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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 16, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
So many beings seek sweetness. Fruits invite the bees with it, It can make a meal delightful. What happens, though, when civilizations go after sugar production without thought for ethics or balance?
Chalice Lighting
At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.
Call to Worship
The words of Hans Christian Andersen, a white Danish author best known for his fairy tales.
Just living isn’t enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Moment for Beloved Community
“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”
– The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
Meditation Reading
From the words of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a white Marine Corps officer who fought in both the Mexican Revolution and World War I. Butler was, at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.
I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service … And during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in ….
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die.
Sermon
My mama was a health food nut. When I was little she used to celebrate our good things with celery. She’d say “So good! Let’s have some CELERY!!” When I was four someone gave me sugar. I felt betrayed. I remember the first time I gave my two year old his first tiny bite of a chocolate kiss. He stopped. He transformed with rapture. I had a herd of boys in and out of the yard. Occasionally they would come in to the house and I introduced them to Earl Grey Tea. Not too much tea. Lots of milk. And sugar. They loved it. I felt a little guilty about the sugar. I knew it was a drug.
We’re going along in a series about some of the elements of baking. Today we’re talking about sugar. This’ll be fun, I thought. This’ll be sweet.
Sugarcane grows in Southeast Asia, and it’s been used for its sweetness since 4,000 BCE. From about 2,000 years ago in India, they were crystalizing the juice into granules. The cultivation and manufacture of cane sugar spread through the Islamic world, and there continued to be improvements in production methods. It was used as medicine in the Greek and Roman cultures.
Then I came to the headline Sugar cultivation in the New World, See also slavery in the British and French Caribbean.
UH OH
I learned about the slavery triangle. Portuguese traders took seeds and planted them on the islands of the Caribbean, and they grew well. The New World was going to be a cash machine of sugar. It was back breaking work, and the Europeans were dying from heat and malaria. Traders began buying people from the coast of Africa to come work in the cane fields, making the very expensive spice called sugar. The sugar was shipped to England. The goods from England were sold on the way to Africa to buy more people. I say “people” because when you say “buy more slaves” it sounds like these folks were born slaves, or like they are some other species, but it’s buying enslaved people is what they were doing. And shipping them, stuffed in like merchandise, to the New World. Over 11 million people were sold into the cane plantations, mostly in Brazil. Between 1502 and 1866, of the 11.2 million Africans, only 388,000 arrived in North America, while the rest arrived in Latin America and the Caribbean. These enslaved people were brought as early as the 16th and 17th centuries. The work, the heat and the malaria was killing people, so more people had to be bought and brought to the sugar companies.
The colonizing countries were making so much money on their occupied colonies where sugar was growing, that their economies depended heavily on sugar. The enslaved workers throughout the Great Britain colonies outnumbered the White plantation owners and they were always worried about uprisings. They demanded troops from the Crown to protect themselves. If the Crown hadn’t been spending so much money and so many troops protecting their sugar interests around the world that they couldn’t spend what they needed to in order to win against the American Revolutionary armies. So we may have won that war because sugar in their other colonies was distracting the Brits.
Now the work is still back breaking and we have better machinery, so sugar is inexpensive and doesn’t require slave labor any more. It’s not fun work, but people get paid some.
So with sugar’s bloody history, should we allow ourselves to enjoy it? Sugar is naturally attractive to bees, to animals and humans too. Apples, as we know, increase their sugar content to increase their appeal….then farmers helped that process keep going. But when we humans like something we try to get more and more of it, concentrate it more and more. We go after the things that make us happy : pleasure, accomplishment, friendship, love relationships, money, drugs, alcohol…. And it seems to me that we have a tendency to want to process whatever it is until it reaches its full concentration. I wonder what is enough? Sugar is one of those things that can trigger a switch (alcohol is just liquid sugar) in your mind and nothing is enough. Money does that to some people. Nothing is enough. 10 million sounds good, but once you have that, 100 million sounds better.
What we want, we want. We don’t ask ourselves often what is enough. We have the money, most among us, to have most of what we want. As long as it doesn’t cause people to be enslaved. This is where I have to tell you about how much child labor and yes, even child slavery is still involved in the chocolate trade.
The US State Department estimated that 20 years ago there were 15,000 child slaves working in the cocoa, cotton and coffee farms in the Cote D’Ivoire. Hershey, Mars and Nestle promised they would no longer use chocolate that involved child labor. But they have broken that promise. Newman’s Own chocolate keeps its promise not to use child labor, and other companies do too, but their chocolate is harder to get.
There is nothing wrong with chocolate. It’s the people who run the farms, and the people who run those people. And underneath it all, the love of money, the never-enoughness of the people at the top and their money, and the system that says you have to squeeze as much money out of your company as you possible can, and you’ll go as far as you need to go to do that.
This world is so hard on children, so hard on the powerless. We can’t possibly live in complete purity, but we can try to do what we can. Let’s keep making the world better, one step at a time. When you get weary, let someone else “hold the note” for you for a while. Do not despair, but let’s use all our privileges of health, wealth, skin color, sexuality, citizenship and education to partner with the powerless to stand by them and listen to their pain and do what can be done. That will be really sweet.
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