Looking Back, Looking Forward

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta

June 14 2015

I love the types of jokes that start with just have a phrase and then fill in the blanks.

Looking back, I like to think of Unitarian Universalism as filling in the blanks for me. And the blanks go way back to the time in England when I was the director of religious education for the Catholic Sunday School at the American base where Wil worked. I had off and on taught Sunday School ever since I was 18, and before we moved to England in 1983 I’d been an RE teacher for the Annapolis Catholic church.

So I decided to continue teaching in the small American Catholic congregation’s Sunday School once we arrived in Yorkshire, and the next year found myself the DRE! I needed inspiration, and resources, and I found the Diocese of Leeds Religious Education Centre, which was for teachers of religious education in the Catholic schools of the diocese. It was great to find lots of things that helped me with the RE program, but the more I knew about RE curricula, the more I wanted to know about theology. I applied for a place at the local Catholic university to study theology…and when I got my degree, I got another degree, and began to teach at university level in theology and religious studies.

And that’s when the bottom fell out for me! I realized how little I knew about religion, about spirituality, and the courses that I was teaching made me thirsty to learn more. I began to learn about about feminist theology, ecofeminism, wiccan ritual, process theology…all this way beyond what my own religious experience had been to that point. I knew that I was nearly past the point of no return to my Catholic faith when I found myself celebrating a solstice ritual with the pagan chaplain to Leeds University.

And then we came back home to Augusta GA, and soon we were so dejected after trying to fit into Southern Catholic parish culture that we stopped going to church at all. I had lots of blanks to fill in: I had left my long-time teaching post which I loved, and had to face the fact that I would never teach theology again here in Augusta. I missed my colleagues and friends, and the place that had become my home. I had at least been hanging on to my faith before we moved, with a parish priest whose Celtic spirituality was supportive, but now had no desire to practice the Southern conservative Catholicism I found here…I had plenty of blanks to fill in, until I was invited to speak here at this church about my academic specialism of theology and film.

The experience of giving a sermon here, and being welcomed so warmly in this place, was amazing. And within weeks I was joining the choir, being croned by the women’s group, and within a year volunteering to run Adult Religious Education classes, and within 2 years training to be a ministry associate.

Clearly this church filled in the blanks for me; I found a home where I was free to ask questions, could try new worship experiences and hear different, challenging ideas from the podium almost every week.

I’m not the only one – many of you have walked through those doors and you thought after the first few minutes that this place is too good to be true. You thought, where have you been all my life? You thought, I have found my tribe!

Alice and Andy found this church home filled in the blanks for them when Alice became ill; specifically, the love and comfort and support that they both received in the midst of that crisis from the members of this congregation. John also will tell you that when he fell ill shortly after beginning to attend this church, he received pastoral care that made him want to give back.

Why would you come back here week after week comes unless you’ve found something that fills in the blank for you – whether it’s a song we sing or a postlude that Joe plays, an in-depth discussion at a meeting of the Limbo crowd, the chance to come up here and share a joy or sorrow, being part of the volunteer team at the Master’s Table, lunch with the Retired Old Men Eating Out?

And when your blanks are filled in, your questions answered – or at least respected and acknowledged – you regard all these people as kindred spirits. We are not all alike, we can’t say we are of like minds, but we all appreciate being here because we feel we matter to each other and we belong together.

Cathy wrote in the song she sang for our chalice lighting,

“Along this

interdependent web

Of our existence

May we journey

Knowing we are one

Gathering here to seek

Gathering here to share

Gathering here to speak

Gathering here to care.”

(“The Candle of Faith”, by Cathy Benedetto)

The affirmation of community that comes, in the words of Mark Morrison-Reed, from “the connectedness…discovered amid the particulars of our lives and the lives of others… inspires us to act for justice.” He writes that “the religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done.” (#580, Singing the Living Tradition)

Looking forward, we can all know that walking through those doors every Sunday will be someone who has blanks to fill in, just like you did at one time; will you be the person they remember offering a hand to shake, making them welcome? That’s doing the work of ministry, and I am looking forward to another year of collaborating with you in that work.

