by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given April 7, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

OPENING WORDS

Welcome here to this community of faith,

welcome here to this place of fellowship and laughter,

this house of remembrance and hope,

where we celebrate all the seasons of life.

We come here together, young and old alike,

to find meaning, to find hope, to join our voices in song.

Come now and let us worship here together.

One day a couple of friends were talking and they came around to the subject of churches. They had both been church shopping and decided to compare notes.

They liked the wonderful sense of mystery in the Catholic Church. They loved the smell of incense and the sounds of bells.

The Methodists, one of them thought, seemed to be good singers and they had a good Sunday school program.

The Episcopalians, they agreed, had the best music in town and the homilies didn’t take up too much time.

They talked about a number of traditions and finally one friend asked the other what she knew about the Unitarians.

"Oh, the Unitarians," she said, "they believe in recycling."

Even in a faith where we profess that we don’t all have to believe in the same thing, I expect there would be pretty common agreement on the issue of recycling. I know that for me it is a weekly ritual, one that I can even get a little compulsive about. Every Sunday night, I carefully separate out everything that can be recycled, and some days I want to try to slip in that soiled paper food container even when the instructions from the recycling people make it clear that if there is one thing in the bunch that won’t pass, then the whole load will be rejected. Still, there’s that part of me that does not want that one piece to go into the regular garbage. I want to attain perfection in my recycling.

But that is another story. Most of us recycle, I expect, because it is pretty easy, and it just seems like the right thing to do. And not far under the surface there are other reasons why we do it. But I want to get back to that and recycling a little later.

This is the time of year when I don’t have to go far to be reminded of one of the most basic lessons in life.

Yesterday I went into my yard for a time and decided to do some weeding. I don’t tend to pay a whole lot of attention to what is happening in the garden in the winter. But when I walked through it a few days ago I realized that all of a sudden I was way behind on my weeding and that I needed to catch up in a hurry. Things have been growing for the past couple weeks.

As I looked around the garden, I saw all the things that were dead from last fall and winter. And as soon as I started getting my hands into the soil I saw all the life that was there. I saw the worms crawling around. I saw the bugs making their way over the little ridges of the soil. I looked again at the plants that when I first saw them appeared to be dead from last season, and then I look down and see that a new round of life is emerging—little leaves appearing—I just hadn’t noticed it. And as I started to dig around in the soil I was aware of the leaves that had fallen from the trees last fall that had now become part of that soil and that now were in a different form, a form that continued to give forth life. I was reminded of the smell of the earth in the spring, a sweet smell, still kind of rotten, ready to be more active again.

In witnessing this, I was reminded once again of the fact that things don’t die as much as they change their form, and that one form evolves into another and that really it is all part of some great cycle. What has died will become energy and food for more life. As I witness this it was abundantly clear that from the death of winter new life springs forward. I am moved by what I see and even a little surprised, even if it is the same pattern that I have come to know year after year after year.

Now, I know some of what happens in this process, I know about how the bugs are working, how the moisture plays a role. I know that things rot and decay and change form. I know that the temperature is important and the amount of sunshine. But even when I know all of this, at the core of this change—this evolution—is some wonder and mystery that I will not be able to explain, no matter how much I might study the science of what is happening.

Exactly how living things are able to be still for a time and then to move forward into something new, I can’t ever fully know. And in fact, I may not want to know. What is most important for me is that year after year this happens. I don’t need to look far in the natural world to start to see the parallels with my own life. I know that I go through certain rhythms, though maybe not as predictable as the seasons and nature. But I can see how in my life as well, what I may think is a setback—loss of job, loss of relationship, something that simply shakes me up—may not be a setback. It may be something I will look at it one day and see it in a totally different way. That what happened there, even though it seemed to be a loss is really something that turned out for the good. If not for the good, then to see at least something that came out of it. What I can see with hindsight is that I just couldn’t see it at the time. I am reminded in my life that the things that were once important are not so important now. I see that my life, like the earth, will go through its share of cycles, and that inevitably things will change.

