The Joy of Sustainability
By Sam Collier
Oakhurst Baptist Church
September 5, 2004
The preparation for this Green Sunday has been very enjoyable for me – many of us have been planning for months just how to fully express our feelings of joy for creation and our desire to bring sustainability to our lives, as individuals and as a covenant community.
In fact, the concept of “pent-up demand” has come to my mind as I have seen us offer up ideas for worship and sort these ideas into a service. You probably notice how much enthusiasm there is, and what a diversity of sources of inspiration for this service. We have a lot on our hearts, and we are pleased to share it with you.
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I want to take a moment to offer a few acknowledgements. First, to Woody and Carol Bartlett, for their work with the faith community throughout Atlanta. Woody presented on two different Wednesday evenings at our Prayer meeting, and Carol has worked with many Christian and Jewish congregations to establish the Georgia Interfaith Power & Light as a way for faith communities to lead the way to renewable energy.
Here at Oakhurst, it has been Leon Clymore who has facilitated our efforts on environmental awareness. Leon is such a good and supportive leader, it is fun to work with him. He pulled us all together to plan this service, and I appreciate his guidance as well as Lanny’s, in helping us plan this worship service.
The planets have aligned nicely for this theme here at Oakhurst. Our retreat a few weeks ago, led by Ted & Julie Purcell, focused us on Spirituality and Ecology, and this fall, Katy Hinman, a Candler School of Theology student with a Ph.D. in Ecology, will be interning with us. The timing could not be much better.
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I have had the luxury of several weeks to ponder just what I would say to you here today – I have spoken here in this pulpit for many hours, in my mind.
One of the first things that came to my mind, and has never left me, is a story I heard at a seminar. I just remembered last night that Rick Voyles was the seminar leader, at the Alternative Dispute Resolution conference that is held each fall. I confirmed with him just a few minutes ago that he told the story:
A man is working in a large company, in charge of a major project, and he makes a big mistake that costs the company $10 Million dollars. Naturally, he is just sick about it, and of course is called into the boss’s office. He walks in, nervous, scared, certain this is the end of his job.
He says to his boss, “I know you called me in here to fire me.” The boss replies, “Fire you? I just invested $10 Million dollars in you – I can’t fire you!
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I love this story. It works for me as a story about grace and the hope of redemption. It asserts that we are not defined by our mistakes. Further, we are not necessarily doomed to repeat our mistakes. But the story goes a step further to teach us that there is the possibility that we can even be BETTER for our mistakes.
The hope is of transformation.
If we heed our mistakes, we turn them into investments in our future success.
Bill Clinton offers up a similar story in his memoirs: During his first term as Governor of Arkansas, Clinton decided the rural roads in the state were in such disrepair that he started a road improvement program. To pay for the program, he significantly increased car tag fees.
Well, the tag increase was not popular, to put it mildly. Clinton lost his first re-election campaign, due largely to the tag increase.
Two years later, he was campaigning for another chance to be governor, when he ran into a man who said, “I voted against you last time, but I’m going to vote for you this time.” When Clinton asked him why he voted against him last time, the man said, “Because you raised my car tags” Clinton then asked why he was voting for him now, the man said “Because you raised my car tags.” Clinton then said, “Well, I hate to offend someone who just said they would vote for me, but that doesn’t make sense that you would voter for me for the same reason you didn’t voter for me. The man said. “It makes all the sense in the world. You may be a lot of things, Bill, but you ain’t dumb. You’re the very least likely one to ever raise those car tags again, so I’m for you.”
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But we do have to heed our mistakes and learn from them, lest we be like the family hurtling down the road, when the daughter says, “Dad, we’re going the wrong way!” Dad replies, “Yeah, but we’re making good time.”
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I have facilitated a lot of strategy sessions and trainings on environment over the years, and I always ask for people’s “creation stories” – that moment when they either got inspired to work to protect the environment, or got fed up enough to say “enough is enough.” I have always enjoyed the responses, many of them very rich. For some, it was a special place that inspired great awe at the wonder of nature. For others, it was a toxic waste dump proposed in their community, or the steady creep of development that ate away a beloved forest.
