HomeGood Morning!
On Thursday I went
shopping at my usual supermarket. As I was bringing the cart full of groceries
to my car, I saw someone else’s car parked in a space. Hanging from the rear
view mirror was one of those pine tree deodorizers that many people have in
their car. This one was jumbo size. And it was accompanied by five other
identical deodorizers. Six giant sized deodorizers hanging from the rear view
mirror. And I thought to myself, “Oh, now, that’s a bad sign.”
Not only would you have whatever the smell was—one might say stench--that those
deodorizers were meant to cover up, but you would also have the overwhelming
stink of the deodorizers themselves.
Now it so happened that Thursday was Earth Day, and in thinking about it later, I realized that much of our approach to treating the earth is all too often like hanging six deodorizers in the car; we spend a lot of time and resources trying to take care of the effects, and not enough time and resources on the cause.
Before I return to that, I want to spend a moment or two speaking about stewardship and what it means.
The Reading this morning was two parables from the Christian tradition. Each one is a reflection upon the meaning of stewardship.
In the Reading from Luke, the story about keeping the masters house, the point is that if something is entrusted to your keeping, remember that it is not yours; that you are not to treat it as if it is your wealth, your property. Your job is to maintain it properly and keep it ready for whomever it actually belongs to. Fail to do that and you will both deserve and suffer the consequences.
The second story, the one about the servants given the coins, has a similar and yet very different point. If you are a good steward, then you will not only maintain property that is entrusted to you, when you return it, it will be in even better condition than when you first received it. Simply to bury it and pass it on as it was is not sufficient. You are to improve it.
That sense of stewardship can be applied to many different areas and aspects of life, even to areas that one might not initially think of. If I have worked hard and amassed some measure of wealth, I might choose to see that wealth as mine, as my property. Should I do so, then it is within my discretion to save it, use it or squander it, and I owe explanations to no one.
If, however, I view that wealth as something over which I am merely a steward, and if I view the real owner of that wealth as my children, my country or my God, and see myself as the fortunate caretaker of that wealth, then I have responsibilities to tend to it in a different manner. I now have an obligation to use it properly; I must use it to further the interests of those for whom I hold it. And I ought at least to maintain it in the condition in which I received it, but I really ought to improve it. The concept of stewardship changes the focus from, “What do I want?” to, “What is best?”.
“Ask not what your country can do for you…”.
That view can be applied to all aspects of life.
A famous reading by Khalil Gibran begins “Your children are not your children…”; the point being that we do not own them, they are not our property. When they are young and helpless we are stewards of their lives, it is our responsibility to work hard to improve the prospects of their future, whether by supplying them with the best education we can or by changing the world to make it a better place for our children to live in. But our children belong to themselves and they belong to the world and they belong to the future, not to us.
The same applies to this congregation. We are in charge; it is in our keeping. But it is not here just to serve us, and it is not here just for us to use for whatever our needs are. We have responsibilities to those who preceded us and passed this congregation down to us through the generations; and we have responsibilities to those who will enter our doors in future generations. Five, ten, twenty years from now, this congregation should be better because we were here and tended it properly.
How much more so Mother Earth?
The reality of our presence upon the Earth is that we are no longer merely a part of the life of this planet. Our presence here has such an impact that we must recognize that we will act either as owners or as stewards.
If we see ourselves as owners, then we are free to continue to use and squander the earth. If we are owners and earth belongs to us, then there is no reason not to drill for oil in the wilderness, there is no reason not to burn down the Amazon rain forest to clear the way for farms and cattle ranches, there is no reason not to clear cut the jungles of Indonesia for old growth hard wood, there is no reason not to treat schools of cod and herring as we did the passenger pigeon and the buffalo. It’s there, it’s ours, we want it, let’s use it. We have a right to squander it if we so wish.
If, however, we see ourselves as stewards of this planet, if we believe that we have a responsibility to care for it, to tend it, to pass it on in better shape than that in which we received it, then I think we must acknowledge that we have not been doing a very good job.
We too often put short term economic interests over long-term environmental interests.
Now some will say, “Wait a minute; that’s rather one sided; if we pass on an improved economy and an improved standard of living, is that not good stewardship?”.
Yes, it is.
But, two quick comments: quality of life is not solely tied to economic advance; and, I refuse to accept any claim that economic advance requires environmental degradation. I certainly refuse to accept that argument in the manner in which it is put forward.
The European Union is considering a moratorium on cod fishing in the North Atlantic because the cod stocks are being heavily over fished and are in decline. Those who depend upon cod fishing for a living are understandably upset by that proposal. But the choice before us—all of us—is a simple one: continue over fishing of cod, thereby ending in a few years with no cod and no jobs; or protect the cod now, thereby having both cod and fishing jobs in the future.
