernaturalism’ would imply that there is something beyond the natural world. So according to Jerry Stone, “religious naturalism is a philosophy or theology that there are religious aspects of this world which can be appreciated within a naturalist framework.” Which means that religious naturalism is easily compatible with science.

    And religious naturalism allows belief in God. (Jerry Stone also says that there are also religious naturalists who see no need for any concept of God at all; but that’s a topic for a different sermon.) Some religious naturalists would say that God is the whole universe, the totality of everything; as we heard Bernard Loomer say in the first reading this morning. Other religious naturalists would say that God is a part of the total universe; for example, a theologian named Henry Nelson Wieman said that the creative process in the universe is God. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau fall into one of these two camps: they found God in natural processes and in the connections between living beings, and it may be that they find God in everything.

    To find God in the interconnections between living beings: it seems to me that such a God could help us understand why we should do something about the current ecological crisis. This is the big problem I have with people like Richard Dawkins: he gives me no compelling reason why I should try to stop species extinctions, or try to clean up New Bedford harbor, or do anything at all about the ecological crisis.

    Our ecological crisis fascinates me. It horrifies me, too, but I’m fascinated by the fact that we have the science and the technological know-how to end the ecological crisis — and yet we aren’t ending the crisis. I’m fascinated by the fact that we have the financial resources to pay for solving global warming, to take one example, to pay for it with relatively little disruption to the economy — and yet we aren’t ending global warming, or any part of the ecological crisis. I’m fascinated from a religious point of view, because I think our society refuses to deal with the current ecological crisis because of certain prevailing religious beliefs. Let me outline what some of those religious beliefs might be.

    First, and most obviously, there are substantial numbers of right-wing Christians who don’t worry about the current ecological crisis because they fully expect the end of the world to come, and all the true believers will be “raptured” up to heaven. If you think you’re going to get “raptured” up to heaven, I’ll bet you don’t think you have to deal with global warming, species extinctions, or the PCBs in New Bedford harbor. Second, there are substantial numbers of people of many different religious persuasions who are willing to passively sit back and trust to God, or to Goddess, or whomever. If you think it was meant to be this way, ecological disasters and all, if you say “I’m sure God will provide”; I’d have to say there isn’t much incentive for you to take responsibility yourself to clean up the world.

    Thirdly, and least obviously, there are lots of people who believe that human beings are the most important life form, not only more important than any other plant or animal but also more important than the ecosystem considered as a whole. If you think you, as a human being, are so special then why would you cut back on your fuel consumption just because global warming is going to melt the polar ice caps thus killing off all the polar bears? This third group includes plenty of people who would not think of themselves as religious, but I count them as religious since they hold onto this belief with religious zeal in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Yet if the theory of evolution teaches us anything, it teaches us that human beings are not special and not unique; we’re just another organism that happened to develop through the chance processes of evolution.

    We human beings do have a deep need to feel special. At the moment, too many of us satisfy our need to feel special at the expense of all other life forms. If we are willing to affirm God as being intertwined with Nature in some way, that means that we, too, are a part of God. It doesn’t get any more special than that: there is that of God in each of us; or maybe it’s that there’s that of each of us in God; in either case, we too are divine, we too are Godly. If you prefer, you can substitute “Goddess” for “God” here, and everything will still be equally true.

    Yet if we say that God or Goddess is intertwined with Nature, we have every incentive to do no harm to Nature, for doing harm to Nature is not only doing harm to God or Goddess, it is also doing harm to ourselves; since we too are divine. It is morally and ethically wrong to cause harm to Nature.

    In the first reading this morning, Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us that we have become strangers to animals and plants, strangers to ocean and continent, strangers even to the night and to the day. Why is this so?: “For we invade them impiously for gain,/We devastate them unreligiously…”. Emerson tell us that it is morally and ethically wrong to cause harm to Nature. He also tells us that in causing such harm, we only harm ourselves: “The nectar and ambrosia” of the Gods “are withheld” from us; “And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves/ And pirates of the universe, shut out/ Daily to a more thin and outward rind,/ Turn pale and starve.” Causing harm to ourselves is itself morally and ethically wrong, to say nothing of being stupid.

    “Give me truths,” says Emerson, not delusions. The truth is that it wouldn’t do us any harm to start treating Nature as divine. I’m not trying to convince you that you should accept this idea of God; I’m not even sure that I accept this notion of God; I need to think about this some more. But the idea of God as Nature is worth taking seriously.

