Sermon: More of What Matters

One of the cardinal sins of sermon writing is to bore the congregation with a detailed account of all the difficulties you had in writing this sermon and how first you thought about writing A, and then you realized B, but then you thought X, and so you’re left with Y to offer this morning. Nobody cares. So rule #1 of sermon writing is, go through your process at home and don’t drag the congregation into it. Well, I’m going to violate that rule this morning. Apologies in advance.

 

Because here’s the thing: tonight is the first night of Hanukah AND the Paris Climate Conference is going on right now. I had this great idea for connecting the two. Actually it wasn’t my idea, it was Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s idea, but I’m stealing it. It goes like this: The mythical part of the Hanukah story has to do with oil. Once the Jews had reclaimed the temple in Jerusalem, they immediately went to relight the ner tamid – the flame that was supposed to constantly burn in the temple to channel God’s constant presence. They found enough oil to burn for just one day. But it miraculously burned for eight days, enough time for the Amazon delivery of new oil to arrive. (They didn’t have Prime back then.)

 

Now this was olive oil that they were using, pressed from olives, not the kind of oil one might hope to get from drilling offshore in the Arctic. But still, the idea of oil as a scarce resource feels like some kind of message to us from the past. One day’s worth of oil lasting for eight days. So, I thought to myself, I’ll ask us as a congregation to do our part in making the Paris agreements a success. I’ll challenge us to make a Hanukah pledge to move toward using 1/8^th of the oil and fossil fuels that we currently use – to make one day’s worth of oil last for eight days, to make one year’s worth last for eight years. Yes, this will entail huge changes in our lifestyle, not only in the oil we burn directly in the cars we drive and airplanes we fly in, but also in the oil we use indirectly in the production of the meat and dairy that we eat and the products that we buy. It will be huge, but together we can do it! Together we can change the world.

 

But then I realized, c’mon, Levy-Lyons, that’s not going to work. People won’t like the sermon, they’ll think I’m trying to make them feel guilty for their lives in which, on balance, they’re really generally good people doing their best. More importantly, it won’t work in the sense that it won’t get anybody to do anything differently. Tell people to make do with less? In December? In the holiday season, I’m going to come along and try to cultivate a scarcity mentality? What would such a sermon be titled? “Less of What You Love?” It’s just not going to fly.

 

Because people, especially we modern religious liberal people, do not respond well to messages of deprivation. We don’t want to deprive ourselves. There’s nothing fun or sexy about it, and, more importantly, we define ourselves religiously against Puritanical, pleasure-denying theologies. Most people come here or, more accurately, don’t go to any religious service, precisely because they want to get away from guilt and moralizing. We don’t delay gratification till the next life. We want to live here and now. We are this-world positive. Plus, if we just stop buying stuff, the people who make that stuff will lose their jobs. Yes, we care about the environment, but people come first and preaching about some self-sacrificing return to pre-Industrial life just rubs us the wrong way.

 

So, okay, back to the drawing board on the sermon. But the problem is, I can’t just scrap the goal. We actually do need to start cutting down our energy use such that one day’s worth of oil stretches for something approximating eight days. Solar and wind are great, but they’re still in their infancy. They’re not even close to being able to replace fossil fuels at our current level of use. World leaders are meeting in Paris to try to do something, but we can’t rely on them to fix this problem. You might have read about this a few days ago, but it bears repeating: if all the world leaders make the best agreements that they are realistically able to make, that will only get us down to a 6° F rise in global temperature. Scientists have agreed that we have to get global warming down to less than 3.7° F to avoid complete disaster for everyone, starting with the poorest and least powerful.

 

We have to take it the rest of the way. It’s the thing that nobody’s willing to say: we need to consume less. We need to use a lot less oil, which means making a lot less stuff, which means buying and having a lot less stuff, at least new stuff and certain kinds of stuff. Consuming has to be decentered from our social lives. Entertainment has to become local and low-tech. We’re going to need to create new kinds of service jobs, green jobs, and train people to do them. We’re need to help developing countries become more self-sufficient so that working in a sweatshop making cheap goods for us and destroying their land in the process isn’t people’s best and only option. And we need to start eating, in the words of Michael Pollan, “food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The laws of nature are forcing our hand. We may not like it, we may not want to hear it, but this change has to happen. Or we could become the very first species ever to cause its own extinction.