Putting together this sermon wasn’t easy…because this is not an ordinary Sunday service. It has that feel of the end of the school year for me, like the last period before school lets out for the summer. We’re all a little distracted because there’s this great potluck waiting outside in the common area, and there’s the Annual Congregational Meeting with its fascinating reports, its exciting congregational votes…okay, well it does have awards, which are always nice.

But I love this service each year because it gives me a chance, before delivering my Minister’s End-of-Year Report in the Meeting proper, to thank all those people who have made this a great year for me…who have challenged me, who have supported me, who have prayed for me, who have dragged me through the rough times and floated on the clouds with me during the fun times, the happy times. I will mention in my report the highlights of the past church year…but really, every day has been a highlight of my year. I’ve said to our board president that being paid to be a minister is like being paid to eat ice cream…that may not seem such a big deal if you don’t care for ice cream! But I love ice cream, and the idea of being paid to eat it is incredibly exciting. Serving as your minister is just as exciting to me, and collaborating with members is the only way to serve, exactly because of what Morrison-Reed observes, that my vision alone “is too narrow to see all that must be seen”, and my strength alone is “too limited to do all that must be done.”

I’d like to end with a quote from Rachel Remen, who says:

          Service is not the same as helping. Helping is based on          inequality, it's not a relationship between equals. When you help, you use your own strength to help someone with less strength. It's a one up, one down relationship, and people feel this inequality. When we help, we may inadvertently take away more than we give, diminishing the person's sense of self-worth and self-esteem… Serving is also different to fixing. We fix          broken pipes; we don't fix people. When I set about fixing another person, it's because I see them as broken. Fixing is a form of judgment that separates us from one another; it creates a distance. So fundamentally, helping, fixing and serving are ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak; when          you fix, you see life as broken; and when you serve, you see life as whole. When we serve in this way, we understand that this person's suffering is also my suffering, that their joy is also my joy… We may help or fix many things in our lives, but when we serve, we are always in the service of wholeness.

(https://www.uc.edu/content/dam/uc/honors/docs/communityengagement/HelpingFixingServing.pdf)

Filling in those blanks that plague us, that lessen us, that frustrate us, makes us whole. We fill in those blanks in a spirit of hope, and when we fill them in we are honoring those who have gone before us. As Holly Near sings,

“I am open

and I am willing

For To be hopeless

would seem so strange

It dishonors

those who go before us

So lift me up

to the light of change.”

(http://www.hollynear.com/lyrics.html)

We fill in those blanks with the help of the Spirit of Life; we can be open and willing to effect real change, both in our own lives and the wider world, because we grow roots that hold us close and we have wings that set us free.

Blessed be, Amen.

Gaye Ortiz

June 14 2015

The Open Door

The Open Door

Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta

May 17, 2015

It was probably this time of year - 6^th grade in Mrs Gavalas’ class, at Bayvale Elementary here in south Augusta. One day we were told we had some students visiting our classroom, and 2 black girls came and sat at the round table where I was sitting. I found out they were twins, June and Joan. They were there because at last – in 1965 – schools in Richmond County were being integrated. June and Joan looked scared and a little confused, but I got to know them when they started the next school year – and, when we went to Glenn Hills Junior High School together, their older sister Janet, who was a genius student and scooped up lots of academic prizes during her years there. June was a good friend, she was a real goofball and wore her Afro as big as she could! She became our daughter Molly’s godmother; today she is a successful psychiatrist who practices in Atlanta.

G.K. Chesterton writes (“Xmas Day”),

“Good News: but if you ask me what it is, I know not;

It is a track of feet in the snow,

It is a lantern showing a path,

It is a door set open.”

The door set open for June and Joan and Janet in the integration of schools here in Augusta was still firmly shut when Kay Sutherland moved here from California with her family. Kay was very much influenced in her attitudes toward racial equality by the work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. her daughter Madhuri says. In the 1960s the UUs here in Augusta were especially impacted by his writings and speeches, including the Ware Lecture, given by Dr. King to the UU Association’s General Assembly in 1966. Remember what Dr. King wished for his four children: that one day they would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Kay was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta, where there was a congregation that had already made waves in the Augusta community by writing to the Chronicle about matters of race that didn’t match up with the prevailing conservative – and racist – feelings about segregation.

