April 19, 2009

First Church and Parish in Dedham

Sermon Celebrating our Mother Earth

The Rev. Rali Weaver

Serendipitously, as I was considering our topic on Friday, Doug Howell stopped in the office and offered a quote from Don't Know Much About the Universe: Everything You Need to Know About Outer Space but Never Learned By Kenneth C. Davis. On the page Doug left for me the author had quoted Voices of the Universe: Mystery of the Cosmos by Johannes Kepler who was a key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution. I hope you won’t mind if I begin with his sentiments.

At the top of the photocopy Doug had written “An amazing quote by an early scientist” and then drew an arrow to these words:

We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens… The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.

Little did Doug know that I have been meditating all week upon singing of all types. I haven’t actually been asking why the birds do sing but as we have assembled this Folk Music /Earth Day Worship, I have wondered what folk music and the songs of our mother earth have in common.

While I am not sure I can agree with the great Scientist that all things in the universe were ordered for the pleasure of the human mind— I do believe the human mind (and spirit) benefit greatly from these gifts of nature.

Today on this Sunday before Earth Day it is good and right that we should celebrate the great gifts of our Mother Earth with song.

There are times though when I am so distracted by the plight of our environment that I loose sight of the beauty of our natural world. Our media reminds us every day of the greenhouse effect so on an unseasonably warm day my mind turns to the melting ice caps. I walk in the woods and instead of meditating upon foliage or appreciating the breezes or the soft songs of birds I can only lament the traffic noise and the litter that lines my walkway.

There are some truths that make it difficult to sing joyously about the earth.

Diane Winchester reminded me that there are not many upbeat folk songs about saving the earth.

Maybe you can think of some upbeat songs that also hold to the truth of our environmental problems but I can only think of Joni Mitchell’s song Big Yellow Taxi. “They took all the trees; Put ‘em in a tree museum

And they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em. Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got Till its gone. They paved paradise And put up a parking lot”

The sad truth is our earth is not the same as it was when we were children and it won’t be the same when our children are old. In the name of progress we have prioritized the green of money over the green of our grasses and trees. Conservation in this light is quite simply the effort to keep what we in full knowledge that we will never be able to replace what has been lost.

No wonder it is so hard to find up beat folk songs about saving our Mother Earth.

If you are anything like me you already, reduce, reuse and recycle to a ridiculous extent and hang your clothes out to dry even when it might rain, you also keep your thermostat low and you drive your car as little as humanly possible and you still feel bad.

What more can we do you ask. How can we turn back the tides?.
We can beg for legislation that will enforce cleaner air and cleaner water and protect our land.

We can strive to continue to reduce our own carbon footprints by getting involved with groups that educate us like Dedham’s Carbon Café Initiative. There are probably thousands of things we can do to protect our mother earth from any more harm, but just short of abandoning all forms of motorized transportation and using only our bicycles or feet, we probably won’t find any of these things getting us much closer to nature.

I bring this up because (if you hadn’t noticed already) I did not title this sermon Saving Our Mother Earth I titled it “Celebrating our Mother Earth”.

I don’t know about you, but worrying about the environment or spending my days advocating for cleaner air and carefully calculating my carbon emissions rarely elicits any feelings in me of celebration.

Being tax season I could go so far as to say that counting anything at all sort of kills any celebratory mood for me. I confess that I might be the only one who feels this way but I think that tax season is about the most stressful season of the year.

I mean spring does have its rainy days, and summer its heat, and fall all those darn leaves and then winter with the snow removal, but from my vantage point, tax season is the most harrowing.

Of course there is the holiday season with the never ending shopping and packaging and wrapping and cooking, but I still think Tax Season is the worst.

This year on Tax Day I had some difficulty finding my W-2 form. Not only that but I hadn’t remembered it was tax day until it was certainly too late to be searching the enormous parsonage for the form. All the frantic worry and searching put me to bed far too late at night. Going to bed after such a frenzy I naturally did not sleep. Perhaps you know how the rest of the story goes-- I could not sleep because I was frantic about my taxes, and so the next day (not having enough sleep) I awoke rather frazzled. Which lead to a difficult day.

Does anyone else in this room recognize this cycle? I sure hope I am not the only one.

