“…there’s in this spring, a new era.”
A new era. That phrase is from the virtual choir piece at the beginning of the service. Which I loved.
I loved the setting in that community garden…in the Cully neighborhood, a model of empowerment of those who have been disempowered.
I loved the Santana lyrics and rhythms…did they bring a smile to your face as they did for me?
That video was a perfect, musical introduction to our reflection today…
The consideration of Earth Day, in this year of Covid and climate change and the on-going, urgent demand for racial justice…
How do Earth Day, and Covid, and Racial Justice…how do they all fit together…or do they? How do we organize power so that our journey toward the Beloved Community does not replicate the exclusion and injustice of the system that got us into this mess in the first place. How do we organize power so that love can win?
“…there [is] in this spring, a new era
In the air of this new universe
today there is freedom.”
Let me begin by reminding you that Earth Day has passed. It was April 22, 10 days ago. We had planned this service for last Sunday…until the verdict in the Chauvin trial was announced. The priority last Sunday for First Unitarian seemed to be to recognize that verdict and try to understand its meaning…and how we might be called to respond.
So, we moved this service and the recognition of Earth Day forward a week.
And that decision speaks volumes about how these issues impact each other, about how they HAVE impacted each other… about how they can easily be seen to be in conflict…a zero-sum game…in competition for our attention and for our energy.
We need to find a wholistic understanding of all that we are dealing with…so that we can craft individual and collective, spiritual and political responses that avoid the trap of competing claims and move toward a single vision of Beloved Community.
There is a great deal to cover in this sermon.
The theme of Earth Day this year is “Restore Our Earth.”
Restore Our Earth.
The theme reflects a broadening of focus, beyond just trying to stave off the devastations of failing to change our ways.
The language of restoration begins to ask…to invite…to open up a conversation about vision…about what kind of world we hope will emerge from these Covid days… and from our responses to a warming climate.
We responded to the call to center environmental concerns on climate change…on the danger that global warming poses…
Many of us have been moved by that call to limit the damage…to mitigate the cost in human suffering and environmental loss that increasing temperatures are bringing.
It has been harder to bring a human justice focus into the environmental frameworks…harder to remember the greater impact of those changes on Indigenous, Black, Brown and poor communities here at home and on entire countries and island nations of the global south.
Harder to hold both, and fully embrace an environmental justice frame.
Restore the Earth…
As the Earth Day Network writes:” the theme is based on the emerging concept that rejects the idea that our only options to save the planet are to mitigate or adapt to the impacts of climate change…”
The Earth Day Network urged taking the “time out” demanded by the pandemic to concentrate on efforts not only to limit the damage of climate change but change the trajectory.
We do have a new President who is taking the US back to the international table and promising to cut US greenhouse emissions 50%…by the end of the decade.
And the pandemic…early…did give us a glimpse of a different environmental future…with CO2 emissions down 7% last year, demand for oil down 9%.
And, with the shutdown, we saw the air clear in our cities. Last year, on Earth Day, I showed pictures of the India Gate in New Delhi… just before shutdown, when the air was so thick with pollutants that you could barely make out the shape…and after just a few weeks of shut down when the skies were blue once more and the arch of the gate visible in startling detail.
But the economic cost of that glimpse has been and continues to be horrific and it has been born most by those on the margins, those least able to survive it…Black and Brown and poor communities…even the virus seemed to target them…because of the way our system forces those communities to live.
They paid the greatest price, while many of us…we may have been inconvenienced but we sheltered in comfortable homes, with income secure and investments growing
But re-opening is now the agenda. Restarting economies. Planes are full again. Cruise ships are starting to sail. There is traffic again…have you been out enough to notice?
Re-opening. And the question is whether we will just return to the pre-covid patterns…to both the environmental degradation AND the pre-Covid economic injustice which has deepened?
On this Earth Day, how can we chart a different course that deals with climate change and the restoration being called for, but also includes all of us…not just some.
That is a religious question for a faith community with Universalist in its name.
We are called, I believe, to recognize as Audre Lorde wrote…back in 1982… there is “no such thing as a single issue struggle, because we do not live single issue lives.”
Her argument, in a lecture at Harvard titled “Learning from the 60’s” laid the groundwork for what we now call “intersectionality,” of seeing the intersections of identities and concerns so that we could work toward a wholistic future.
Seeing the intersections.
And telling the truth. Again, from that lecture: “We know what it is to be lied to and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves.”
“We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about – survival and growth.”
Perhaps it is the transition from mere survival to growth and flourishing that Earth Day, with its language of restoration, is calling us toward.
The work of justice always involves tension…just like braiding sweetgrass is best done with tension… Tension is to be expected, but a competition between the issues of environmental justice and racial justice is a false, zero sum game…because the Beloved Community addresses both or it is not worthy of being called Beloved.
We need new models for change.
These are moral issues. As religious people it is true that we need to stay on the right side of history. We need to mobilize moral energy just as Dr. King mobilized the moral sensibility of this nation during the Civil Rights era. But we also need to organize power…just as he organized power to end American apartheid.
His words: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love with power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
Power needs to be organized so that love can win. The questions is not whether we organize power, but how.
I want to talk with you about developments here in Oregon…current developments…that are embodying new models of organizing.. Because we, First Unitarian, we are part of efforts to build power toward a future we all can inhabit.
Most of you will remember the drama about HB 2020 in the Oregon legislature two years ago. The bill would have introduced a “cap and trade” system to reduce carbon emissions, using the market to incentivize choices that help rather than hurt the planet. First Unitarian was a supporter.
But the politics in Salem and the walk out of Republican legislators prevented the bill from passing. Do you remember that drama?
