Homilies given by Rev. Frank Clarkson and Zan Spaihts-Mohns, with the song “Part of It,” by our church choir.
Frank:
It’s always lovely to sing “Blue Boat Home”—the tune, the words, all of us joining our voices together. A line I particularly love describes “…our ship’s companions, all we kindred, pilgrim souls, making our way by the lights of the heavens, in our beautiful blue boat home.”
Ever since astronauts went up into space, we’ve had this image of our earth, and its place in the cosmos; this awareness that we are a tiny blue dot in the darkness of space. And this changes things, does’t it? Or it should.
I have to confess that when I hear about or think about the climate crisis our world is facing, my first reaction is to feel sad and overwhelmed by the bad news of this reality. Which for most of my life I was blissfully unaware of. I think we humans might still be trying to get our minds around the fact that our vast and beautiful earth is sick, because of what we in the industrialized nations are doing to it. But this gives me hope—that as we acknowledge and embrace this new reality, was can adapt and change, learning how to live with it and, I hope, in the fullness of time, work with our earth’s own self-healing powers to reverse climate change.
Because we humans, as flawed as we can be, are capable of growth and change. Human societies can and do get better. It can seem like two steps forward, one (or two!) steps back, but we can adapt and change for the better. We’ve done it before. When I was a young adult, you could smoke in offices, in hospitals, and even on airplanes! Our culture around smoking has completely changed; we’ve decided that the comfort of some can’t be to the detriment of everyone else. How might we change our attitudes about climate change? A friend of mine says her grandchildren, used to their parents’ electric car, complain that her gas powered car stinks. Isn’t a change be coming, in how we see our relationship to our earth, and to each other?
In the Christian calendar this is Palm Sunday, which marks the point in Jesus’ ministry when, after ministering out in the country to the common people, he comes to Jerusalem, the seat of power. And those in control, especially the Romans, don’t like the people power that Jesus inspires. Because the Roman Empire, like any empire was about control and dominance.
We are living in an empire, and have been for a long time. The question is, how do we, people of faith and good will, act as citizens of the empire? Do we give up and check out? Do we keep our heads down and follow orders? Or do we find creative and life-giving ways to work in our own neighborhoods creating communities of helping and healing and resistance?
The UU minister Roger Cowan wrote words for Palm Sunday that speak to the ongoing struggle for liberation. Imaging us, citizens of the empire, in the Palm Sunday story, he wrote:
…we march to a different drummer.
Not many rich, not many mighty.
A vagabond crew in a strange land,
Whose ways are not our ways
Nor thoughts our thoughts.
But let us be of good cheer.
Let the word go out.
The donkey is mightier than the missile,
And flowers have been known to split a rock.
This week moves inexorably toward Friday.
It is Caesar’s week.
But it is God’s world.
And so we take heart and rejoice.
In these days, can you trust that there is a power, there is a Spirit, ever moving around us and with us, always on the side of justice and goodness and peace. Inviting us to be part of that journey, on the way with these companions, singing as we go,
Amen.