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Rev. Erin Walter
April 27, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
We continue the celebration of Earth Day and April’s worship theme (joy) by exploring the role of hope and pleasure in movements for climate justice. Join Rev. Erin Walter in a service that shares some of the latest strategies for Climate Justice and invites us to bask in the beauty of the earth and the possibilities of a thriving planet.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us. Giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily. and I must return the gift.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
from NATURE AND THE SERIOUS WORK OF JOY
by Maria PopovaIt is time for a different formal defense of nature. We should offer up not just the notion of being sensible and responsible about it, which is sustainable development, nor the notion of its mammoth utilitarian and financial value, which is ecosystem services. But a third way, something entirely different, we should offer up what it means to our spirits, the love of it. We should offer up its joy.
Sermon
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
Since my own band can’t be with me today. I’m gonna invite you all to be in Parker Woodland today. So what I’m gonna invite you to do as we start the sermon about climate hope and justice is to make a heartbeat with me. It’s just two beats.
The spell that we’re casting.
Demands a reckoning, a reckoning.
All this greed needs a sacrifice.
Now or never
Leave it all behind
Building spaceships
Wasting time
I don’t think we’re getting out alive.
This greed needs a sacrifice
All this hate claims your soul in kind,
marching armies
selling you their lives,
looking down from up on high
I don’t think we’re getting out alive.
Thank you. That’s a piece of a song I wrote called “The Reckoning” and some of you remember the Reverend Jonalu Johnstone who was my co-minister in 2022 and 2023 and when she first came to see my rock band do that song in full electric at the Parlor, a pizza place over here. She came up to me afterwards and she said, “I don’t think we’re getting out alive, yikes!”
The song is a lamentation, which is a spiritual practice. And there’s a part in the song that says, “Is this the last sunset we’ll ever see? How will we know it’s enough? How will we know it’s enough? And that’s the question that’s on my heart all the time when it comes to climate justice and the earth.
This greed, this hate that’s claiming our souls and that’s numbing us to the needs of our planet and the needs of each other, I absolutely wrote that song with Elon Musk in mind a couple years ago where that line about building spaceships and wasting time. I don’t want to get out of this planet alive. I want this planet to thrive.
So I know that I’m known for what I like to call a hope orientation and when I started serving here I requested the title of Minister for Joy and Justice. So not everybody is expecting a song like The Reckoning which is really heavy also in its full rock form.
But there is so much to lament and the practice of lamentation where we name what is wrong and we are honest and we lift it up to the all or to our community and then we declare a trust that something someone will answer our prayer is a very important sacred practice. And there are unitarian Universalists like the Reverend Derek Jackson who lead lamentation practices.
I believe your new Incoming Minister Reverend Carey Holly Hurt also has a workshop and a service around lamentation and I’m excited to check that out sometime, but it’s a very important practice and I was surprised and elated when I was researching this service to find that there is actually a movement for more joy in climate justice work, and in fact that researchers and scholars are insisting that climate justice and happiness can be intertwined.
So that’s some of what I want to give you glimpses of today, because I dearly need hope and I know you do too when it comes to this climate work because if you were at the Capitol with me during the Hands-Off picnic You heard me say there is a bill in our Texas legislature from Senator Hughes that would have the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality testing at water treatment plants for chemicals in urine associated with abortion, birth control, and health care for trans people.
That’s our environmental commission. Everything is connected. It’s connected to our bodily autonomy. It’s connected to LGBTQ rights, to women’s rights. So we need everybody to be paying attention to what’s going on in climate justice. That’s just one example. And We need joy to do it because otherwise we’re not going to make it through, otherwise it’s going to be too hard. Thankfully, there were a lot of really good options around how this work can bring us joy.
UU National did a climate justice revival in the last year and they asked these questions. How can our climate work be less isolated and more connected, less anxious and more nourishing, less limited and more visionary? But first, what are we talking about when we’re talking about climate justice? That term in particular? This is a definition for you from that UU climate revival.