    Affirm that Nature is divine, and maybe humans will stop unleashing blight on the natural world. Affirm the divinity of Nature, and maybe we will figure out how to extend our morals and ethics beyond human beings to all of Nature. Such affirmations do not strike me as delusional, but as good practical common sense.

  • Ecofeminism

    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 is from the Christian scriptures, from the book called Matthew, chapter 6, verses 24-30.

    “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

    “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you — you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’… But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

    The second reading is from Starhawk’s book Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics. I take this second reading to be deeply related to the first reading.

    “The image of the Goddess strikes at the roots of estrangement. True value is not found in some heaven, some abstract otherworld, but in female bodies and their offspring, female and male; in nature, and in the world. Nature is seen as having its own inherent order, of which human beings are a part. Human nature, needs, drives, and desires are not dangerous impulses in need of repression and control, but are themselves expressions of the order inherent in being. The evidence of our sense and our experience is evidence of the divine — the moving energy that unites all being.”

    So end this morning’s readings.

    SERMON — “Ecofeminism”

    One of the things that I like best about Jesus of Nazareth — that is, the Jesus whose words we can find in the Bible as opposed to the Jesus that the established church has constructed — is that Jesus constantly challenges us to think more clearly and to feel more deeply. So Jesus preaches to his followers:

    “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” Today, we might add that the birds of the air use no fossil fuels in order to feed themselves, and the only waste products they emit are biodegradable and nontoxic. Jesus goes on: “And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” And Jesus’s words take on additional meaning in the 21st century when you think about the energy it takes to manufacture clothes, and ship clothes from the distant countries in which they are now mostly manufactured. Jesus goes on: “If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you — you of little faith?”

    If you have been coming to church over the past three weeks, you know that I have been preaching a series of sermons on feminist theology, and today’s sermon is the last, and I might say the culminating, sermon in that series. If you were here two weeks ago, you heard how feminist theology became our most important theological stance in the 1980s, and you heard about how feminist theology underlies the so-called “seven principles,” which have become the most widely-used affirmation of faith among us, and therefore I said that feminist theology has become central to who we are now. But I also pointed out how the feminist theology of the 1980’s has problems and limitations, and I described how a younger generation of women, especially working class women and women of color, have pointed out some of those problems and limitations. And that old 1980’s feminism really doesn’t have much to say about the ecological crisis that we are in the midst of now. Today I’d like to speak with you about ecofeminism, and I’ve saved ecofeminism for last because I believe ecofeminism addresses these problems and limitations, and I believe ecofeminism should be a central theology for us Unitarian Universalists.

    Which brings us to the second reading this morning. Starhawk, a Neo-pagan and the author of that second reading, is one of the best-known ecofeminist theologians alive today. In that second reading she writes, “True value is not found in some heaven, some abstract otherworld, but in female bodies and their offspring, female and male; in nature, and in the world. Nature is seen as having its own inherent order, of which human beings are a part.” In other words, Starhawk is saying that we don’t have to wait until after we die to enter into some disembodied heavenly state. We’re there here and now. We can find true value in our own bodies. We can find true value in the world and in nature. Actually, there is no real separation between our bodies (our selves) and nature, because we are a part of the inherent order of the world.

    That’s a pretty radical thing for Starhawk to say. Western Christianity and Western culture have been telling us for centuries that our souls or minds are more important than bodies. Western culture tells us that there’s a separation between our minds and our bodies, and that our bodies are less important than our minds; and Western Christianity tells us not to worry about suffering here and now, because one day we’ll get to go to heaven. But Starhawk says that true value is found in our bodies, in nature, in the world; we’re already a part of it; true value is here and now.

    And like many ecofeminists, Starhawk tells a story of how we got to the point where we are now. This ecofeminist story is based on archaeological and anthropological research, and it goes something like this:

    Before humans invented agriculture, the archaeological record shows that we got along pretty well. Back then, human beings were reasonably healthy, and the hunting-gathering life didn’t take up much of our time so we had plenty of leisure. Maybe we did some gardening, too, but we weren’t engaged in intensive agriculture. Then some bright human invented agriculture. Once agriculture became the way we got our food, the archaeological record shows that overall health declined. Archaeologists find a greater incidence of illness and disease, and they find that agriculturalists were on average four inches shorter than hunter-gatherers. In addition, the invention of agriculture seems correlated with several other inventions: slavery, economic exploitation of the majority of humanity, devastating wars, and (dare I say it?) the emergence of monotheism, that is, the belief in one single male god.

