Interdependence Day

July 2, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, today we meet very close to this nation’s birthday, the day in which this country declared itself independent of the British Empire. We would hope that, that independence has done more than simply cut us off from the rest of the world. We would pray that in our good fortune and experience of the democratic process that we would not forget that those things we fled from in the old world, may, in fact, come back to haunt us.

As a republic we need to remember that although our sovereign power resides in those whom we elect, those so elected need to be responsible ultimately to we, the people. In these trying times when it seems that our nation is making more enemies than friends, in these times when elected representation ignores the best interests of those who elected them, give us the patience to withstand the affront and the willingness to get back the power that exists in the people themselves.

Democracy is a prime example of relationship in action. Let us never forget that how we treat one another in this country is as equally important as how our country treats other countries. Fairness and peace are things that we must practice in our grass roots relationships.

If peace is to be practiced in and by this country it must first be practiced here in and by this covenant community. If love, empathy and compassion are to be taught by freedom loving people, then that love, empathy and compassion must be a part of the cloth that makes up this covenanting community.

May we recognize the fact that the entire world is an interdependent whole.

Help us, Great Spirit, to humbly remember our births, to graciously remember that we all shall die, and to treat our mother, the earth, as the living being she is.

We ask this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely everything.

Amen.

SERMON: Interdependence Day

Introduction:

The sun is a nuclear engine. It started up a long, long time ago – 4.5 billion years ago to be exact – and it has been revving up its engine ever since. Scientists estimate that in 500 million years from now – that’s in a half a billion years our Sun – we call it ours you know – our sense of property has no bounds – our Sun will heat up to the point that the surface of OUR beloved planet Earth will be about the same temperature as Venus – around 750 degrees Fahrenheit with a variance of ten degrees all over the planet.

In other words there won’t be a planet Earth, as we know it. There is speculation that the future of the human race – Homo sapiens – rests on the technology that can take us to Mars – the next planet that will be ready for life as we know it.

There have been a lot of science fiction movies made where Earth is threatened from forces outside our galaxy. It looks like we’ve been looking too far away, it seems something closer to home will eventually be our undoing.

Speaking of galaxies, do you remember the little ditty, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord he is rolling down the alley in a blue and yellow Ford?” My guess is – it was a Ford Galaxy.

George Bernard Shaw once said that the English and the Americans were two great peoples separated by a common language. It is my contention today that the Republican and Democratic Parties are two great parties separated by a common misunderstanding. The nature of that misunderstanding is cosmic in scope and proportion.

It turns out that life on this planet is like a bad “B? movie where the main character turns to the other characters and says, “Nobody is going to get out of this alive.” And although the actor well enough known to be a lead in a “B? science fiction movie may have been referring to their reputations and resumes as actors, as well as their pretend life in that movie, it turns out that prophesies sometimes come from the weirdest places.

When I was married to my second wife we were separated for a while. I moved into my mother’s summerhouse in Key Largo, Florida. I was having a good time fishing for rainbow sea trout in Florida Bay – as the western side of the waters along the Keys are known. I was also doing my damnedest to play out the role of the Hemingway-like character who drank too much, caroused with strange women, and wrote brilliant prose. Well, at least I was being successful at the drinking part.

One night in the Keys, I dreamed I gave my five-year old daughter, Isabelle, a piggyback ride on my shoulders. When I awoke I could still feel her little legs on my shoulders.

I got up, poured out the booze, threw the live shrimp into the bay – I was fishing from a rowboat and in the early afternoons when the sun was headed toward the Gulf, I’d get a strike on nearly every cast – anyway, I freed the live shrimp, counted my money and called a cab.

When I got to the Greyhound Bus Station it turned out that I only had enough money to get to Orlando, in central Florida, which if you know Florida at all, is not walking distance to the Capital, Tallahassee, in the panhandle.

On the bus ride from Key Largo to Miami I had to do some fast thinking. Where could I get an extra $40 to push my bus ticket all the way to Tallahassee?