For many years, I told people that mine was a boring, wonky setting for an epiphany about nature – that day, 25 years ago this week, when I was sitting in the sun at Legion Pool in Athens, a few days before I started law school. I was reading a book of essays on environment, and the one on garbage and toxic waste made me angry and very concerned. I saw modern society hurtling into the future with no plan, no one doing much about the increasing pollution crisis, just creating more and more stuff and calling it progress, and I determined that I would get involved.
But actually, my creation story is much more charming than that, and much older. It took decades to get in touch with this, but in actuality my creation story was as a 7-year old boy, playing in the streambed of “The Creek,” a very modest little coastal plain stream a few blocks from my home in Goldsboro, North Carolina. I used to ride my bike down there with a friend. Spending hours on the sandy banks of that little creek was some of the most soul-satisfying time in my life. That is where I really began to commune with nature. I spoke of it is such grand terms that my Mom was surprised when she came down and say how small the creek really was. But it was a world unto itself to me, and I loved it.
I suspect that each of you has some type of “creation story,” a place and time where you became aware of the natural world in a whole new way, discovering the interplay of little critters that you had either never seen before, or never really noticed, maybe even feared for the threat you felt they posed to you. But all of a sudden, you realized that they were doing what they have done for forever, living in cycles of birth, life, death, decay and rebirth.
Living sustainably.
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My definition of “Sustainability” is really quite simple:
“If everybody in the world did it, we could keep on doing it for generation after generation.” Living in cycles of birth, life, death, decay and rebirth.
The Native Americans often speak of looking to the impact of our actions on the seventh generation – but of course that just describes the horizon – they use that as a way to make ongoing sustainability more easy to grasp.
Now if you think about it over the course of human history, what is sustainable under this definition is relative – what’s sustainable among 5 million people – the global population 8,000 years before Jesus lived – is a bit different from what’s sustainable among the 150 million people that lived during Jesus’ time. Different still 1800 years later, when the population reached 1 Billion. And a good bit different than what’s sustainable among 6 Billion people - today’s world population.
It makes sense to me that what mattered in the era that Genesis was written is very different than what matters today. With only a few million people on the planet, “Be fruitful and multiply” is a sensible statement. But it’s not so sensible today.
I can imagine a follow-up in the modern era something like, “You have exceeded my expectations on the ‘be fruitful and multiply’ thing, now how about going forth and learning to live in harmony with the rest of creation.”
And what is sustainable before the modern technological era is very different than what is sustainable in an era when
- the atom can be split,
- ancient carbon deposits are being burned for energy in a period of a mere 100 years,
- synthetic chemicals – many of which do not decompose for millennia – are manufactured everyday,
- DNA is being mapped and altered for a variety of reasons, and
- the same society who are living beyond their ecological means see it as their Manifest Destiny to bring this lifestyle to the rest of the planet.
Let me explain that last statement: Ecologists are now calculating what is called an “ecological footprint.” This is the total amount of land needed to feed, house, clothe, make mobile, entertain and otherwise support a given population, such as a city or a nation. The amount of land needed to sustain the average US resident is almost 24½ acres. But the average capacity available within the US is less than 14 acres. So we in the US are getting the rest of our capacity for living from outside our borders.
As you can see, we are on a collision course with that article of faith of the modern market that “all growth is good, the more the better, bring it on.” IF everyone begins to live like North Americans, we will need at least two extra Earths just to maintain this lifestyle (In fact, sometimes the slogans of the anti-environmental side expose such moral emptiness, they seem almost like satire. One bumper sticker mocks the environmental action group Earth First! – the slogan is “Earth First, We’ll Mine the Other Planets Later.”)
We will need to find another way to find true prosperity without confusing it with mere consumption of stuff. We will have to learn how to produce the things that make our lives enjoyable and prosperous powered by the solar energy streaming in each day – a renewable supply – rather than fossil fuel, which represents that solar energy that got trapped in carbon over a span of millions of years, all happening hundreds of millions of years ago - as fossil fuel. We will need to design and build products that not only can be recycled, but in fact are fully capable of being re-built into another product – what’s called cradle-to-cradle design.