And I see that what I do is very much connected with everything and affects everything else. I see that what happens in my life makes a difference in the way that everything else around me lives. And that is where the recycling part comes in.

Part of that living is that I am a consumer. I buy things to eat and all kinds of other stuff that I use for all kinds of things. I buy food. I buy gas for the car and things for my house. Some of that stuff piles up in my house. I travel to other places and consume things there. And all of this prompts questions for me. When I do consume things, in the end, what comes of those things? Just what happens when I throw something out? I use them and in the end either digest them or decide to throw them away. At some point they become garbage, my garbage. They either go to the recycling bin or the garbage pail or down to the basement to stay there or they end up in some pile in the corner of my study.

In the society we live in, we consume a lot. You’ve heard the statistics about what we as Americans consume compared to the percentage of the world’s population we are. Most of us don’t have to look far to know how much we are inundated with stuff. Most days when I open up my mail at the office or at home, I seem to throw out a good portion of it right on the spot. The rest goes into a pile and most of that gets thrown away a month or two later, after it has been on the pile for a sufficient length of time.

If I look in my closets or in my basement I also know how much I have and how much of it I really don’t need. That, I expect, is true for many of us living at this time in this culture. And some of it is not a surprise. We get the message that it is good and important that we consume. When terrorists attacked last fall and our country went into a state of war, we were not told to conserve as in times past, but just the opposite. We were told that if we wanted to be patriotic, we should consume more.

But there are consequences to this—I can’t even imagine all the consequences. When we consume we also produce waste, all kinds of waste. It is not just what our bodies produce, but also what is left behind from our actions. When we consume, too often we don’t think about what that will be.

There is a story that is probably apocryphal about the scientists who developed nuclear power. The story goes that some years after the first nuclear power plants had been built, when they were up and running and had already started to run into problems, somebody did a survey that discovered that none of the scientists who had developed nuclear energy had ever changed a diaper. Now, most of them had children, and most of them knew about what children do after they eat, but none of them had ever changed a diaper.

The moral of the story, of course, is pretty clear—we need to be mindful of our garbage. When we produce something, we need to know what the consequences might be down the road. And if we are not, then we’ll have an even bigger mess on our hands years and years later. We have to be aware of the consequences of our actions. We need to be mindful of the garbage that we produce.

It may be this awareness, on some level, that makes us take out those recyclables every week. It may be the awareness on some level that we are connected with other living things and that what we do affects everything else. This is the awareness that might underlie our commitment to our 7^th principle, when we hold up the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.

It is that principle that reminds us to be mindful of our garbage. It is also that principle that reminds us that we are connected with all of life. We are reminded that what we do affects everything else, and that our own lives depend on everything else.

In this principle we are reminded that the earth has a way of making this cycle of life into death and then back into new life happen. We are reminded that even when we fall on hard times, even when we wonder how we will make it through the events that set us back in life, that even in all of our brokenness, even with all the mistakes that we make in life, there is something that will come of that. That we will be changed, but that life will go on, in one form or another.

This is where the compost pile comes in. Writer Judy Canato talks about what she will put in the pile:

"What will I place on the compost pile that is me? Impatience, most definitely.

"And confusion. Doubt. And a touch of stubbornness (hope no one sees me throw that one in). I usually have too much control, so I’m sure there will be scraps of that left over. Sometimes I cast aside my leftover anger, which can generate quite a bit of heat.

"Broken relationships will have to go in there at times—dead ones that have no hope of bearing fruit—and the pain that comes from going separate ways. Old thinking patterns that don’t work anymore. Words—like yesterday’s ‘Yes’s’ and last week’s ‘no’s.’ Words spoken in haste, without love. Unspoken words that contribute to pain and injustice and disharmony. Deeds performed with insensitivity. Feelings shoved aside because they’re too raw—too hard, or too rotten—too soft. Good intentions that were peeled away from forgotten purposes.

"Quite a compost pile! And what a stench! But in due season, and with a little care, all the pieces added to a compost pile disintegrate. They’ll smell. They’ll generate heat. Individual elements will become unrecognizable, but part of the essence remains, hidden within the dark, rich humus the compost pile will become.