Bus stations are always in dubious parts of cities, and Miami is no exception. I could see the Cuban pawn and jewelry shops lined up and down one street as we made our way toward the station. That’s where I’d get the extra $40.

The only thing I had of value that would be of interest to either of those shops was a little bit of gold. The first few jewelry shops told me the same thing. It was a poor grade of gold and too little to even think about getting $40. Then, I happened upon a jewelry store with a manager who was a beautiful Cuban woman.

I had something else that was nearly always saleable – a modicum of charm. I turned the volume on that charm up to ten and entered the shop. She wasn’t interested. That’s when I told her why I wanted to sell my wedding ring. I had to get back to Tallahassee to reunite with my beloved wife and child. I think I was on the verge of tears. I may even have told her about the dream with my daughter Isabelle. I can’t remember. The next step was to get down on my knees. The gold wedding ring went to the beautiful Cuban woman, but the forty bucks wasn’t for the gold in the ring. It was in exchange for a story of romance gone awry.

I rolled into Tallahassee around 4:30 AM. The bus station is about two miles from Lake Ella Drive where my wife, Debra, and daughter, Isabelle, were staying with her parents, Lino and Teresa Hernandez.

I got to the lake when there was just beginning to show a sliver of light in the east. I walked around the lake and waited for the sun to come up.

As I was standing there with the lake between me and the rising Sun, all of a sudden I knew – no, no, I felt that the Sun was stationary and that it was our mother, the Earth, that was moving beneath my feet. My problems on this spinning orb were laughable compared to the enormity of space, and the light that was streaming at me from the Sun – its mean distance from the earth defined as one astronomical unit – boy, you can say that again! I understood finally that the burdens I carried were fictitious and I could, if I chose, discard them. At that moment I walked to the house and rang the doorbell. My father-in-law, Lino, came to the door all bleary-eyed and half asleep, and I asked him, “Can Debra and Isabelle come out and play?”

Some one once asked Buckminster Fuller if he could imagine what it must feel like to be an astronaut. He laughed and said, “We’re all astronauts – we are all riding our mother, spaceship Earth.” There is a sense in which this earth is our spaceship. We have a controlled atmosphere, food supplies, and amusements on board.

The leaders of this world, and certainly the leaders of this country have decided to ignore the fact that we’re all on the same spaceship – the same vehicle!

Why would anyone tease onboard a closed atmospheric vehicle with others onboard that same vehicle that they might use nuclear weapons in order to get their way? Think about it. It would be like riding in a car with someone and when they decide not to stop at the I-35 Czech Stop Bakery and Shell station you announce that if they don’t stop you’ll pull the pin on a concussion grenade that you happen to have in your pocket. There’s a disconnect somewhere in that kind of thinking.

Is anybody paying attention to the fact that the billions that were spending and making on this war could have fed the entire planet a few times over?

So how can we diffuse this bomb of a world? Can we diffuse it? Is it hopeless? Are we doomed? Will nobody and nothing get out of this alive? Will we destroy our world?

Jayan Nayar, a lecturer in the School of Law, at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom has this to say; “It is often that we think that to change the world it is necessary to change the way power is exercised in the world; so we go about the business of exposing and denouncing the many power configurations that dominate.”

Yet, “To say the word power is to describe relationship; to acknowledge power is to acknowledge our subservience to that relationship. There can exist no power if the subservient relationship is refused – then power can only achieve its ambitions through its naked form, violence.”

Mr. Nayar continues; “Changing the world therefore is a misnomer for in truth it is relationships that are to be changed. And the only relationships we can change for us are our own. And the constant in all our relationships is ourselves – the “I? of all of us.

And so, to change our relationships, we must change the “I? that is each of us. Transformations of “structures” will soon follow. This is, perhaps, the beginning of emancipations. This is, perhaps, the essential message of all the Mahatmas.”

So – what do we need to change in order to change the world? Is it even possible to talk like this? Is there one thing that if we did away with it, then everyone would be changed?

My problems on this spinning orb were laughable compared to the enormity of space, and the light that was streaming at me from the Sun – its mean distance from the earth defined as one astronomical unit – boy, you can say that again! I understood finally that the burdens I carried were fictitious and I could, if I chose, discard them.