So in 1964 when a Quaker from New York named Rachel Du Bois came to Augusta to speak about improving communication among diverse groups, there was some difficulty finding a venue for her that would allow both black and white citizens to attend. The UU church opened its building for her and a large crowd showed up to hear her. 

After the meeting Du Bois was persuaded to stay another day, and to meet with a group of black and white women who were leaders in heir communities. These women asked DuBois specifically to help with ways to help their children combat the violence and prejudice from anti-integration forces in Augusta.

Five young women, black and white, all with college degrees and small children, asked to meet again soon. It was at that next meeting that the idea of a kindergarten was first suggested. After the idealistic idea, reality hit when they were rebuffed, snubbed, and rejected by churches turning them away when the group of women asked if they would host the kindergarten. 

An additional concern was financing the idea; the women were determined for it to be an independent school, with no sponsorship but also no fees that would prevent those families applying that could not afford to pay for their children to attend.  An affordable place that had the facilities and standards for a kindergarten was another concern – until Kay and her husband negotiated the UU building for a nominal fee. And so Open Door Kindergarten was founded in the spring of 1964.

The group of five then found two other women to become teachers – Jane Lester and Ella Stenhouse, and then formed a board of Trustees with Kay as the Chair. Lois Greenberg and Freddie Jackson were also board officers.

When we look back, the interfaith aspect of this nonsectarian, multiracial endeavor is so impressive – Jewish, Christian, Quaker, and Unitarian Universalist – and it was supported financially by many families of Augusta, both black and white. The Augusta Chronicle even ran an article about the kindergarten with a photo of the interracial board.

The day that the group decided to hold an Open House for preregistration turned out to be the same day of the march on Selma! Still, both classes filled up, and there were so many parents there that they ran out of punch, cookies, and application forms. When the day ended, 22 children, racially an even split, were enrolled.

This sermon comes 50 years after the first graduating class of the Open Door Kindergarten. Not only was the door to interracial education open to those children, when this first class graduated they all went on to complete their studies in local schools and many of them went on to college.

In the case of the kindergarten, another metaphor would have been just as appropriate for its name – a bridge instead of a door, because the exercise of creating the kindergarten built a sturdy, supportive bridge between diverse communities.

The women who asked for the extra meeting with Rachel DuBois were concerned about how to bring up their children in an environment that was poisonous in its institutionalized racism, but also concerned about the purpose of education itself. This desire to prepare their children for the changes and challenges of American society comes through in an early brochure for Open Door: “In keeping with the rapidly changing world, we felt Augusta needed a kindergarten which would reflect the continuing advances in education while building upon the heritage of the past.”  Building a bridge between the past and the future is the function of education, as they saw it. Also crucial to the founders was building a bridge between races: “In our rapidly shrinking world, the child who has experience in working on a give and take basis with persons, from backgrounds other than his own, has distinct advantages.”

Another bridge that the kindergarten built slowly but surely was between its children and the wider Augusta community. In a 1997 Friends Journal article by Faith Bertsche, several examples of the reaction of local people to the kindergarten give a flavor of just how radical the interracial school was:

One field trip the children went on was to the local fire department, and Bertsche says that her “heart stood still” as they arrived, because the firemen were lined up in a row to keep them out of the facility. But as the children got out of the cars and ran towards the firemen, they began to smile, and began lifting the children onto the fire trucks. Another time the children went to Bush Field airport, and were shown the inside of a real plane. It was a hot summer day and the teacher forgot to bring containers of water, so they went to a motel next door and asked inside if they could drink from the water fountain near the door. The motel manager told the teacher to leave and take the black child with her. People who were registering at the motel overheard, and immediately canceled their booking, picked up their luggage, and followed the teacher and child out of the motel. And one of the motel workers who had heard the manager’s remark met them outside with a drink for the child.

