January 28, 2007, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany and
Annual Meeting Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 112; I Corinthians 12:12-13:13
“If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.” That bumper
sticker has never been more applicable. Two weeks ago on Sunday evening we
showed An Inconvenient Truth here, Al Gore’s movie about global climate
change. Then last Sunday evening we showed The End of Suburbia, a movie
about the rapidly approaching energy crisis as worldwide oil and gas supplies
begin to decline. The two movies made me think that the bumper sticker could
also say, “If you are not afraid, you are not paying attention”—if not afraid for
ourselves, then afraid for our children and grandchildren.
If you have been paying attention you know the government of Great
Britain is afraid, and that insurance companies are afraid, and some low lying
nations in the Pacific and places like New Orleans have gone beyond just being
afraid because the nightmare of global climate change catastrophe has already
begun to come true for them. If you have been paying attention you know the
trillions of dollars in damages, the hundreds on millions of refugees, the world-
wide great depression, the famines and pandemics and killer storms being
predicted as the climate goes haywire. If you have been paying attention to the
peak oil story, you know that gas and oil could become in such short supply and so
expensive that our whole way of life could collapse. It is hard to imagine and
even harder to believe, but before our youngest children here are old enough to
graduate from college, our world may be unrecognizably changed and its suffering
unbearable.
As frightening and depressing as all this sounds, how we respond as
individuals and as a world could make it much worse. As gas and oil or food and
good water become scarce, hoarding and robbing and fighting are likely to
increase, both locally and internationally. Our government’s Middle East policies,
including our Iraq war, are already driven by the desire to control the oil fields
there for American consumption.
But China and Russia and India and Europe all need oil and gas, too. The
whole world is depending on the earth’s one supply of resources, spread unevenly
across the planet. The Bush Administration has warned us to be prepared for a
long, perpetual war. Their strategy is to fight for worldwide domination to get
control of resources for ourselves. But other nations have needs. Other nations
have armies. Other nations have nuclear weapons. If in the panic of running out
of oil or food or water we all respond by grabbing what we can for ourselves, then
we can expect endless war.
I am not saying anything that you do not already know if you have been
paying attention, but it is still painful to think about, and I am sorry to have to say
it. It is a nightmare vision, yet enough of it has already begun to come true that we
know we are not dreaming. The reason we need to think about this now and
together in church is that we have a moral choice to make. We have to choose
how we will respond.
One natural, instinctive response is to run from here screaming, to panic,
every person for him or herself. Forget the Annual Meeting, let’s each go home
and begin building our own root cellar and bomb shelter and oil storage tank and
bank account—and don’t forget weapons and ammunition because we will have to
guard what we have and fight to get all we can hoard for ourselves.
This response is only human nature. In fact, it is only nature—every mama
bear or fat-cheeked chipmunk does the same—protects its children and squirrels
away and defends the resources it needs to survive. Threatened with hardship,
hoarding and fighting come so naturally to us that we may not even question their
virtue.
During World War II many everyday necessities were rationed, and some
people hoarded them, which made other people angry. People received ration
coupons for their household’s quota at the Ration Board. Not long before sugar
was rationed, the rumor went around that it was next. Someone overheard two
women talking at the Ration Board. One said to the other, “We had better go down
to the store and stock up on sugar before those hoarders get there!” If it is us, it is
simply a matter of getting what we need. If it is others doing the same thing, it is
hoarding.
One of my favorite hoarding stories is about Dan Clouser, the late husband
of Mel. Dan was one of the saints of this church and this world. He was a
seminary graduate and later Chairman of the Board of that seminary. He was a
respected philosophy professor at major universities and a founder and leader of
the modern field of medical ethics, and he was one of the funniest as well as one
of the most faithful men I ever met.
The Clousers used to receive a certain sinfully good kind of candy from
Mel’s mother every Christmas called Anaclaires. She sent one box of them and
Dan and Mel would compete for the limited resource. Dan complained that he
was not getting his fair share, so one year he received his very own box. He put it
on his study shelf, and there it stayed for weeks with the plastic wrapping
unopened. Mel marveled at his discipline with some dismay. She would come in
to dust and hope to be able to sneak a piece of candy, but she was amazed to find
he still had not opened it week after week. Finally one day she picked it up to dust
and it seemed lighter somehow, despite the fact that the wrapper was still on it.