Rachel Naomi Remen tells the story of a woman who was a cancer survivor. She lived in San Rafael. Helene was a truly gorgeous woman who took hours on her appearance. She told Dr. Remen that she was living with a man that was perfect with one exception – he lacked passion. He asked her permission every time he kissed her. She wasn’t sure this is what she wanted in a man.

“All this changed on October the 17th, 1989 at 5:04PM. On that afternoon, Helene was in one of downtown San Francisco’s finest department stores seeking the perfect outfit for a business dinner honoring her fiance. In the company of a personal shopper, she was in a dressing room wearing a fuchsia silk dress that she had decided was just right. Both women were admiring the dress, when the shopper suggested she wear it up to the seventh floor and match it to a pair of shoes. Leaving all her belongings in the locked dressing room, she went to the shoe department. She had just put on a pair of heels in the perfect shade when the earthquake struck.

All the lights went out. The building shook violently and she was thrown to the floor. In the darkness she could hear things falling all around her. When the shaking stopped, she, a few saleswomen, and several other customers somehow made their way down the stairs in the dark to the front door. There was broken glass everywhere.

Helene found herself standing in the street in a very expensive dress and perfectly matching four-inch heels. Frightened and dazed people rushed by her. All of her own clothes and her purse were somewhere in the dark chaos of a building which quite possibly was no longer safe to reenter. Her money was in her purse. So were her car keys. Walking to the corner, she picked up a public phone. It was dead.

Helene was a person who had never been able to ask for help, and she couldn’t ask for help now. She turned north and started walking toward her home, many miles away in San Rafael.

It took her almost eight hours to reach there. After a short time her feet began to hurt, so she took off the heels and threw them away. As she walked on, her nylons tore and her feet began to bleed. She passed buildings that had collapsed, stumbled over rubble, waded through streets filled with filthy water from the fire-fighting efforts. Dirty, sweaty, and disheveled, she walked down the Marina to the Golden Gate Bridge and crossed into the next county. She reached home sometime after midnight and knocked on her own front door. It was opened by her fiance, who had never before seen her with her hair uncombed. Without a word he took her into his arms, kicked the door closed, covered her dirty, tear-stained face with kisses, and made love to her right there on the floor.

Helene is a very intelligent person but she could not understand why she had never met this ardent lover before. When she asked him, he said simply, “I was always afraid of smearing your lipstick.”

She tells me that now when she begins to relapse into her former perfectionism, she remembers the look of love in her fiance’s eyes when he opened the door. She had been looked at by men all of her life but she had never seen that expression in a man’s eyes before.”

In our efforts to remain aloof and perfect, in our desires to appear in control and in the know, perhaps we have given those around us, those that we are supposedly involved with in relationships the wrong message.

So this is what it boils down to – we can’t change things by complaining about them. Power structures are based on relationship and the only way those in power stay in power is for us to maintain a subservient relationship to their power structure. If we decide to build grass roots relationships closer to our homes and churches and ignore the call of big government we can go so far as to refuse to pay taxes to support an unjust and profit driven war. However if we refuse this subservient relationship, we run the risk of being the object of ambitious power through its naked form – that is – through violence.

And yet, we must envision a new story for our species. We can no longer be satisfied with their country versus our country, nor especially, my country, right or wrong. These attitudes are juvenile and lead from all out competition to war-like stances and war-like actions now participated in by our government.

We cannot rely on the fact that we are the only superpower to get us through. Can’t anyone remember what happens to the bully when all the kids on the block get tired of getting beat-up?

A new story has to be written. Chief Seattle spoke these words long ago and they still ring true today;

“I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be made more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive. What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected. This we know; the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.”

I’m sure that most of you have heard these words before, but who among you knows the secret behind these words?

(Pick up the handheld mike and go into the congregation.)

No, this isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m really asking, Who among you knows the secret behind these beautiful words?

(Either you get an answer or you don’t.)