    That’s the scientific story. Some Christians and some Neo-pagans tell this story a little differently. They tell a story about an ancient time when humankind lived in balance with the rest of the world. Some of these Christians tell the story of the Garden of Eden, a time a place where the first humans didn’t have to work by the sweat of their brows, and didn’t have to wear clothes, and generally had a lovely time. In this Christian story, those first humans violated God’s law by eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that is by knowing too much. Because they knew too much, those first humans got kicked out of the paradise that was the Garden of Eden; and this is known as the Fall.

    Some Neo-pagans tell a different, but related, story about an ancient time in human history when women were in charge of human society. At that time, we human beings lived in harmony with the earth and in harmony with our own bodies. In this Neo-pagan story, someone invented domination, whereby one human being (usually a man) dominates another human being. This led to slavery, exploitation of the earth, and a lower standard of living for everyone except a few wealthy men; and this kind of domination is known as patriarchy.

    The Christians tell us that we can’t go back to the Garden of Eden; Neo-pagans like Starhawk tell us that we really can’t go back to living the way they did in the old matriarchal societies; the archaeologists tell us that we can’t go back to living as hunter-gatherers. So what went wrong? And how do we find a way out of this mess?

    Not that I believe that there can even be a final answer to these questions, or to any serious question about the fate of earth and humanity. Year after year, century after century, individuals have claimed to have the one true final answer to life, the universe, and everything; and year after year, century after century, human beings have fixed one problem only to have a new problem emerge somewhere else. That is the way of growth and evolution and change. To use an ecological metaphor, there is no single climax state of the forest in which the forest ecosystem settles down into some perfect unchanging heavenly state. Random fluctuations of weather, chance mutations in certain species, interactions with nearby ecosystems, all lead to change. Change is the only constant, accompanied by growth and evolution.

    Yet if change is the only constant, then we should be able to change things for the better, rather than letting them get worse. And ecofeminism offers some profound religious insight into our current mess, and offers hope that we might be able to grow, and to change things for the better. In that spirit of hope, let us ask what ecofeminism can offer us.

    Ecofeminism tells us that domination has helped get us into the current mess. So if we look at the Western Christian tradition, we find this idea that God allegedly told humankind that human beings have dominion over all other living things; and then God said that men have dominion over women; and next thing you know you have variations on the theme of domination like slavery and oppression of ethnic minorities. Even if one form of domination doesn’t follow another form of domination chronologically, all these kinds of domination are linked together: human domination of other living things is linked to patriarchy or the male domination of women, which is linked to slavery or the domination of some human beings by other human beings, often along racial or ethnic lines.

    Needless to say, domination and exploitation go together. If a woman’s place is in the kitchen where they don’t get paid or compensated for their work, whoever is dominating them is also exploiting them. And when human beings dominate the total ecosystem to meet our short-term needs without paying attention to the survival of other species, that sounds like exploitation to me.

    As Unitarian Universalists, we claim that we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. I take that to mean that we will not affirm the domination of some human beings by other human beings. So, for example, if we affirm that women have inherent worth and dignity, then we will not put up with men dominating women. If we affirm that people of color have inherent worth and dignity, then we will not put up with white people dominating people of color. To say that we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all persons means that we won’t put up with domination. We won’t put up with one person dominating another, yet we are willing to go further than that and say that we won’t put up with human beings dominating other living beings.

    So, too, do we affirm respect for the interdependent web of life of which we are a part. We are not comfortable with domination, no matter what form it might take. Any religion rooted in dignity and respect for other beings is a religion that cannot tolerate domination and exploitation. So it is that I say we Unitarian Universalists are ecofeminists — or, at least, we are in the process of becoming ecofeminists, for I’m not sure we’re quite there yet.

    Because once you start thinking like an ecofeminist, it really changes the way you think about religion. Your whole religious landscape shifts. You become suspicious of the way the old religious texts have been interpreted, so that when you hear about how God told humankind to have dominion over other living beings, you get suspicious and you wonder if there might not be another interpretation of that old Bible verse. You become suspicious of your whole Western religious tradition, so that when you hear about a God who is always referred to as “he” and “him,” you begin to wonder why we don’t also refer to God as a Goddess whom we refer to as “she” and “her.” You become suspicious of people who tell you that it is “natural” for men to have power over women, just as you become suspicious of people who tell you that it is “natural” for people with white skin to have more power than people with darker skin — and when they tell you that the Bible says that men should have dominion over women, you become suspicious of the way those people are interpreting the Bible.