They say climate change has the same root causes as health disparities, poverty, criminalization, and most of our society’s problems. Extractive systems like the fossil fuels industry take from the earth, destroy our communities with pollution, disproportionately harm marginalized communities, and increase the inequities that drive racism, sexism, classism, and more. So to shift from an extractive age to a new era means we must reject the broader systems of harm in capitalism and white supremacy to realize a future where all communities thrive. This rejection of systems that take, destroy, and harm necessitates a shift toward connection, nourishment, and communities of care.
That is what we’re trying to do here in our church. And so before I go any further, I want to thank those of you in this congregation who’ve been doing the hard and often thankless work of environmental and climate justice over decades. If you identify as one of those people who has been doing this work for a long time, would you raise your hand and let us see you? Thank you. (audience applauding) Thank you.
It is serious work. And the research is showing us that if we want to see more hands go up next year in the week of Earth Day, for example, one way we might have more folks is through more humor. One of the great sources of human joy.
So an article in Fixed Solutions Online, the headline says “Laughter is the ultimate unifier – can it work for climate action.” And this quote is tough but you’re gonna know you’re gonna understand. It says:
Researcher Sarah Yao says, “Environmentalists have long received criticism for being preachy or taking ourselves,”
(and I will put myself in this)
“ourselves, too seriously, in some cases becoming the butt of a joke, Al Gore being a perfect example. And when a joke has a butt,” Sarah Yao says, “It can actually act as a social wedge, further consolidating in-group and out-group.”
and what we want is for everyone to be in the group Climate Justice.
So here’s a joke for you this week being Earthday and on Friday was April 25th.
In the movie Miss Congeniality, Does anybody know that one? there’s a scene that’s now a favorite online meme where William Shatner’s Miss United States pageant emcee asked contestant Miss Rhode Island in an interview,
“Describe your perfect date.”
Do you know what she says? “April 25th.”
She says, “That’s a tough one. I’d have to say April 25th because it’s not too hot and it’s not too cold, all you need is a light jacket.”
So when I saw that meme this week, it, of course, got me thinking immediately, I laughed, and then I started to think, “Will we ever have April weather again in Texas with climate change and it’s gut-wrenching?”
So, we need to engage more people and get more people to change their beliefs about climate justice and climate change is what the researchers tell us. And Sarah Yao, the science researcher at University of Utah says, “Humor may make people receptive to information they disagree with.”
So there are several climate justice and science comedians out there that I am going to recommend to you, this researching the sermon was so fun. There’s someone called Kasha Patel, formerly a NASA, with NASA’s Earth Observatory now running science-themed comedy shows in DC. You can find those online to share with your friends. As Patel says, “Comedy can transcend different educational levels and backgrounds, which is so important. And we can use that for science.” Then we have Raleigh Williams, a comedian, does comedy and education on a YouTube show called Climate Town, and Brooklyn eco-rapper, Hilla Perry, who dresses up as the Earth for her act.
So those are some options for you, but we’re not all comedians, so what else can we do? There’s a project called Happy Climate that’s on a mission to show all of us small steps we can take to reduce our carbon footprint. And I’ll just tell you I was one of those people. Just last week I was telling my guitar player, “This is really about corporations, this is really about what you know governments and corporations can do – like what can what can we do?” And so I stand corrected because what the research for this very sermon taught me was that what we do personally does very much matter in addition to the systemic changes that we need to make.
We’ve got a little video that I’m just gonna give you just a snippet of and then we’ll talk about it. We’ve got a researcher named Jay-Z not the musician and her colleague Elizabeth Dunn who are studying the intersections of climate justice and happiness. Here’s a taste.
