Written Plainly in the Sand

Sermon by

Reverend Greta Browne

February22, 2009

My name is Greta Browne and I am here to recruit you.

If you saw the movie MILK you will recognize this line with which Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to office in the United States, started his speeches in San Francisco in the 70’s. “My name is Harvey Milk and I am here to recruit you.” He was calling on boys and men, and women as well, to join a movement of self-liberation and human rights.

What he was asking was difficult and life altering, that is, to take courage, come out of the closet, tell your truth to your parents, and if necessary, move away from your community to a place such as San Francisco where you could live a fulfilling life. It might mean having the courage to fight all the way, joining thousands of others to demand your rights and theirs. It might mean jeopardizing your job, and even your safety. But it was the only way to move forward into freedom and equal rights.

My name is Greta Browne and I am here to recruit you to respond to the urgency of the climate crisis. What I am asking is difficult and life altering, and I myself am having trouble responding adequately to a situation that threatens to flood thousands of coastal cities large and small, around the world; threatens to cause floods and droughts that will decimate the crops that feed the increasing world population; threatens to decrease the water supplies of whole regions as ice caps melt along mountain ranges in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and North America as well. Global warming is already increasing the temperatures of the oceans, causing permanent damage to the immense coral reefs, such as the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, reefs that have been the breeding grounds for small sea organisms, feeding and the nurturing the world’s fish population.

Now, I may not have to preach to you about the importance of climate change and the serious threats it poses to the human race. Some of you probably know a lot more than I do about it. I am not a scientist or a specialist. But I am a grandmother and I worry about the world my grandchildren and all the children will have to face if we don’t act with haste and efficiency. I have been paying attention to the articles in magazines and websites that warn of the impending disaster if we don’t manage to reduce the mounting carbon emissions from cars, trucks, airplanes, home heating and cooling, manufacturing, industrialized farming. For the safety of human beings and other creatures, the maximum parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 – 350 parts per million. We have surpassed this number – the last I saw we had hit 390 – we are in the red zone already and numbers are increasing. Here’s what the organization 350.org says on its website:

“Make no mistake--getting back to 350 means transforming our world. It means building solar arrays instead of coal plants; it means planting trees instead of clear-cutting rainforests; it means increasing efficiency and decreasing our waste. Getting to 350 means developing a thousand different solutions--all of which will become much easier if we have a global treaty grounded in the latest science and built around the principles of equity and justice. To get this kind of treaty, we need a movement of people who care enough about our shared global future to get involved and make their voices heard.”

People who care enough.

Yes, it is written plainly in the sand that the survival of the Planet is threatened. The Earth itself will endure but not necessarily as home to human beings and to the animals and plants that have adapted to its current environment. To ensure the survival of this home we need a movement of people who care enough to get involved and make their voices heard. People who are willing to alter their lives, come out of the closet and take the lead.

We Unitarian Universalists in the United States like to think that we stand for the most enlightened positions, that we act for justice and equity, that we have the courage to make the world a better place for all its inhabitants. But we don’t have the best record on truly aligning our lives with the needs of the times. Harvey Milk engaged in a battle to the death for the human rights of homosexual men and women in the 70’s. Yet as recently as 2005 a UU minister from Michigan said that her congregation was not yet ready to become a welcoming congregation, too many members of the congregation still had qualms about welcoming homosexuals into their midst as equals, as true brothers and sisters.

We UUs value our principles but we also value our lifestyles of comfort and convenience. We like to surround ourselves with people who look and behave as we do. We value freedom and we especially value our own freedom to live where we please and travel when we so desire. Back in the mid-19^th century when abolitionists were speaking out about the need to end slavery, many Unitarians in New England refused to support that movement. Their money was in textiles and the manufacture of goods that depended on the cotton plantations of the South. The abolition of slavery would mean the end of inexpensive labor in the cotton fields and would cut down profits.

Throughout the ages we can find brave Unitarians and Universalists, committed to justice and truth, willing to die for religious freedom, for peace, for human rights. But, as in most religious groups, many of us sit back and wait for others to lead the way, hanging onto our privileges, following as it becomes easy and comfortable.

The thing about this moment, perhaps more than any other in history, is that there is no time to wait. Scientists give us only a short window to turn things around – some as much as fifteen years but most only five years or even three. Immediate and drastic action is required, both at the government level and at the individual level, though some believe that only drastic mandates by the government will be enough to stop the galloping increase in carbon emissions due to consumerism, increasing development around the world, exponentially growing populations, and the clearing of rainforests for agriculture.

My friends, I am here in this pulpit this morning to recruit you. The pulpit has provided the place over centuries from which the words have resounded, “Change your ways.”

Let us change our ways. For the love of truth, beauty and justice, let us alter our ways. This means cutting way back in our use of fossil fuels, including electricity generated from fossil fuels. It means seriously limiting our consumption of meat. The government in Germany this month issued a recommendation for the whole country that because of global warming meat should be eaten only on special occasions. Yes, radical changes are called for. Perhaps even more than these important individual changes, our voices must be heard – by our relatives, friends, neighbors, and especially by our representatives in government. For the love of our children and grandchildren, let us come out of the closet, risk our necks. Let us educate ourselves, educate others, and let the government at the local, state and national levels know that we want the drastic changes that global warming requires.

May we be instruments of change. The sand in the hourglass rushes through, and the time grows short. As the sand on the beaches disappears, the writing in the sand washes away. Our individual lives are like tiny grains of sand, but together we make up the entire population of this Planet. Let us write in the sand a story of hope, commitment and transformation.

I end with a blessing adapted from the words of Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in us and we wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what our lives and our children’s lives may be, let us go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

Let us come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. Let us come into the presence of still water, and feel above us the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time let us rest in the grace of the world and be free.

May we find that balance between serenity and action, between gratitude and urgency.

Readings

From President Obama’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 2209

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America... We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do... The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good... With old friends and former foes, we'll work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat and roll back the specter of a warming planet... What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship."

Parts of an essay by David Roberts posted on January 22, 2009

For several days I've been pondering how to write something interesting or insightful about Obama and What It All Means -- something that hasn't been written a hundred other places.

In the end, though, profundity is not what's needed. Obama did plenty of that on the trail, and the very fact of his ascension to office speaks for itself.

Instead, what's called for is some bluntness. The Obama presidency is in a political vise grip, squeezed between two facts:

The dire situation described by the fourth IPCC report is, by all indications, an underestimate. We are careening toward catastrophe, and to avoid it we'll likely have to virtually eliminate U.S. carbon emissions by 2050, while also engineering a whole range of difficult international agreements. If we don't, it's not exaggerating to say that unprecedented human misery will result, potentially putting at risk the very preconditions of human civilization.

There is nothing close to the public or political support necessary to pass the kind of sweeping policies necessary to eliminate America's emissions. The U.S. political class, to say nothing of the public, is nowhere near understanding or internalizing the implications of fact No. 1. By and large climate change is still viewed as a nagging, marginal, far-off problem to be addressed to the extent (and only to the extent) that it doesn't cause any economic dislocation.

This is just another way of rephrasing Gore's famous warning that the politically possible falls well short of what's necessary. The politically possible has moved forward considerably with Obama taking office, Pelosi running the House, Waxman running the Energy Committee, Markey running the Energy Subcommittee, and competent professionals in charge of executive branch agencies. But it is still far, far short. Even many people in the green world don't really get the existential urgency involved.

Over the next four/eight years, Obama (with help from many others) will bridge that gap, and we'll have a shot at a prosperous green future. Or he won't, and our children and grandchildren will inherit a world filled with unthinkable suffering.