That was when she discovered that Dan had cut a little secret trap door in the
bottom of the box so he could enjoy his candy without anyone else getting any.
It is one thing to be a mama bear and provide for your cubs or to be a
loving, generous-hearted, faithful man and cleverly hoard one of your few small
indulgences, but it is another to see that there is a limited amount of food or oil in
the world and to take more that your share. Dan Clouser was a man who was
careful to live what he believed and stay true to Christ’s calling. If he were here, I
think as Christian and as philosopher he would be urging us to consider the ethical
implications of our response to our global crisis.
I think Dan would agree with the early Christian teacher, Basil the Great,
who said this: “ When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief.
Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does
not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; and the coat hanging
unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it…the money which you
hoard up belongs to the poor.” If we attack a country to secure its resources or
ourselves and the hoard what we gain, we are a thief twice over. But there is a
better way we can choose to be.
It is the way of sharing that Basil the Great is indicating. It is the way the
Psalm was describing, the way of being gracious and merciful, dealing generously
and lending, conducting affairs with justice, distributing freely to the poor. It is
the way the Apostle Paul was describing, that “still more excellent way” of
charitable lovingkindness that we heard from First Corinthians.
The church in First-Century Corinth was full of sophisticated, gifted
people. It had great resources and great opportunities to do good, but it was
hampered by internal jealousies and conflicts and disrespect of those whose gifts
were considered inferior. Paul wrote to change their way of thinking about one
another.
He said we are all members of one body, just as the foot is the member of
the same body as the hand. We need each other to make our body whole. When
one member is in pain, the whole body suffers. When one is honored, all the
members of the same body rejoice because the whole body gains. All the different
skills or gifts of the body are good and are good to strive for, but love needs to rule
them all. Without love, Paul says famously, all our gifts amount to nothing.
Without love the body falls apart because it is the law of love that makes the
essential sharing of pains or gains happen.
Jesus Christ taught and lived and died by this law of love and compassion.
It looked weak and foolish to some, but it proved to be the most powerful force in
the universe. The body of the church has not always followed Christ’s way
perfectly, but it has carried the seed of it forward into this time of our world’s
greatest need.
The hope we have in the face of global nightmares coming true around us is
that we can still choose this other way to respond. We do not have to follow the
law of fear, we do not have to fight an endless war for control of resources or
hoard all we can get our hands on.
We can choose to follow the law of love. We can choose to look at our
neighborhood and our town and our region and even at all the earth as one body.
We can choose to see other nations and peoples and religions as other members of
our one body. We can choose to see that if they suffer, we suffer, and if we gain,
we should make sure they share in our gain, doing unto others as we would have
them do unto us. We can learn to manage world resources together as a
community of nations for the equal benefit of all—not using more than our fair
share, and making sure no nation has less than its fair share. The vision of world-
wide, inter-dependent unity that Christ gave us in stories like the Good Samaritan
has become an absolute necessity to our survival.
The hope of the whole world depends on the choice we each make as
individual members of our church or nation or world. Each response will make a
difference. It is time for the church to show leadership by example. As Donella
Meadows said, “The most anyone can do to upgrade the moral tone of a society is
to offer a shining example.” And as today’s Psalm said of the generous-hearted
who follow God’s ways, “They rise in the darkness as a light…They are not afraid
of evil tidings.”
Today at Annual Meeting we have the opportunity to be a body living by
the law of love as examples in a world of conflict. We have the opportunity to
steward our resources guided by our vision of the whole body’s need—the body of
the church and the community around us and all the earth. We have the
opportunity to rise in the darkness as a light, partly by the decisions that we make,
but even more by the love we show as we go about our work.
From now on, in the shadow of the threatening storms ahead, we need to
ask of every choice what difference will this make in the world our children will
inherit. We must take on the wisdom of the Great Law of the Iroquois
Confederacy that states, “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of
our decisions on the next seven generations.” We cannot know for sure where it
will lead, but we know that every time we choose the way of Christ’s
compassionate love, even in our smallest deliberation, we are doing the best we
can possibly do for the body of all the earth.
Rise in the darkness as a light, and you need not be afraid of evil tidings.
Let us pray in silence, opening our hearts and minds to the guidance of the
Holy Spirit, asking what the love of Christ is calling us to be and do today…
Sermon 01/28/2007