So my name is Liz Dunn, and I do research on how we can increase happiness. Hello, my name is Diane Zhao, I’m a JZ, and I do research on how to reduce carbon emissions. And recently, we’ve been bringing these two seemingly disparate areas of research together to try to identify what we call sweet spots. That is, behavioral changes that would both increase individuals’ happiness and decrease their carbon emissions. Now, as behavioral scientists, we can tell you that changing behavior is hard, so we are not here to flight-shame anybody or to try to compete for the very lowest carbon footprint. Instead, we’d really encourage you to take kind of a playful, curious mindset and just sort of brainstorm the ways that you might be able to change your own life in order to increase your happiness and decrease your carbon footprint.
An important premise here is that our actions matter. They matter not only because they show our commitment to sustainability, but also they signal to other people that we care. Our actions can instigate a ripple effect for collective actions to tackle a grand challenge like climate change. Now having said this, I should say that individual change should complement, not substitute, broader institutional structural change. So we do recognize the need for climate funding policies and infrastructure. In this session, we will focus on individual behaviors in a sweet spot between carbon reduction and happiness promotion. We’re going to take you on a whirlwind tour of the science of sweet spots. And we’re going to hit on four key areas, driving, flying, eating, and shopping.
Okay. I wanted to show you the whole video, but here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m going to put it in the newsletter, and I’m gonna tell you a little bit about, I’m gonna give you a little summary, but I was so impressed by the program that they’ve put together that the Texas UU Justice Ministry is gonna look at offering it to all of our congregations.
I’ll tell you some of the things that I learned. They shared, of course, this won’t surprise you, that biking and carpooling to work increased happiness if you can do it.
- Carpooling, because you get that social reinforcement in addition to reducing your carbon footprint. And that could be true not just for work. That could be true for coming to church. Is there someone you haven’t seen in church lately? And maybe they’re having a hard time getting there, but you could offer to carpool with them to church, then you have the benefit of helping someone connect with their community of care and reducing a carbon footprint. The same for if you’re going out socializing, if you’re going to a concert, something like that.
- When it came to food, I didn’t know necessarily that cheese had as much of a carbon footprint as beef and lamb. I know, whoa, the vegans are excited for me to tell you this. If you can go without beef, lamb, and cheese at lunchtime or, you know, choose what is workable for you, that reduction will help.
- When it comes to fashion, the two folks that you saw in that little video, they committed together as friends to only shopping for clothes twice a year. Which makes sense, right? It’s seasonal, you know, maybe you’re shopping based on the weather needs. And they said that the carbon, I’ve been looking forward to telling you this all day, the carbon impact of shoes, jeans, and jackets is the worst. The carbon impact of underwear is the least. So they said you don’t need to worry about skimping on underwear. love my job.
So that’s some information for you. There’ll be a lot more, a lot more in the videos, but it also made me think of my mom whose motto is “no special trips.” So if you are going to get something, think about where else can I go? Or do I really need this thing today? Can I wait and go with several other things, no special trips. They also talk about if you’re gonna go on a work trip and you really need to go, think about could I see people I love on that trip to get some social emotional needs met because the grief and the anxiety of the climate crisis is real and we need to nourish ourselves so that we can stay in all of the justice work and all of the care that we’re doing just to survive and thrive in this world. So that’s another thing to think about.
There’s a lot in there and I’m really looking forward to talking with the team at the Justice Ministry about bringing this happy climate workshop to UUs in Texas. There’s also a carbon calculator and one of the things that they said is people criticize carbon calculators for shifting too much emphasis away from systemic changes. And you know with the Justice Ministry, we’re real big on systemic changes and that is huge. But Jay-Z says, “There’s no evidence that if I do more as a person, I’ll become less active civically.” In fact, the research suggests that the opposite is true.”
So if you’re making these commitments in your daily life and in your community you’ll be even more, your word will also mean more when you go to testify and you can speak from personal experience about what it means to find joy in making these changes in your life and holding our leaders to account as well.
Should we take a breath? Thank you, Air. Sometimes we just need to do that. Another piece of claiming our own actions is that it affirms our agency. It is very easy to feel like there’s nothing we can do, and it’s simply not true. And we can do more when we do it together.