I have several spiritual practices that help to ground me each day (that I have spoken about from this pulpit before.) But on these days I did not practice anything. I did not address the Sun with the Gayatri “you who are the source of all power, whose rays illuminate the whole world, illuminate also my heart so it too can do your work.” I did not stick my feet in the earth and feel the earth beneath my toes grounding me. And worst of all I did not meditate.

In my frenzy to get “on track” with the green of money I simply forgot all the mechanisms that usually keep me on track that are grounded in the green of the earth.

I share this with you today, because I believe it is a perfect metaphor for how in our worry and desire to correct what has been lost it is easy to get off track and loose sight of what truly nourishes us and feeds our spirit. All of which comes from our mother earth and is still here with us.

On Thursday night I had a ticket to go to an Indigo girls concert. If you aren’t familiar with the Indigo Girls they are sort of a folk Rock band who have been around since the 80’s. What is remarkable about the two front women Amy Ray and Emily Saliers is how for 20 years or more they have been singing their own true song. Their lyrics are often poetic and profound. They speak the truth of their lives in song. And despite singing on an independent label people flock to their concerts, buy their albums and respond with their souls to their message.

There was this one lyric they sing. It is one of their older songs but it struck a chord in me and reminded me that all of my tax and bill paying worries were not as important as life.

Maybe some of you have heard the song on the radio. The song sounds a little bit like this:

Im trying to tell you something about my life

Maybe give me insight between black and white

And the best thing youve ever done for me

Is to help me take my life less seriously

Its only life after all

Yeah

Well darkness has a hunger thats insatiable

And lightness has a call thats hard to hear

I wrap my fear around me like a blanket

I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it

Im crawling on your shores

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains

I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains

Theres more than one answer to these questions

Pointing me in a crooked line

And the less I seek my source for some definitive

(the less I seek my source)

The closer I am to fine

The closer I am to fine

The way they sing it, that song reminded me of the earthly truth that life is this organic process, that defies all our counting and measuring and plans.

The celebration of our Mother Earth only needs us to slow down and to remember the beautiful things that surround us, to point our hearts and minds to the sun and embrace its warmth and also to relax in the cool of the shadow.

There is no one way to celebrate our Mother Earth, but turning our hearts and minds to its song, to sing with the birds wind and to settler our own spirits in this way is our gift to our mother and our mothers gift to us.

As I have been thinking of what gift to give our Mother Earth, I have also been thinking about Fresh Air Fund for Kids. If you aren’t already familiar with it the Fresh Air Fund is an independent, not-for-profit agency that provides free summer vacations to New York City children from low-income communities so that they can spend time in the country and closer to nature.

Nearly 2 million children have been helped by this Fresh Air Fund since it was founded in 1877 and nearly 10,000 New York City children now enjoy free Fresh Air Fund programs annually. Children visit volunteer host families in suburbs and small town communities across 13 states from Virginia to Maine

When I was a kid living in Virginia and Pennsylvania there were a couple summers when our family had Fresh Air Kids visit us. The thing I remember about this was the feeling that what we were doing was actually helping the earth. Maybe it was because I was a kid and the name Fresh Air gives the impression that what we were doing was freshening the air. But what I remember about those visitors is how astounded they were at first by the open spaces, the fresh air, the clean water. One of them was so surprised that we could swim in a lake another that we could see the stars, both that we could hear the birds sing and rustle in the trees.

As a child I thought that giving other people who might not be exposed to it, an opportunity to experience the earth, might encourage them to live closer to nature in the future. And I also thought that when you learn to love the sound of the birds, you want to protect them. When you learn to love the fresh air in your lungs you want to protect it.

As our lives get busier and busier it is so much harder to take the time to nourish our souls with nature’s gifts. But the gift of our Mother Earth is that at any point when we decide to turn our face toward the song, to turn our ears to her music, to plant our feet in the soil, her grounding nourishing presence will be there.

Teaching City Children to respect and love nature may not be the quickest form of environmental preservation, but it is a form of environmental preservation.

In celebration of our Mother Earth I have no intention of encouraging you to stop striving to protect her, only to direct us all to remember that more important than protecting her our Mother Earth needs to be savored and enjoyed.

What I think songs of all kinds have in common is the power to nourish us and replenish our spirits so that we can carry on. May our folk songs today remind us to pay attention to the songs of our earth which are more blessed than the songs of traffic, more nourishing than the distractions of our society and are a free gift we can share with every person we meet.

Happy Earth Day.