"Humus. Of the earth, the ground, the soil. Human. An earthly one. I am of earth. My own humus, product of my life’s compost pile, fertilizes the transformation process that allows me to become human."

Most of us, I expect, have had experiences in life that have shaped us. Those things that have made us the people we have become. And in life there are those experiences we can look back on, those experiences where we think we really wanted something only to look back years later and realize that it was a tremendous blessing that that job did not come through or that that relationship did not work out.

With hindsight we can see that what happened likely was for the best, or at least that something good came out of it. But at the time we could not perhaps have even imagined that that would be the case. And we can look back on things that were terrible, things we thought we would never recover from, and we can see that we did, that those experiences, while not what we would have hoped for, made us different in some way, and that we, too, found something in those experiences.

That is what happens in the pile of compost. The compost pile of life.

Writer Wayne Dosick is a rabbi, and he tells the story of how he and his wife lost their home in a fire. They had been away and when they came to the airport in San Diego closest to where they lived, their house sitter met them at the gate. She told them that a windstorm had come up and was fueling a fire. She had been forced to evacuate along with neighbors. She told them the few things that she had been able to pull out of the house.

They went home in silence, not knowing what to expect. Their house may have been fine, but it may also have been gone. When they got there, they learned the worst. They learned that the house had been completely destroyed. It was night and there wasn’t much they could do. They went to a friend’s house for a night of little or no sleep. The next morning they went and they saw in the daylight that it really was as bad as they had feared the night before.

Everything was gone and nothing was there. Dosick writes that while there are those losses we expect as part of life, there are those that we don’t expect, there are those that not only set us back, but some that we may never get over. He and his wife went through all kinds of stages, anger, grief, all kinds of things. They asked where their possessions went. Most of them into thin air, consumed in fire. They asked where God was in all of this and what this meant for their faith. In the end, Dosick writes that there are those losses that can break us, or he says they can serve us. We are called to find meaning in the loss, even when that might be very hard.

He tells the story of the man who was wearing only one shoe. Someone says to him, "I see you have lost a shoe." "No," he replies, "I found one."

He writes that everything we know best, everything we love most, is made up of what he calls God-energy. That there is something more than the object itself when we give it power and meaning. That some of our own energy is invested in the thing and when that is gone there is a part of us that is gone as well. That is why some things are so much more precious than other things. And what he and his wife found is that no matter what form they are turned into they are still there for us.

He gives the example of sorting through the ashes of his home and seeing that everything was destroyed. When they looked closer, they found amazing little messages. He writes that here and there were lumps of metal, burned and fused together. To most anyone looking at them they would have been pieces of junk. But he found the lump that used to be his grandfather’s pocket watch and another that was the cap of his favorite pen. The lumps did not have any real value, but for him they were also little touchstones of what he once had, very important and valuable.

And Dosick found that his faith in God was questioned. He asked himself where God was in the fire. He found some segments of pages of books, and on one was written the words, "I asked him point blank: ‘How can you believe in God after the Holocaust?’ He looked at me and said, ‘How can you not believe after the Holocaust?’" The lesson he learned is that God was not destroyed in the fire. It was God who was still there with him through the fire.

In life we find again and again that we are tested. We cannot know what tragedies might come our way. We cannot know what life will hold. And no matter what we experience we find that we can’t have the answers. We find that we can never fully know how what we do will help or hurt those who go after us.

We are called to take the garbage out, and to keep the garbage we create to a minimum. We are called to tend the compost pile as an act of faith, that something will come out of all of it in the end, something that will grow out of soil that is rich, something that will represent life in a new form, in some new and mysterious way. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of life, help us to be ever mindful of the blessings of our lives, even those we might wish away. Help us to be open to growing. Help us to be ready to reach out a hand in love. Help us to be always open to the spirit and where it might lead us. In this time of spring, in this time of new life, we ask this in the name of the good and the holy. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you find yourselves planted in fertile soil, good people. Tend your compost pile, and always sing a song of thanks.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.