Minister's Corner - April 2025

Earth Day: An overdue conversation with ourselves

As a Pastor of a Unitarian Universalist Church there is no easier service to prepare for than the annual Earth Day sermon. No more information about any morally relevant topic pours in on us faster than the environmental impact of this or that.

And, in order to capture the pace and urgency of the topic, I would like to instruct all “Faith Matters” readers to read this fast. The problem is crucial, and the pace should feel a little frenetic. Ok, ready!

From Polar bears to pop bottles, bees to trees, asthma to asbestos,

…urgent info about carbon, coal, congestion, and climate change rush forward.

Pictures I can use for the cover of the order of service are everywhere.

The angles and content on what can and/or should be said are so plentiful that Earth Day-related news and appeals pile up in my physical and now digital recycling bin.

Yours too, I suspect.

It requires no effort at all to come up with something important to say from the pulpit about how we should change our behavior regarding our fragile home.

Ironically, this concern is due to the remarkable recent successes of humans.

In a very short time frame, we have improved the quality, comfort, and longevity of life.

We as a species are, as the kids say, “crushing it.”

A true statement in both positive and negative ways.

The trouble is that our success, truly remarkable as it is, is threatening the place that birthed us and the only real place we can live.

Again, it’s ironic. Above all else the challenge of our generation, our era, our culture is to hold onto as many of the wonderful things we have worked to accomplish without destroying ourselves in the process. Given our newfound technological capacities and success as a species, of all the things on our collective wish list that we want to do, the only thing we NEED to do, is make any future success, sustainable.

A task so simple and yet so hard.

Although the EPA is being gutted along with oversight on commerce and industry, I think what is really needed is to have a very difficult multi-generational conversation. One that stretches seven generations into the future, as some Native American traditions suggest, but also seven generations into the past.

The results of that conversation should be what we use to set policy.

I imagine a conversation with the generation that came of age during the industrial revolution might go like this…

The planes and the cars and the mines and the central air, and the frozen food, and all that you dreamed up and struggled so hard to put into place has worked. The vision has been largely successful and continues to spread around the globe.

Thank you, seriously thank you, we are grateful.

That was an awesome transformation

But, now there are roughly 8 billion of us, and…well…

I think you should sit down to hear this.

We have discovered that the life that we successfully built rests on the unexamined premise that the planet was infinite.

There is no need to feel defensive.

You/we could have never seen this coming

The truth is, we are grateful for so much of what you have handed us.

However, …and this is hard to say…. (our eyes turn down and bashfully we say) but we feel the need to go another way.” “Please forgive us.”

Can you imagine that?

For us to not ruin the earth, imagination will be required.

For change to happen, we humans are going to need events, tools, rituals, metaphors, images, and imagination to pull us along, so that we can begin to take seriously the ecological spot we are in.

Good news - there is potential for change.

Evidence that change could happen quickly is all around us, and disappointingly not.

Some of us are in denial. Some of us are angry. Some of us resistant. It’s all very reminiscent of Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grief.

As modern religious people, we need to introduce powerful images, that are intentional and emotionally move us to greater empathy with the planet.

I encourage you to pause to think about what images, what ideas we might employ to get our species more sustainable. As religious people, this is our new work.

Rev. Steve