So in the process of creating an inclusive atmosphere for educating the children, the kindergarten also helped to challenge the status quo and to change attitudes in Augusta. It was housed here at this church for nearly 2 decades, until moving to the Congregation Children of Israel campus, where it operates today as Open Door Pre-K. It’s had 62 children enrolled this year.

The ‘Good News’ of ‘a door set open’…Opening a door sometimes takes courage – what is a door besides an entryway to another space, a transition between one mode of being to another? One of the ancient customs when a couple is married is to lift the bride over the threshold. It symbolizes protection, both because a bride who tripped over the threshold of her new home would irrevocably bring bad luck to her home and marriage, but also because the threshold of the home was thought to be rife with unattached evil spirits.

The women who founded Open Door were acutely aware that they might be opening a door to something that could be threatening or dangerous for the children, parents, and teachers. Initially the founders of the school were so focused on the commitment they had to the effort that they were not as concerned about safety as they suddenly became when the school was actually opening. Then they realized that they could be attacked or killed. Betty Hostetler, who played piano for the kindergarten music sessions, says that they were concerned that the big glass windows could have been broken by rocks thrown at them.

With violent attacks on churches and schools by opponents of integration a real possibility, the women – according to Bertsche – 

“had a long, prayerful afternoon one hot August day, not about our own safety but about the children’s safety and our concern for their parents… (who after all) were entrusting their children to our care.

"Our decision was to purchase a first aid kit and several pails of sand just in case we were the recipients of a fire bomb. Then it was decided that there would always be 3 women present during school hours. Next, we would take the matter up with all the parents at the first parent-teacher meeting. At that first meeting, the parents agreed with our actions, and the matter never came up again.” (Bertsche, 22)

The ‘Good News’ of ‘a door set open’…Doors can be opened – and they can also be shut. Augusta back in 1964 was full of people who shut the door on equality, who shut the door on justice, on decency and kindness and love for their fellow human beings, because they were a different color. The Open Door family refused to let that door stay shut, and their courage in reaching out and grabbing the doorknob and pulling the door open was a daring act of love.

Socrates writes, “Courage is not only knowledge of what is to be dreaded and what is to be dared, but knowledge of all goods and evils at every stage.” Galen Guengerich, Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, interprets that quote to mean that “the essence of courage…is to pursue a goal that is morally worthy or stand up against a force that is morally repugnant, despite the risks involved. Courage is the knowledge of what is worthy and must be pursued, no matter if the road is long and the path unclear.” (Quest, CLF, March 2015, 2)

The director of the UU Service Committee, Bill Schulz, was once the executive director of Amnesty International. Guengerich recalls hearing Schulz say that, as a result of his work combating torture and dealing with torturers, he felt the belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person is a myth.

Now that is hard for a Unitarian Universalist to hear, because that after all is what we affirm in our first principle. But Schulz said that “there are too many malevolent hearts and too many god-forsaken places, where worth and dignity have no presence. Worth must be assigned and dignity must be taught, [and we cannot stand idly by and expect these to spring up magically]. Rather, in order for worth and dignity to exist, we must speak and act in a way that creates a place for them.”

And that is what the founders, staff, parents, and children of Open Door Kindergarten did for our city, our community, and our world – they created a place for worth and dignity to be created and flourish. They have made the First Principle of our UU faith tradition come alive.

We are honored today to have staff and families from the Open Door Pre-K here with us today. I’ve often thought that if our church ever decided to create a name for itself – besides the very descriptive UU Church of Augusta – that The Open Door would be a perfect name.

We pride ourselves on being a Welcoming Congregation. Our door has been open since 1954, welcoming all those who seek a place to grow their souls, where love is our religion, where freedom and reason and respect are values we try to live and embody through our beloved community.

Our own contributors to the first years of the Open Door Kindergarten deserve to be remembered today and always in the history of this church’s commitment to equality, liberty and justice for all. Kay Sutherland and Peggy Kelly are no longer with us, but Betty Hostetler is very much with us still. 

Those women who confounded the common prejudice and the legal framework of racism, in order to give their children the opportunity to enrich their education and their very lives, in a multiracial learning environment, each had an individual strength that connected with the others’ strength.