 

But – and here we go… here it is – we’ve been taxiing down the runway with this sermon and now we’re finally getting liftoff. Is it possible that this change that we’re forced to make might – just might – be the best thing that ever happened to us? Could it be the salvation of humankind not only physically but spiritually as well? Could it be that we end up with, not “less of what we love,” but “more of what matters?” What I’m talking about is, global environmental healing is intimately bound up with global spiritual healing. How we relate to the earth and the natural world is how we relate to one another and to ourselves. It has always been like that and it’s no different today. There are consequences to the lives we lead – not only the long-term environmental consequences that we all hear about, but current personal, human consequences. Because how we do anything is how we do everything.

 

As a culture, we’ve internalized the logic of the market, where the natural world and the workers who make our stuff are “resources.” We even use the terms “natural resources” and “human resources.” What can I get out of this person? How much can I get out of this animal? Corporations tend to pay their workers as little and protect them as little as they can get away with. On Thursday we heard about the coal executive who had conspired to violate safety rules, resulting in an accident that killed 29 miners. This isn’t just the cynicism of that one particular executive. The ethic of our culture itself is that quick profits trump (no pun intended) everything else.

 

In this hyper-connected world, we’ve never been more personally disconnected. We drive around burning oil in separate cars (most of the country does, anyway), live in isolated homes with fewer and fewer people in each “unit.” People’s memberships in community groups and religious institutions has been dropping since the 1950’s. Psychologists have found that the more we’re on our phones texting and tweeting, the less able we are to connect authentically with other live people – we become less able to read emotions and body language. Most frighteningly, our ability to feel empathy declines. Even a cellphone on the table changes the depth of a conversation. We’re always partly somewhere else, wary of commitment, looking out for the next thing. We in the western world get a lot of material benefits from this system, but our intangibles, our ineffables, our children’s spirits and our soft insides – have no home.

 

So we’re lonely. Some call it an epidemic of loneliness. And to fill our inner hunger, we buy things: a pint of ice cream because we’re grieving, new clothes because we deserve it, a new power cable because we think we need one. But we all know that once the shine wears off of the new thing, which can be in a day or a year, we’re back to craving something else. The Buddhists have the best handle on this one – all the suffering caused by our craving and striving for things – the mirage of fulfillment that vanishes as soon as we touch it. What really trickles down from the economy that brought us global warming is alienation from the source of life and from one another.

 

What we need is not “less of what we love,” but “more of what matters.” I believe we can take this earth crisis as a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to return to one another. It’s time to reclaim the best things in life – the things that are free; not only for us, but for the planet. Real conversations. Making music together. Taking walks. Playing with our kids. Playing with someone else’s kids. Listening to a grandparent’s stories. A pickup game of soccer or basketball. Reading a book that already exists.

Tutoring people in basic reading skills. Serving meals to people who need them. Making love. Dancing. Teaching and learning. Praying together; praying alone. These are all ways of connecting with our source and with one another and they are, not by coincidence, carbon neutral. It’s time for more of what matters.

 

We can take this opportunity to eat in a way that expresses reverence for our bodies and for the earth. It turns out that the healthiest, longest-living people in the world are those who eat mostly plant-based diets anyway. (I know, I know, do they really live long lives or do they just feel long because the bacon-less existence is so bleak?) We can take this opportunity to take public transportation more, carpool more, start community gardens, things that bring us together as people. So many of us in Brooklyn do these things already – can we make them even more connecting experiences?

 

We can take this opportunity at the holiday season, to give each other gifts of time. For those of you who are parents, what your kids want more than anything else (whether they know it or not) is time with you, quality time, where you slow down and hang out with them and listen to who they are. This next month can be a chance to connect more deeply with the world through the stories of our traditions. It’s time for more of what matters.

 

And when we feel the craving well up in us for stuff to fill the void or to make us look respectable or to fend off boredom, we can take the opportunity, in a Buddhist way, for spiritual growth. Work with that craving. What’s that really about? What are we really craving? What will really feed us in a way that’s lasting? This process can be the greatest gift of all to ourselves. Because we discover that– at the holidays or any other time – it’s not the shiny stuff made by burning oil that brings us joy.

It’s the people. It’s the feeling of being in humble harmony with the earth, wasting nothing, giving more than we take. It’s consciousness of the extraordinary life with which we’re blessed. That’s what brings it.

 

The insight of the Hanukah story – what finally dawned on the people when the flame burned for eight days on one day’s worth of oil was that the light and all the goodness it carried was never fueled by the oil to begin with. It was fueled by God. Like them, in our day and age what we need is not more oil, but more God as it manifests in all its many forms and names to us. In other words, more of what matters. More time together, more gratitude, more love. And love is the ultimate renewable resource.