THE EARTH CHARTER

INTRODUCTION: Language about God is the poetry of Existence. It’s not true or false: It’s poetry. God language is poetry. It’s not saying that God exists or doesn’t exist. Rather, it’s saying that the Mystery of life and faith, death and existence are just that: Mystery. And all our rituals, and creeds, and liturgies are no more and no less than poetic attempts to address the common Mystery before which we all stand.

Or put another way, our world is such an awesome place, that we had to create and derive an entirely separate category of language to help us confront the magnitude of the Mystery which encompasses us all.

Religious language, God-language if you please, increases our vocabulary, and with it our self-understanding, and thereby enables us to engage life at a deeper more intentional level, to live life more fully during the good times, and during bad times better to cope with living. Somehow religious language takes the sting off of loss…it helps explain the unexplainable…it shortens the distance between the known and unknown. It helps us to see life’s ending as a time of completeness, a finishing of a journey that began back when…on this Earth when we came into being. We carry within us the water, and oxygen, the minerals and nutrients that come from the Earth…that not only strengthen us, but also our planet and its many millions of species.

That connection to Earth may be why that when our babies are born, we want to take water from the Earth and ritually apply it to our baby’s head and say something about this little one’s connectedness to the Other, the Mystery, of it all.

When we die, if there’s a graveside service, we want to toss a handful of the Earth in on the casket. And if we are cremated, we want the ashes to be spread on selected spaces of the planet…a favorite resting place, a pool of water. It’s been an awesome journey and we want to return to the Earth from which we came.

And when we pause for a moment, and stop to consider the majesty of the planet on which we live, it elicits that same feeling of awe. It may be the ocean that roars with waves smashing into the banks…or the beautiful mountains that reach majestically into the heavens. The giant whale, the dolphins, the manatee all elicit a “Wow…look…there’s one.” The same for animals of the jungle…giant elephants…giraffe, rhinoceros, hippopotamus: Wow…look…see…there’s one.

Religious language lets us move beyond muteness to articulate “Oh, Lord! how magnificent, how majestic is thy handiwork.” We even add some archaic linguistic forms to separate it as a different kind of statement.

It’s important to add that the use of the word “god” is not an explanation, but a description of the indescribably. Here’s an example of what I mean:

Lost in the Torah of Judaism, actually, the Book of Exodus, is the story of Moses being called by God to go to Egypt and lead the Israelites out of slavery to the Promised Land. Moses, reluctantly asks, if I do this and they ask who sent me, whom shall I say. The voice in the burning bush states, “Say, ‘I am that I am.’” Moses says, “Say what?” “Say, ‘I am has sent you.’” It’s a verb…not an adjective of description nor a noun of identity, but a process. No super being. But as Tillich stated, “Not a being, but being itself.”

It’s those kinds of linguistic exercises that invite us to impute divinity to the very life surrounding us…where we can feel the sense of the sacred…the holy. Be still and know that I am God. Listen to the voice of the divine. Know that God is in this place. It’s not a matter of believing…it’s rather the decision to enlarge our vocabulary so that we can employ a whole different language-set to describe the Mystery of existence. And here is a fundamental premise of the Mystery:

What does that mean? Do you remember the story of Goldilocks and the three bears? What happened? Remember the three bowls of porridge: one was too hot, another too cold, but one was just right? And remember the beds: one too hard, another too soft, but another just right?

That’s something like our planet. Above is too cold…below is too hot. Let me be more specific:

Below us at the core of the Earth, the temperature is something like 10,000+ degrees Fahrenheit. Right now, in fact, some 1,800 miles beneath us – remember, we’ve never drilled more than eight miles – there’s a raging inferno of heat beyond our imagination. And it’s causing all kinds of shifting and moving of tectonic plates, and exposing fault lines. It’s why the terra firma is never very firma: It’s constantly moving due to the enormous energy in the form of heat pressing up from below.

And up above us, the opposite is so. Do you know how cold it is in space: about -450 degrees below zero?

Heat below and cold above that exceed the limits of imagination. But here on Earth, as Goldilocks said, “It’s just right.”

“Just right” means we can travel all over the Earth and experience all kinds of weather, cold and hot, but it all falls within parameters that are within our capacity to sustain life and to do so regardless of the temperature. If we want to be where it’s very cold, we can do that. Or if we want to be where it’s warm or very hot, we can do that, too. Life on Earth offers us those possibilities. Or we can live in places where it goes from hot to cold with a break between for cool and warm – what we call Spring and Fall.