Together they called forth the best of each other, and their collective courage challenged the silence that held back too many of our citizens, our parents, our religious leaders, the silence that allowed racism, intimidation, violence and hate to dominate in this community.

Audre Lord writes about fear in relation to her own diagnosis of cancer in her essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”:

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality…what I most regretted were my silences…[times when I had] waited for someone else’s words…Of what had I ever been afraid? I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me, Your silence will not protect you.” (Quest, March 2015, 6)

Thinking today about the times we have been silent in the face of injustice, cruelty, violence, when faced with the threat of losing face or stature or privilege, we can be encouraged by the example of the Open Door founders who summoned the courage to act, who indeed set the door open for others to follow. Their work built bridges, their dedication to their children - and generations of children since - opened doors for us today, and inspires us to a better tomorrow.

I end with a blessing, in the words of Meg Riley:

May you find courage to do the work that is uniquely yours to do on this fragile planet. May you speak when words are needed, and be boldly silent when that is called for. May you know the deep care and connections that are everywhere around you, holding you in place no less surely than planets are held in their orbits. And may you hear the stars sing hallelujah when you dare to do and be exactly what is yours.” (Quest, March 2015, 6)

Blessed be, Amen.

Gaye Ortiz 5/14/2015

Committing to Climate Justice

Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta

April 12, 2015

The other day on our church Facebook page I put a link to a short film that was sent to me – it’s called MOTHER: Caring for 7 Billion, and anyone can have free access to it on the web until April 22^nd; I found it interesting that there was a typo in the heading: it says,  “Earth Day Free Steaming Through April 2015”!

Yes, Chicken Little, the sky IS falling! Anyone who denies it after all the evidence from science is willfully ignorant and working against the planet’s best interests. Some of us are old enough to remember the TV ad with the slogan, ”It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” – if we don’t know it by now, we soon will!

The impact of our earth, of nature in general and of climate change in particular, upon our lives and our spiritual identities, is the subject of our service today. For Unitarian Universalists, climate change is not only something that we are concerned about because of our seventh principle, but because it is a social justice issue.  Our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations recognizes this in a statement on Global Warming/Climate Change:

“Environmental justice is the recognition that environmental degradation disproportionately harms those who are poor and marginalized, even while they derive less benefit and have less control over how our resources are used. These concerns are especially true with global warming/climate change. As weather patterns change, causing drought in some areas and flooding in others, poorer peoples lack the resources to respond to these disasters and bear the brunt of suffering when they happen.

Our Unitarian Universalist (UU) spiritual values call us to act on the personal, local, and national levels to adopt practices that will reverse global warming/climate change, and to do so in ways that are just and equitable.” (UU Guide to 2012 Preach-In, www.uua.org)

Climate Justice Month is a month-long spiritual journey for climate justice, from March 22 through April 22. Its organizers, Commit2Respond, have listed on its website three action goals for individuals, congregations, and organizations – 1. To shift to a low-carbon future 2. To advance the human rights of affected communities 3. To grow the climate justice movement.

The concept of Climate Justice is huge, and even taking one full month to reflect on what it means and how we can become committed to it doesn’t do it ‘justice’, no pun intended. So the Commit2Respond team divided up the month into 4 phases, beginning on World Water Day, which, fittingly, is when the Savannah Riverkeeper Tonya Bonitatibus came to speak here; I’d like to reflect that 4-part structure with our service this morning. Each of those phases will have a spiritual reflection to enrich our appreciation and deepen our understanding of the process we need to go through in order to commit to climate justice. With each phase, we will focus on an element of the Earth to ground that reflection. Denice will be helping with those reflections.