    And that can lead us to challenge the old religious interpretations. So Starhawk challenges us to give up those old notions of heaven as some abstract, otherworldly place. She challenges us to find true value in women’s bodies here and now, and to find true value in male and female bodies that come from women’s bodies. She tells us that we don’t need to be estranged from our bodies, or from each other, for we human beings are inherently part of the inherent order of nature. She tells us to trust the evidence of our senses, and find evidence of the divine in the moving energy that unites all living beings, unites all things. We challenge the old religious interpretations, and we find freedom: the freedom that comes when we don’t allow our thoughts to be dominated by some abstract authority, the freedom that comes when we shake off the bonds of slavery or servitude imposed on us by someone else. We challenge the old religious interpretations, and we find deep interconnectedness: we are interconnected with each other, male and female, all races and ethnicities, and dominating someone else only harms us; we are interconnected with all nature, and we can’t dominate nature without dominating and enslaving ourselves as well.

    This brings us back to those enigmatic words of Jesus, which end with Jesus saying, “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Traditional religious authorities have interpreted this to mean that we should strive to get into heaven, some time after we die, and then, like the lilies of the field we too will be clothed like King Solomon in all his glory. When Jesus talks about the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, generations of church-goers interpreted these words as referring to heaven, to some perfect state of being that will come to us (if we behave ourselves) after we die. Wait for death, enter into that disembodied state known as heaven, and you too can become like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. When you’re in a disembodied heaven, it’s easy for the heavenly father to feed you and clothe you if you’re disembodied. In other words, suck it up now, be meek and mild and don’t be bothered when others dominate you, and after you die you’ll get your reward.

    But what if generations of church-goers and the old traditional religious authorities are completely wrong? What if Jesus is actually telling us to resist domination and to live with dignity, in harmony with each other, respecting the earth and all living beings? What if he is telling us that we can have heaven here on earth, if we choose to do so?

    That’s what you get to do if you’re an ecofeminist. You get to discard those old traditional religious interpretations, and try to get at what Jesus was actually saying. Strip away to creeds and dogmas of the centuries, and perhaps what Jesus really said was to strive for the kingdom of heaven, so you can live in harmony with the world — in the same way that the birds of the air, and the lilies of the field, live in interdependent harmony with the world. That possibility exists here and now. Nor is this some pie-in-the-sky utopian vision, for the lilies manage to do it here and now.

    Not that I’m going to claim that Jesus of Nazareth was an ecofeminist theologian, because he wasn’t. Nor am I going to say that any contemporary ecofeminist, including Starhawk, has the final answer to our problems, because they don’t and she doesn’t. We don’t need a final answer, we just need a direction in which we can travel. I think ecofeminism offers us a direction that all of us — women and men, people of color and white people, Christians and Pagans and humanists — a direction in which we can travel together to get out of this mess.

    It’s not like I’m just making this up. Many of you have told me that you know domination is everywhere: men dominating women, white people dominating dark-skinned people, super-rich dominating everyone else, humankind dominating other living beings. You have told me that domination no longer works, that it’s just creating mass extinction of species, ongoing violence against women, racism, and miserable lives — and many of you have told me pieces of how to put an end to it.

    So I’m just piecing this together for you. We know what to do. We know this is a religious matter, and we know that our church, good old First Unitarian in New Bedford, is one of the religious institutions that can address this matter. So what if we’re a small church. So what if there’s only forty of us here this morning. So what if we’re a little disorganized, and some of us are tired, and all of us are busy. What we need is an ecofeminist movement happening. When there’s a hundred of us in here on a Sunday morning, we can start building coalitions with like-minded groups. We’ll get lots of kids in here so we can get them to understand this at a young age. Then when there’s four hundred of us, the local politicians will have to start paying attention. And when there’s a thousand of us, we can….

    Now, I just know what someone is going to say to me at coffee hour — “Well, Dan, I just don’t know, I don’t think we’ll ever have a thousand Unitarian Universalists, not in New Bedford.” Well, my friends, the evangelicals are building a megachurch in the northern end of our city and they plan to build a membership of two thousand or more people, in order to save a few disembodied souls….

    …Surely we Unitarian Universalists can come up with a thousand people who will work towards a world of dignity and respect for all living beings, and earth made fair, and all her peoples one.

    No excuses, now.