Sermon: Now Is The Time by Pilar Millhollen

Phrakhru Pitak had come to a crossroads.  For 18 years, the Buddhist monk had watched as the forests of northern Thailand were gutted by deforestation, the watersheds destroyed, and the local economy suffering as soil erosion and mono-cropping forced local farmers off their lands and able-bodied family members to flee to the cities in search of stability.  At first Phrakru did what any good member of the sangha would do: he preached to his people on the Buddhist principle of interbeing, or what we know as our 7^th principle – respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.  He poured his heart into these teachings, entreating the community to remember that all beings are sacred, that what they did to the trees, to the soil, to the fish and the birds, they were doing to themselves.  Yet nothing changed; clear-cutting for cash-cropping continued as modernity swept the province of Nan.  Phrakru’s sermons were just empty words when a farmer is trying to put food in the mouths of his hungry children. 

The face of rural Thailand, which once reflected the samsara – or the “wheel of life” of a give and take between humanity and the creation that it inhabits – was becoming a cold mirror to the consumer culture of global capitalism that takes no prisoners – human or otherwise – in its quest for more.

And thus Phrakru Pitak had come to a crossroads. 

So, in 1990, one morning he walks into the forest, wraps saffron robes around the oldest and largest trees, and hangs upon them signs which read: “To destroy the forest is to destroy life.” Now in Buddhist tradition, a saffron robe denotes the status of monkhood. Phrakru himself wears one every day.  And to kill a monk has dire moral consequences – you could even call it karmic suicide.  See, Phrakru had ordained the trees.  Suddenly, by a simple ritual act, he elevated them to a divine status.  They now looked very different to the villagers whose lives depended on them in more ways than one.  Seeing the trees with new eyes changed the meaning of what they were.  It presented the people with a choice: kill these divine beings and suffer your karmic consequences, or obey a moral teaching deeply embedded in the collective conscience of a people inextricably linked to the world in which they lived.  The decision wasn’t easy or simple; jobs were on the line – yet in the end the people decided not to clear-cut and to prevent others from coming in and doing the same.  The sacred value that the trees symbolically carried was ultimately more important than their market value.  

            So what did this mean for the Buddhists of Thailand, and what does it mean for us? Pragmatically, the story has little meaning without the ritual resulting in some kind of shift in the daily lives of its practitioners.  Phrakru knew that people would need an alternative. He visited with other activist monks and NGOs to work on community projects that not only protect natural areas but educate the community on how to live sustainably, bringing materials and agricultural methods that shift away from mono- and cash-cropping back to the samsara way of living within local ecological systems.  Phrakru and his fellow monks promote integration of the entire community – from youth to the elderly – into these methods while grounding them in the religious teachings behind them.  In a consumer culture, Phrakru preaches, desire for material goods drives the morality and actions of its people. Makes sense. But desire often turns to greed, and the Buddha teaches that greed is one of the root causes of suffering.  The message that Phrakru and the other Thai ecology monks teach is this: As long as we can produce enough to clothe and feed our families, we are living in right relation to all that we encounter which is the only way that we can experience true happiness.  Now it’s not that he’s changed the world economy – but the communities he’s visited have been transformed by linking practical solutions to real-life problems with the prophetic vision of the great teachers that came before him.  Pragmatic action came first; the spiritual value of right relation then followed.      

Lest we romanticize Buddhism, this value of “right relation with all that we encounter?” It’s not unique to Buddhism.  Or Hinduism, or Daoism.  Nor is it a tenet of faith only found in one part of the world, or indigenous cultures. In fact, our Unitarian Universalist faith values this so deeply because of our Jewish roots. In the Old Testament, Jewish theology interpreted justice as being in right relation with all that is.  Like the ecology monks of Thailand, our Old Testament prophets called upon their people to act with tsedeqah, which translates as “righteousness.”  Note that action is involved here. This righteousness wasn’t some private internal asceticism between the self and God; after all, in Jewish theology, there is no particular concept of heaven apart from the heaven we create here and now.  Our Jewish ancestors meant for us to enact justice on our earth for all creation.  “Now” was the only time for them to know that everything they did was sacred.    

So it probably seems like I’m preaching to the choir. As people of a progressive faith, we have no trouble reverencing the beauty in ordaining an entire forest.  We applaud the moral actions of the “ecology monks” for practicing the diligence and self-restraint it takes to concretely shift a way of life for a whole community of people. But there’s something else here – and it’s about who that community was. It’s no coincidence that the people most affected by the environmental violence of industrialism are not the people at the top of the economic chain. In Thailand they were rural farmers and hill tribes. In this country, they are entire communities of black and brown people. And in our UU community, it’s easy to become a little complacent about just how immediate ecological violence now is. We may compartmentalize environmental justice apart from economic and racial justice. Because if you’re anything like me, you might have had the privilege of growing up in a neighborhood where your air and water were clean. If you’re anything like me, you might still have that privilege (at least for now) – you may content yourself with your daily habits of recycling, taking the subway or driving your Prius and assuming these are going to save a planet in peril. And it isn’t that they aren’t doing anything.  But these actions are relative to a way of life that our ancestors never imagined. And many of us in this sanctuary may not feel the immediate effects of the ecological violence that even these actions are contributing to, but as people of a faith that must respond to the violence of white supremacy, we’re compelled to recognize the cost – and who’s already paying for it. It is what Rev. Ben Chavis, a theologian and activist who also happens to be a black person, coined “environmental racism.” It looks like toxic landfill in Warren County, North Carolina; poisoned water in Flint, Michigan; it looks like the judge in Detroit that ruled that water was not a human right. Oppression of everything non-human is inextricably linked to human oppression. Our experience of the world is based on modern conveniences borne out of and still benefiting white imperialism that allow many of us to have anything we desire at our fingertips – while the rest of the creation, non-human and human alike, suffers profoundly.  “Our mode of vision is tied up in our mode of being,” my ethics professor used to say. As much as our ancestors’ values were bound by their cultural and geographical context, so too are we now bound by our post-Industrial disconnect from the very earth that we trod.