Starting on March 22^nd, the first week’s emphasis was "Rejoicing and Celebrating in Our Natural World." The Rev. Thomas Starr King said,

I believe that if, on every Sunday morning before going to church,…  we could fairly perceive, through our outward senses, one or two features of the constant order and glory of nature, our materialistic dullness would be broken, surprise and joy would be awakened, we should feel that we live amid the play of Infinite thought; and the devout spirit would be stimulated so potently that our hearts would naturally mount in praise and prayer. (Lessons from the Sierra Nevada, sermon, 1863)

We all have wonderful experiences of the world around us, and I love the way Kenneth Patton, the author of our closing hymn, “We Are the Earth Upright and Proud”, puts this sense of celebration: “And with its purpose strong, we sing earth’s pilgrim song, in us the earth is growing.” The element we focus on with rejoicing and celebrating in our natural world is water, and of course nothing can grow without water. Our connection with the natural world and its gifts, which are what we eat and drink, is an essential one for our continued existence.

When we think of the teeming life in rivers and oceans, the incredible and invisible underwater kingdom, we are humbled at how little we know about our planet. But water is at the heart of basic human rights, which everyday are under threat – even right here in the US. The media story last week about Peter Brabeck, the CEO of Nestle, is an example: water is a natural resource we should all be entitled to for survival, yet it’s being taken from a drought-stricken area of this country, California, and sold by a multinational corporation back to us. He says that this idea that every person has a right to water is ‘extreme.’ 

And finally, when we reflect on the role of water in our natural world, we grieve at the potential for loss due to climate change. Communities throughout the world are facing threats to their water access as a result of climate change.

* First Reading

Let us now read together the responsive reading from Thich Nhat Hanh, Water Flows:

Leader: Water flows from high in the mountains.

Water runs deep in the Earth.


All: Miraculously, water comes to us,


and sustains us all.

Leader: Water flows over these hands.

All: May I use them skillfully


to preserve our precious planet.

The second step in the process of committing to climate justice is to "Reckon with and Grieve the Loss We are Confronting." To me, the vastness of this earth makes it difficult for me to imagine the magnitude of destruction.

Just seeing images of the mountaintop mining in Kentucky causes me to grieve for the beauty of those mountains, and how they are left bare and scarred, after their precious interior materials have been gouged out for our use.
 “We are caught between two fears,” say Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone: “The fear that if we do nothing, our world will fall into crisis, and the fear of acknowledging how bad things are, because of the fear it brings up.” Matthew McHale from UU Ministry for Earth writes, “So many of us deal with this conflict by trying to push the crisis out of view. But we aren’t really free of it; it’s just sitting there like a pit in our stomach. We may try to numb the pain, but it numbs the joy as well. Our energy starts to sag, and we feel less alive. And…as a society we become unable to deal with the deepening crisis unfolding around us.”

Fire is the symbol of Reckoning because Fire signifies transformation, righteous anger and passion; in this phase of reflecting on climate justice, we are asked to explore where our energy comes from, and to reckon with the impacts and injustices of climate change. 

* Second reading

Fire is “too much with us; late and soon….”

Of late, terrorists made spectacle of massacre, setting ablaze a living man, in a cage.

Of late, 9/11, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dachau and Auschwitz,

Fiery crosses and lynching trees—hate’s infernos.

….

Soon (and now) fossils afire, we warm the oceans, parch the soil, turn trees to kindling.

Of late and soon, self-immolating, we set this world, our home, ablaze.

We make spectacle of massacre.

“For this, for everything, we are out of tune….

….

But let us never forget, never again—fire “changes everything.”


In the beginning was fire, and fire’s the seed of stars—
Ex ignis, we come from fire.


Fire, our first tool, warmed and gathered us.


Fire, need not and cannot and will not be, our blazing cage.

- Dr. Michael Hogue

McHale says, “By honoring our emotions, we begin to transform them. We recognize that our sadness and grief are manifestations of our deep love for the world. We recognize that our anger arises from our passion for justice. And we can then begin to use those emotions in service to helping heal our world.”

And so the third step in committing to climate justice is "Reconnecting with Front-Line Communities and with the Earth in All Her Glory." 
The Commit2Respond Team says that “being truly honest about the crisis we are facing returns us to our deep love for this world, for love is at the root of our sense of loss.

Today, we reconnect with that love and remember why we entered this process: because we love and are inextricably interconnected with all the beings of this earth and the earth itself. Hope lives in these connections. By reaching out to reconnect with our community, our neighbors, and our allies in this struggle to reclaim life for all, we re-source our souls for the work ahead. Reaching out reconnects us to our own well of inspiration and to relationships that make us resilient.