The bill and that kind of top down, market driven approach did not bring the voices of marginalized communities to the table. So the solutions that HB2020 would have offered did not address the concerns of our whole community. In fact, without additional elements in the program, they could have made life worse for those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
It was not an accountable approach. I want us to start using the language of accountability.
The 8th Principle, the adoption of which we will vote on this month, (I got my ballot on Friday)… The 8th Principle calls for “accountably dismantling” racism and the other oppressions in ourselves and in our institutions.
Accountably dismantling.
Accountability asks who is at the table and who is being served. Accountability asks what relationships got us here and what relationships need to be sustained to move us forward.
Our work at the church now takes those questions seriously. We are following the lead of the Oregon Just Transitions Alliance…the coming together of communities on the frontlines of climate change, economic exploitation and environmental racism. OJTA organizes to create shared ownership over our collective future.
Also joining with our long-time partner IMIRJ, the Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice.
Power is being organized to support the Oregon Clean Energy Opportunity Campaign, which brings the concerns of frontline communities to the legislative table, so that the address of climate change speaks to the daily lives of people who can’t heat their homes and those who work in the fields.
There are three bills to get behind:
One, on energy affordability. HB 2475. It would create a Low-Income Utility Rate Class to decrease utility costs for families already struggling in the economic recession.
Second, healthy Homes, HB 2842. It would support home energy upgrades.
And third, 100% Clean Energy for All, HB 2021 (with over 20 amendments.) This would create living wage jobs in the renewable energy sector and invest in local energy projects as we move toward 100% clean energy.
This is Oregon’s Green New Deal.
And we are showing up in support of our front-line partners.
The organizing is so different now. On-going listening sessions in a variety of communities, including many native communities, led by OJTA, keep the effort grounded.
The work now reflects a strategy and a deep commitment to bring everyone to the table and it relies on the value of relationship and the trust that has been built over time.
Is there tension in these accountable relationships…yes…just as there was in the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960’s (you do know that Malcolm X did not reconcile with King until just before the end of his life and that SNCC was constantly pressuring King to take more aggressive stands. (Not to mention the Panthers). The same kinds of tensions existed in the organizing for Marriage Equality in the 2000’s.
Remember our reading from Braiding Sweetgrass and the importance of tension to create a strong and lasting and beautiful braid.
We are helping to organize power so that the means we employ and the relationships we rely on move us toward the vision of Beloved community we hold. No zero-sum game of one commitment or the other, but a process that honors the intersectionality and complexity of the lives we truly live and the multiple concerns we deeply hold.
You have heard me say often that the culture of white supremacy is a single culture that protects white privilege, but it also protects patriarchy and ableism and the gender binary…and the economy that is despoiling our planet. It is a single culture.
On May 12, three of our justice action groups have partnered to host a phone bank that the OJTA has organized in support of the Oregon Clean Energy Opportunity bills. Please look for details in the e-news to join this effort. It is hosted by our Immigrant Justice Action Group, Community for Earth, and the Advancing Racial Justice Action Group… Three action groups with different core missions…working together…no zero-sum game…all sharing an embracing vision.
This is breakthrough organizing for First Unitarian that holds hope for our future.
And our advocacy is deepening and getting smarter in other areas as well. Our CFE leaders raised a question about the UUA’s investment in a Canadian company named Enbridge, which is building a pipeline to take more tar sands oil across native land to refineries on the Gulf. Socially Responsible Investing at the UUA, and as a discipline more broadly, is working hard to incorporate environmental concerns. It was our ability to see those connections that led the UUA to divest from Enbridge. Our ability to see where we are now and also where we need to go.
At the meta-financial level, we are not working just for divestment from companies that profit from fossil fuels… we are beginning to find ways to use the power of money to move our goals forward.
More of the relationships that support existing structures of power and privilege are being seen.
Oregon’s Treasurer, with the “encouragement” of our coalition, has joined with 8 other state treasurers to insist that the banks the states use remove Board members with deep links to the fossil fuel industry. Many banks have published net-zero climate goals, but they are still lending huge sums to companies like Enbridge.
“The banks are gorging on doughnuts and then eating an apple afterwards,” quipped one environmental justice advocate.
Next Wednesday, May 5 at 7pm, you can attend a virtual forum that First Unitarian is hosting with a broad coalition of climate justice groups from across Oregon. The focus is on these, often invisible, ties at the governance level. Registration information is on our website.
We are getting smarter. And we need to.
We are building and sustaining more relationships. We should.
And we are claiming a more embracing vision for the Beloved Community that we hope can begin to emerge from these Covid days when the injustice in our system has been highlighted in such stark relief.
There is good news on this Earth Day…
And the best news is that the more we see, the more we will be able to see.
And the deeper our relationships become, the more nurturing and inspiring they will be.
It is too early to talk of a tipping point. We have only just begun.
But we have begun. Our own transition is in process. We are in motion.
And there is truth in the old adage that an object in motion…stays in motion.
That is very good news for today and even better news for tomorrow.
A belated Happy Earth Day to you all.
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Gaia, Mother of us all.
In this season of spring…
We know that the pandemic is not quite done with us…
And that justice has not flowed down like water….
But we are moving forward
Holding concern for the earth…because
…we are earth…all of us.
We are moving forward
Holding the many things
That must be held
If we are to build a community
Worthy of being called Beloved.
Be with us, as our vision takes shape
And our deepening experience of organizing
Helps power serve the cause of love.
Ours are the only hands on earth
Hope lies within you and within me, within all of our companions on this small blue planet
And hope lies in the sacred space, held by Mother Earth…in which we can all thrive.
Amen
Topics: Emergence