James Cone, called the father of black liberation theology, reminds us: “For over 500 years, through the wedding of science and technology, white people have been exploiting nature and killing people of color in every nook and cranny of the planet in the name of God and democracy.” I would also add in the name of capitalism. For instance: we wake up in the morning and use an electric outlet to plug in our coffee maker that’s made in China with beans from Brazil. Who and what suffered for my Maxwell House? The fruit bowl on our kitchen tables holds bananas from Columbia or Honduras. Who and what suffered for my morning smoothie? We open our electric refrigerator to pull out eggs from massive farms in New Jersey whose waste is polluting the neighborhood next to it. Our culinary and technological imports come to us on semis and jet planes that rely on limited fossil fuel reserves and are pumping more CO2 into the air in the last 60 years than in all of recorded history combined, and we dump the waste on fellow human beings.

Beloved, we are living in the Age of the Anthropocene. This new age has been coined by a number of scientists as the new geological epoch, beginning around 1950 – some even argue since the Industrial Revolution. It’s called Anthropocene because it’s an age where no place or thing on our planet has escaped the results of our cumulative human touch.  “Climate change”? “Global warming”? These phrases don’t even begin to describe the evolutionary impact that we now possess. 

So this is getting depressing, right? Well, here’s the good news: we are inherently moral creatures! The collective “we,” but especially the “we” here, that have chosen to commit ourselves to a deeply outward-reaching faith. We can imagine other worlds and then go about creating those worlds.  We live suspended between our mode of being – the world as it “is,” and our mode of vision – the world as it ought to be – and not everything that “is” is acceptable to us.  It’s the foundation of the Christian gospel. It’s fundamental to the birth of any justice work. It’s what James Cone means when he points out that First World environmental discussion needs a “truly radical critique of the culture most responsible for the ecological crisis.” This is where faith becomes so important. Because it’s at this point – this breaking point – that the spirit drives us to change. But our current call is startlingly unique; Christian ethicist Willis Jenkins describes it as the ascendency of ethics. Yes, that sounds redundant, everyone in this room would probably say ethics is the most important thing to us, but it’s amazing how fast our actions have overtaken – and then determined – our sense of right and wrong. Jenkins writes in his recent book entitled The Future of Ethics, since we’ve entered the Anthropocene, “We have a capacity in a world come of age to deeply alter our world – but then the question is, what kind of world do we want? If this way of life is immoral or dysfunctional then what way of life is not?” He’s asking, who and what do we now include in our moral decisions? Who, and what, is left out? What he and Cone are getting at is that we have to learn new moral competencies if we are to survive. Jenkins goes on to point out that our interpretation of ethics up till now has been pretty human-centric – specifically, Anglo-centric.  Our western concept of social justice, for example, is about human relationships – and boy do we pick and choose what relationships are more important than others. Justice for non-humans, we call that “environmentalism,” and it’s nearly always separate from human justice. But from a spiritual standpoint, we can’t afford to identify as people of faith and justice without both acknowledging our part in the problem, and making the connection in the work we do. It’s not exactly stewardship; it’s more like choosing life, which is what Moses tells the people in Deuteronomy – “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” It’s Phrakru Pitak’s signs on the trees, “To destroy the forest is to destroy life.”  All life.  How did we lose the connection – both physically and spiritually – to the truth that the life of all beings human is derived from the life of all things other-than-human?  Globalization, capital consumerism, modernity – these have all affected our sense of what is morally acceptable, to the tune of hurricanes that devastate the poorest communities on earth and brush fires that leave our nearby neighbors homeless.  Even us Unitarians, who understand and, I believe, deeply care about the connection between humans and the ecosystems we inhabit – the hard truth is, we are at odds with leading an ethical life every time we buy a plastic water bottle or fill up our gas tank. I know it sounds extreme, yet in this world come of age, we are facing the transformation of everything we take for granted. Now is the time to know that everything we do is sacred. 

            Last summer, I had the pleasure of meeting a woman named Ashley Goff.  Ashley is a fellow graduate of Union Seminary as well as being a rockstar minister at the diverse Church of the Pilgrims in urban Washington, D.C. Ashley centers her ministry around the belief that communities are dynamic and should be flexible, constantly transforming according to the needs of the people.  She says, “I meet one-on-one with my congregants and find out what they love, what they might want to do. And then I’m like, ‘Okay, you have my support, let’s raise some money – go do it!’” It sounded to me like, well, that’s easier said than done.  But four years ago, one congregant had the idea to put a single raised bed in their small urban space behind the church, with the intention of using the produce for their Sunday meal.  The next year, they added two more beds.  Someone else said, I’m concerned about honeybees dying, so why don’t we add beehives to our garden? Four years later, in the middle of the city, Pilgrims has a thriving community garden with three beehives and a composter. They’ve insourced much of the food they use and the Sunday meal has transformed from eating with other church members to eating with whoever needs to eat in the neighborhood. The entire congregation and even non-congregants participate in the wellbeing of the community garden. Like Phrakru and the Thai monks, the pragmatic action of sustainability led them back to the spiritual value of right relation with all that is.      

Tsedeqah – righteousness…samsara – wheel of life… for us: interdependence.  Since now is the time to know that everything we do is sacred, then what kind of actions will we choose in our own community to put us in right relation with creation? What if we chose a world where the trees have moral standing? Where the oceans have legal rights? Where factory farms no longer resulted in the killing of animals and the people who live next door to them? What will it look like to choose life, so that we and our descendants may live?