We know power is everywhere and can be used for good and for ill. The power of human connection can strengthen us. But power is not evenly distributed in our society. We carry this awareness in our connections, and commit to an awareness of our own power in relationship, the power of others, and different patterns of power in society. We choose to source our work with power that nourishes and works for justice—power that serves solidarity—and work against power that harms some and privileges others.”

Can we “commit to working in ways that share power, that redistribute power more fairly, and that use power to create a more beautiful world”?

Let us reflect on this task by using the symbol of air: it signifies breath, the breath that we all take as creatures of the planet in an atmosphere that sustains us, and which we need to keep clean. Clean air is life, and a precious gift. Breathing is balance; we should strive for balance in how we take and give back to the earth.

* Third Reading

“Listen to the air.

You can hear it, feel it,

smell it, taste it.

Woniya wakan, the holy air,

which renews all by its breath.

Woniya wakan, spirit, life, breath, renewal,

it means all that.

We sit together, don’t touch,

but something is there,

we feel it between us

as a presence.

A good way to start thinking

about nature

is to talk to it,

talk to the rivers, to the lakes,

to the winds,

as to our relatives.”

― John (Fire) Lame Deer

In Week Four, which is next week, we are asked to "Commit to A New Way." An obvious symbol for this final week, which ends on Earth Day, is Earth. This is the time for “bringing our vision into reality, fruition, culmination, committing to long-term actions that will create a paradigm shift and grow the climate justice movement”. As I mentioned, Commit2Respond suggests 3 goals for congregations to accomplish, which we can talk about after the service.

We have our work cut out for us; and how much better it would be if we had partners from other faith traditions – especially the ones we name as being the sources of our UU tradition – to join us in our commitment to save the planet.

The good news is that creation care is an ethic present in every major faith tradition. This was made clear in 1986 when Pope John Paul II invited major faith leaders to the town of Assisi, home of St Francis who loved nature. The resulting "Assisi Declaration" was a real challenge to world faiths to practice what they preach, signed as it was by Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu leaders.

Just how do these world faiths express concern and care for the earth? For instance, the Koran says, “Assuredly the creation of the heavens and the earth is greater than the creation of humankind; yet most people understand not.” Because it is an Abrahamic faith, Islam stresses the role of humanity as stewards as does Judaism and Christianity.

"The Muslim Declaration on Nature" that came from the Assisi meeting says, “The central concept of Islam is… the unity of God. Allah is unity; and his unity is also reflected in the unity of man and nature. Unity…is maintained by balance and harmony. Therefore, Muslims say that Islam is the middle path and we will be answerable for how we have maintained balance and harmony in the whole of creation around us” (IPL)

We can read in the Judeo-Christian sacred texts the promise God made in the rainbow covenant with Moses never again to destroy the world by flood. There are also references in the Hebrew scriptures – in the Psalms, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Exodus, Job and Second Chronicles, that urge us to care for creation. Even though there is a clear ascetic strand of religious thinking and practice in Christianity that emphasizes denial of the world, in Judaism there is a more sustained and coherent reverence for the earth in its teachings down the centuries. Rabbi Abraham ben Moses, from the 12^th century, says “In order to serve God, one needs access to the enjoyment of the beauties of nature, such as the contemplation of flower-decorated meadows, majestic mountains, flowing rivers…For all these are essential to the spiritual development of even the holiest people.” (Interfaith Power and Light)

In the early history of the Christian church, the letter of Paul to the Romans says that the fate of creation is bound up with the fate of humanity (Rom 8:19-23). St Basil the Great and St Bonaventure also speak about the need to admire nature – in fact, Bonaventure declares: ”He…who is not illumined by such great splendor of created things is blind.” (IPL)