Truth is these words were not written nor spoken by Chief Seattle. They were instead written by a screenwriter, Ted Perry, for a late 1970’s movie entitled, “Home,” which was produced in the United States by – are you ready? – the Southern Baptist Convention.

Is this an outrage? I think not. Do you remember in my story about getting back to Tallahassee from Key Largo these words?

The gold wedding ring went to the beautiful Cuban woman, but the forty bucks wasn’t for the gold ring it was in exchange for my story of romance gone awry.

The truth is Chief Seattle did make a speech; it simply wasn’t as good as the one rewritten by the screenwriter. The gold – the truth – in my wedding band wasn’t worth forty bucks, but the sad story of romance gone awry – now, there was a universal truth that any woman could identify with.

Jerry Mander in his book, In Absence of the Sacred, says this about the works of Carlos Castaneda; “He led millions through experiences designed to reveal unknown dimensions of our nature. And he did all this by imitating Native American storytelling style. Like the stories, myths and histories Castaneda emulated, it scarcely mattered to what extent the characters were real or not. They were teaching systems.”

Our old stories of manifest destiny and dominion over this earth granted us by a single God in charge of everything, those stories were teaching systems too. They taught us that we lived in a mechanistic world, and that cultures that believed that the earth was a mother, and the sky a father, those cultures were less advanced than ours. We practiced what is nominally called Cultural Darwinism and in the process we murdered millions of indigents, raped the land, made and broke treaties – those treaties were teaching systems, too – they taught the Native Americans that in the end the white man could not be trusted.

Conclusion:

So – the stories we hold onto, that we are better, that they are less developed, that we will win because we have the technology, all these stories are no more or less true than say – the narrative of Jesus the Christ. We have suffered long enough from the stories that teach us not to respect the earth, the sky, and the beasts of the field. We must rewrite our cultural narratives, we must. Yes, it seems that everyone is onboard with this technological BS, and how can the most powerful nation in the world be wrong, but this is probably the same thoughts that go lightly through the minds of lemmings as they follow the running procession off the cliffs and into the sea.

I’m declaring today, the 2 day of July 2006, Interdependence Day. And you’re in just the right spot to celebrate. Today we celebrate that we have found a place where we can gather as a free community. We have found friends with whom we can share our hopes, our lives, and our dreams. We have covenanted with others to be there for one another, to love as unconditionally as we possibly can, to listen to one another, to grow in the fact that we can all believe whatever it is that we believe, simply because we believe it.

No one here has been asked to leave their brain, their heart or their social conscience at the door. We gather here as human beings possessed not only of the powers of ratiocination, but the willingness to imagine that there are other ways in which the world can be seen. We gather here for no other reason than to bask in the warmth of friendship, the beauty of fellowship, and the light of open-mindedness.

The secret to the mundane drama of life is to hold your position while allowing others to hold theirs.

The hope of the planet is in covenant communities like us. Our duty is to keep relationship alive at the grass roots level. If peace is to be practiced it will be practiced here first. We teach love, grace, empathy, compassion, willingness to fail, the ability to be playful. We are free men, women and children who have agreed – we shall be as one from time to time. We shall recognize our interdependence, we shall humbly remember our births, we shall give credit where credit is due, and live as lightly on the land as possible.

I repeat – we are the hope of humankind.

Changing the world therefore is a misnomer, for, in truth, it is relationships that are to be changed.

So don’t tell me you don’t know about changing the story, rewriting the plot – I don’t believe that. There is hardly a one of you sitting here that was handed this particular covenant. Many UU’s are here – not by default – no! We are here because we didn’t like the stories we were born with. We weren’t going to live our lives in guilt. We refused to accept the notion that a God would condemn some to hell and elect others to heaven. We weren’t satisfied with the scripts that we had been given. So what did we do? We rewrote the scenario to fit what we felt matched both our hearts and our minds.

Our problems on this spinning orb are laughable compared to the enormity of space, and the light that is streaming at us from the Sun – its mean distance from the earth defined as one astronomical unit – boy, you can say that again! We must understand finally that the burdens we carry are fictitious and we could, if we chose, discard them.