So psychiatrist Allison Wong says the climate crisis is real and labeling it, that was that lamentation, and figuring out how to manage your experience without letting it overwhelm you is so important. So one of my asks for you today as people of faith living on this planet Earth is to find ways to not let it overwhelm you. We cannot do everything and we can do some things. Ask each other about the things you’re doing and celebrate the things you’re doing. Say thank you to those folks that you know have been in it a long time and ask them what’s one thing I can do to support the systemic work you’re doing and what’s one thing we could do together that’s a personal thing we can be doing. That’s part of our UU faith of interconnectedness and of believing that we can be the change.
Another thing that’s going on is that as temperatures rise, we’re seeing more conflict. Temperature increase is correlated with a 10.8 % increase in conflict and a 16.2 % increase in violent crime. So I’m also asking you to think about how we advocate for things that can reduce that, how we not let those increasing stressors also make us a more policed state and a more fascist state.
We need more health care, we need more mental health care, and if you’re not sure about how to be advocating for that, I see David Overton from your social justice team. Would you like to wave? There is a social justice team right here that And he is sending out meaningful actions on the daily almost right now. So if you’re not getting those, please get on that list.
What one of the researchers, Susan Clayton from the College of Wooster says, “I try to make meaning from the process, not just thinking about the outcomes of the work that I’m doing.” And as the pandemic, so aptly demonstrated, behavior patterns can change rapidly. Do you remember, we changed our, we didn’t want to, but we changed our behavior rapidly and the earth came alive. Even a little bit of that would be so welcome right now. And it is reason to have hope. We can turn things around. And one of the best ways to decrease anxiety about the earth is to engage in empowering actions.
All right, the last thing I want to leave you with, a little bit from Monia Arellis, from the Hitchcock Center for the Environment. She names, first of all, what all of us in UU Ministry name a lot, which is that, and rightfully so, that Black womanist theologians and writers have been naming that Joy is an act of resistance that we need imagination in climate justice, and author Adrienne Marie Brown in particular, her books, including Pleasure Activism, are fantastic guides. If this idea that we can find joy in climate justice or activism is new, then I commend Adrienne Marie Brown to you. Monia says, “I find joy in dreaming what a future world could look like. No homelessness or poverty, an abundance of food available to anyone who needs it. A government where every person has a voice.”
This imagining is another part of climate hope. And Adrienne Marie Brown is quoted in the same piece saying, “I believe all organizing is science fiction, that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.”
And so Rehla’s went out with six-year-olds at that Hitchcock Center and they found a fallen tree. Now I want you to imagine your six-year-old self if you can, and bring a childlike wonder to this fallen tree that we’re gonna imagine together. She says, “We started climbing across the tree’s fallen trunk, and I asked the kids why trees are so important.” The students had amazing answers. They were fun to climb on. They were beautiful. They made forests they gave shade We talked about the carbon cycle. How humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon and trees do the reverse.
The students all began puffing out exaggerated breaths Can you do that with me some exaggerated puffy breath? “We’re feeding the trees,” one of them exclaimed joyfully. Sometimes climate hope is complicated and sometimes it’s as simple as that. Appreciating your own breath and the beautiful ways you and a tree can care for each other.
In that spirit friends as we go forth today I ask you to keep an eye out for those earthly joy moments. Share them with each other and remember that your actions matter and our actions are amplified together and we can We can do our part for this place. We call home.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
This joy that I have
The world didn’t give it to me.
Oh, no,
This joy that I have,
The world didn’t give it to me.
Don’t you know that
this joy that I have
The world didn’t give it to me
Oh I said the world didn’t give it
The world can’t take it awayThis joy that I have
The world didn’t give it to me
Oh no,
This joy that I have,
the world didn’t give it to me.
Don’t you know,
This joy that I have?
The world didn’t give it to me.
Oh, I said the world didn’t give it,
The world can’t take it away.
The world didn’t give it,
The world can’t take it away.Amen.
Go in peace.
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