And Pope John Paul II’s feat in gathering religious leaders in Assisi to agree on their traditions’ emphasis on creation care is about to be topped by Pope Francis. He is working on a papal document, called an encyclical on climate justice. “The encyclical will be released in advance of Pope Francis’s address to the United Nations in September and before high-stakes climate negotiations in Paris at the end of the year. Naderev Sano, the Philippines’ climate commissioner said in an interview that this issue has been negotiated “at the political level for more than 20 years, and we look to Pope Francis to untangle this stalemate, because this issue is beyond merely a political issue. It is a profound moral issue that affects the whole world.” The Philippines was devastated by a typhoon in 2013 that killed more than 7,000 people, and its climate commission hopes the pope’s encyclical will be a “game changer for the international process.” (Interview, Democracy Now)

In an blog from Faith in Public Life, John Gehring predicts that Pope Francis’ toughest audience might well be here in this country. Some conservatives are already reacting, saying that “the pope is part of “the radical green movement that is at its core anti-Christian, anti-people, and anti-progress” (Stephen Moore, a Catholic economist at the Heritage Foundation in Washington).  But, Gehring reminds us, in classic conservative philosophy, conservative means “preserving what is good and being skeptical about the notion of progress at any price. Surely our fragile environment is an inheritance we don’t want to squander, and we’ve already paid too high a price for the progress we’ve made at the expense of our planet. As Pope Francis himself said, the environment is not just a legacy from the past, but a loan for our children.” 

("Can Francis break the US climate change stalemate?" April 7, 2015, 11:05 am | Posted by John Gehring http://www.faithinpubliclife.org)

So we UUs are not alone in wanting to protect our climate and our future, and our future generations.  As he recovers from a serious stroke, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has just this week urged us to wake up to the critical task at hand: “There’s a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with the earth.” ("Wake Up to the Revolution", Thich Nhat Hanh, April 6, 2015 http://www.lionsroar.com)

* Fourth Reading

Earth

By Rev. Mark Belletini

This is our earth.

It falls through heaven like a pearl in a glass of plum wine.

There are no other earths that I know of.

There are no other skies that we have mapped.

This is our earth.

The Oneness who gave birth to it

remains nameless.

There was no midwife then

to bring us word of the birth-cry.

We only rejoice that it is.

This is our earth.

Ice caps its head.  Glaciers clasp its feet.

Warm wind, like the breath of a lover,

breathes around its breast.

Mountains thrust up to the clouds, bringing joy.

Storms blow across its shores, bringing fear.

Silvery fish capture sunlight and haul it down

into the deep, as on shore, valleys spread

with ripening fruit.  Cities teem with the

Poor and disenfranchised in the shadow of

golden towers. Children live and also die.

Highways throb.  Monks sit in silence.  Mothers

work. Crickets chirp.  Teachers plan.  Engineers

design.  Fathers write letters.

People marry

with and without the blessings of law.

People cry.

They laugh, and brood, and worry and wait.

This is our earth.

There are no other earths.

Before its wonder, philosophers fall silent.

Before its mystery,

poets admit their words are shadow, not light.

And all the great names religious teachers

have left to us

Ishtar, Shekinah, Terra Mater, Suchness, Wakan Tanka, Gaia

suddenly refuse to announce themselves.

And so we too fall silent,

entering the time where words end

and reality begins.

And so it is up to us, by keeping our sense of interconnectedness through the Seventh Principle in mind, and by taking opportunities like the Commit2Respond’s Climate Justice Month, to become advocates for the earth. The ultimate aim of this month is to raise our own awareness of how precious our world is. To quote the Rev Judy Moores from the UU Church of Davis, California, it is “our ancestral home, our current home, and the only home that we will ever have – a place deserving of reverence, gratitude, wonder, love and care.” (UU Guide to Preach-in).

The Southern Baptist in me feels that this is the time for the Altar Call: asking all of you gathered here in this church today to make a faith commitment to be good stewards of the earth, to teach our children and our grandchildren to be good stewards as well, and to join our fellow spiritual travelers - in all world faiths and none - in spreading the good news - the Gospel – of creation care… while we still can. Can I get an Amen?

Gaye W. Ortiz

4-11-2015

* Readings for Climate Justice Sunday from the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), Commit2Respond http://www.commit2respond.org