That same choice applies in case after case after case. We can overuse and deplete the resources we have, or we can protect them for the future.
In some cases, of course, the linkage is not that direct. People who want to develop land for housing or industry become angered when they are blocked from doing so by regulations that protect a fish or an owl or a plant, something they derive no economic benefit from. They want their economic self-interest to over ride the environmental interest of everyone. They use arguments about jobs and about “trade-offs”.
Isn’t it fascinating that when business people or conservative politicians speak of “trade-offs” they always mean that we ought to trade off a piece of the environment for profits; they never mean the reverse.
Of course, trading off the environment every time there is profit to be made is reenacting the story of the camel’s nose in the tent. With enough “trade-offs”, there will be no environment left.
Now, before I or we become too self-righteous about that let me say, that is true for all of us, isn’t it? We all make individual decisions that are about our money or about our time or about our effort that result in environmental damage.
Aluminum foil is both reusable and recyclable. I use it for baking and grilling. Sometimes, when there is a lot of charred, crusted detritus on it, I choose not to bother cleaning and recycling it; I toss it in the trash. It’s too much bother or effort or time to do otherwise.
We as a congregation are not terribly good at working with the environment. We have wasteful practices.
Our front doors have a gap between them of about one quarter to one third of an inch. In the dead of winter, how much heat is lost through that gap? How much extra oil is burned to send that heat out into the world? How many pollutants does each gallon of oil pump into the atmosphere?
It sometimes becomes warm and stuffy in this room, even when it is quite cold outside. How often do we open the windows, with the boiler running full blast, allowing precious heat to escape? How much extra oil do we burn because of that? How many pollutants do we send out into the world?
And we are doing that not to make a living, we are doing that not to pay the mortgage or provide food and clothing for our children. Rather, we are doing that for the purpose of temporary comfort. I say that not to scold us, but to remind us not to be too judgmental of others, to see that their behavior is not so terribly different than ours.
There is, by the way, a Unitarian Universalist program called the Green Sanctuary Program, which helps congregations to make a self-assessment of their own behaviors and make appropriate changes. I suggest that we consider such a venture.
You know that I am skeptical about the popular phrase, “Think globally, act locally”, because I believe it is too limiting. I believe we need to think globally and then act locally, regionally and globally if there is to be real change in the world.
The environment is a global issue, what happens anywhere in the world literally affects everywhere in the world. It is not sufficient for us to send our manufacturing overseas so that we can escape the environmental costs and consequences. Even if that worked, it would be ethically improper. But it doesn’t work; pollution over Malaysia becomes pollution over Mount Vernon.
That means we must have global environmental standards and global enforcement of those standards, which means global institutions of enforcement. And that means putting pressure on our political leaders to accept those standards and institutions and to do so in good faith. And so we ought to support the Kyoto Treaty.
If we do not preserve our environment, and do so on a global level, then we will pay a severe penalty. We might not, but our children surely will.
In the readings for this morning, it was the owner of the house or the owner of the money who came back and punished the bed stewards. Am I saying that we will suffer justice from a god of punishment if we do not repent and change our ways?
One does not need to believe in an angry punishing God to believe in cause and effect, to believe that actions have consequences.
Whether we hold the earth in trust as stewards of God, or of the Goddess, or of humanity or for our children does not matter. Whatever our personal theology may be, we can recognize the truth that if we plunder the earth rather than care for it we will pay a heavy price. And unlike the message in the reading from Luke, it will not matter whether we were ignorant of our master’s desire; the consequences for all will be as harsh.
But there is another point to be considered. We are in the midst of a massive “die-off” of species. Millions of kinds of plants and animals are becoming extinct, and human activity is the primary cause.
Each one of those species is the end product of billions of years of evolution , evolution that dates back not merely the three and one half billion years since life began on earth, but the cosmic evolution that dates back thirteen or fourteen billion years to the Big Bang.
Each of these species is a gift, whether a gift of evolution through natural selection, or a gift from divinity to the world or to divinity itself.
Yet wee, like spoiled children, disdain and destroy those gifts if they are not what we want in this moment, if they do not meet our need for ourselves, if they do not serve our economic interests.
But economic measures cannot be the sole criteria by which we judge.
Can economics measure the true value to the world or to us of butterflies, of orchids, or hummingbirds?
In being god stewards we save these for our children.
May the blessings of life be upon us; and may we learn to appreciate them.
So let it be.
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