And the Third World will need to advance directly to the Sustainable model, without going through the “Deplete and Pollute” phase we are trying to move beyond.
We need to live within our means, and the real challenge will be to live not just as well, but even better in the process. William McDonough is one of the leading designers in sustainability, and he reminds us that sustainability is not particularly something to settle for in life.
“Have a sustainable day.”
“Yes, we have a sustainable marriage.”
“My job is sustainable.”
“We had a very sustainable worship service today.”
Now there are many times we would be doing well just to get to sustainability, but that is only a rest stop on the road to an even better goal: “Abundance.”
”That you might have life, and have it more sustainably” does not call us to much joy, actually. In fact, since sustainability is the only way that life can go on, this phrase would be redundant – having life and living it so that you can keep on living?
It’s having life more abundantly that brings in the aspiration.
Mind you, the abundance would also be sustainable. Being a non-renewable resource, we cannot sustainably have an “abundance of gasoline,” no matter how many wars we fight or how many oil wells we sink. It may seem abundant for a while, but fossil fuels will eventually run out.
But it is not the gasoline that gives us abundance, anyway. When we look at the functions of gasoline, we get closer to our goal. It gives us mobility, which can be a very good thing. But mobility in abundance is not the end in itself. It is the places we go to, the learning, the earning, the community connections, the esteem, the love, the hope that we often get when we are able to be mobile. That is what we seek in abundance. That is true prosperity.
And when we realize that this is the vision of abundance, then the sustainable living becomes not only easier, it becomes a source of joy. We find new ways to have abundance in our lives while still living in a way that allows life itself to continue. Each act of abundance, each sustainable practice, can become a prayer, a meditation, a connection with and affirmation of life.
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As we met together to plan this service, I felt a mix of joy and sadness at how quickly we all went to various faith traditions as expressions of our connectedness with nature.
My joy came in the fact that my brothers and sisters in this Christian church were so in touch with the many different wells to access the same underground river that is God.
My sadness came in realizing how little of the Christian tradition we had to work with. There seems to be a particularly strong tradition in Christianity, perhaps stronger than any other major religion – setting up divisions between humans and the natural world. Perhaps the early Christian church sought to distinguish itself from the more nature-oriented pagan practices prevalent in various parts of the world.
But there is a line of thought throughout the history of Christianity that differentiates between the natural world we find ourselves in and another, non-material, spiritual world to which the believer aspires. If “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through” then I don’t worry so much about how I am keeping it – I let others do the cleaning and maintenance at the airport. I am getting on that flight.
But I prefer to think of it differently – that we have invested a lot of trees, clean air, clean water and wildlife in Christianity, and it is not time to fire it. The Christian message is a life-affirming message, and sustainability is about affirming life. Christianity is easily compatible with maintaining the life support systems we all need to survive. And many people are involved with this movement within Christianity, to connect with nature as a part of our faith.
And God has invested much more of the bounty of creation on the human race. For every religion, at this point in time, What’s Past is Prologue. It is the setting in which we find ourselves as we move to sustainable, even abundant, living.
I envision this and other faith communities leading the way to sustainability and abundance:
- Teaching of the sacredness of life,
- Practicing sustainability in the way the church is designed, built and operated,
- Coordinating efforts among the congregation
- restoration projects like tree plantings
- group purchase of renewable energy and energy-saving equipment,
- Community-Supported agriculture where a local organic farmer delivers fresh vegetables each Sunday for distribution (Because after all, we already come here each Sunday, we could easily take fresh, organic vegetables home with us, grown locally – and they taste better, too)
- leading the transformation that must come in our hearts and minds, our schools, our businesses, our government and our homes.
But we have to realize that – despite the fact that we may be “making good time”, we still have to turn around and head down the right road. The signpost may say “Sustainability” or even “Self-Preservation” – but both the journey and the destination can be all about abundance and joy.