In primitive cultures, where their livelihood was more likely tied to the land, there were religious festivals celebrating the arrival of Spring, and the need for planting seeds that would grow into needed crops. Religious rituals would symbolize this in the Spring, with giant Bacchanalian festivals including sexual rituals of males putting their seeds in females. Rabbi Harold Kushner writes that the priests never had to worry about attendance during those festivals!

In the Fall, there were festivals of harvest celebration. Though most of us are long cut off from the land, Thanksgiving is in many senses a symbol of that celebration of the seed that was planted in the Spring having brought forth an abundant crop, and the celebration of the harvest.

And in the dead of winter, there’s a winter solstice on the shortest day of the year, and in summer a summer solstice at the longest day of the year.

That’s the natural liturgy that the Earth has given us. A time of sowing and reaping, planting and harvest. Darkness and light. And we celebrate those cycles with religious language and liturgy. It’s a way of saying they are important and special to our lives on this planet.

But guess what? In the Modern Age, our species has been able fundamentally to alter that rhythm. And the Earth is suffering the consequences.

Our polar caps are warming…our atmosphere is so polluted that in some cities of the world, we are forced to wear masks. (I remember when I went to live and work in Los Angeles during the 70s and 80s: After a few weeks or so, my chest began to hurt when I breathed. I causally mentioned it to a colleague; he said, “Oh, that’s the pollution in the air.” True enough, I learned. At that time, if you wondered up into the mountains nearby, at certain points you could look down and see a cloud of pollutants hovering over parts of the city.)

Our trash, our dependence upon fossil fuels, our excessive use of plastics, and things like Styrofoam…the raping by the developed nations of the national resources of the developing nations, have resulted in toxic rivers, barren lands, and the destruction of delicate eco-systems.

“Eco” probably originally meant something like “household.” In other words, we can think of our world as one enormous household containing an infinite number of households, which have all kinds of design and functions among them, some visible, but most not, some more essential than others, but all with a place and role to play.

To imagine what an ecosystem is, think of our bodies. We have, it’s been estimated, some 90 trillion – that’s right! – 90 trillion or so microbes living harmoniously in our bodies. There may even be mites inside the follicles of the eyelashes, bacteria living on our tongue, teeth, skin and in the intestine. Dormant viruses may loiter for years inside our nerve cells.

Extrapolate what we individually are as an interdependent system of 90 trillion microbes; multiply that by 600 billion of just our species. Put all the animals and plants and organisms, the earth and the water together, and it all is one unfathomable eco-whole with an equally unfathomable set of separate, yet interdependent ecosystems – or what we call Earth.

And our species, to use the technical language that the president did this past week, we’re “screwing it up.”

Into this enormous void, in 1975, a group of concerned citizens met, and then again in 1992, and they said, “Hey! We are not only shooting ourselves in the foot, but without significant effort, we may not be able to halt the path we’re on in time to correct the destruction.” And guess what they did? They created The Earth Charter, and issued it in the year 2000, as a way of saying we want to explore another way of doing things which will not destroy this beautiful planet we call home.

Now briefly, thanks to the help of Donna Roberts, let me give you a brief description of the Earth Charter:

First, it’s made up of 16 principles declaring our interdependence – let me repeat that word: It’s critical for us as a species…our interdependence, calling for non-violence, respect for life, and care for the environment, as well as creating social and economic justice through democratic means. It enables us to measure wealth not just by money or stocks or gold, but by the quality of the lives we lead. It was drafted at the Hague Peace Palace by private citizens from 78 nations, and was the result of efforts of more than 25 years of grassroots groups grappling with the growing lack of ecological integrity in our many lands.

And one thing it teaches us is that we can visualize our ecosystem as a house of cards. Remember how you build a little house out of cards? Remove one card and they all fall.

Ecosystems are like that. Remove or damage a part, and you risk destroying or fundamentally and irreversibly altering the whole.

Given our ability to affect the whole, and recognizing the dangers to the globe that we’ve created, we also realize Earth's fragility and the need to restore and protect Earth's ecological integrity. “The more we gaze in wonder at Earth, the more we realize that human actions are ravaging and deleting the natural world."

We will pause for 7½ minutes of brief questions as a part of our Conversation Café. The Service and Support Council will provide microphones for you to speak into.

[1] A sermon presented on February 09, 2009, as the second in a series focusing on “The Earth Charter (II). Ecological Integrity, followed by the Conversation Café at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1904 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, with the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.