Sermon by Reverend Cecilia Kingman Miller

“From Empire to Earth Community:
The Great Turning, Part 2”

The Reverend Cecilia Kingman Miller, Interim Minister

Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Church

January 27, 2008

Readings

from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy:

The Machine endangers all we have made.
We allow it to rule instead of obey.
To build a house, cut the stone sharp and fast:
the carver’s hand takes too long to feel its way.

The Machine never hesitates, or we might escape
and its factories subside into silence.
It thinks it’s alive and does everything better.
With equal resolve it creates and destroys.

But life holds mystery for us yet. In a hundred places
we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers
that—when you feel it—brings you to your knees.

There are yet words that come near the unsayable,
and, from crumbling stones, a new music
to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.

Sermon

We live in strange times of both great despair and great hope.  Every day we are faced with alarming realities: peak oil, economic crisis, environmental destruction, and violent wars. Anyone with eyes to see knows that something is terribly, terribly wrong. 

There are days when I despair at the state we are in.  There are days when I wonder how on earth I can get in this pulpit and tell you something of value, worthy of your listening, when clearly the entire planet is in a terrible fix and anything I could say is just more foolishness. 

But we also live in a time of enormous possibility.  We stand at a critical juncture in human history, a terribly rare moment when humanity could choose a new way of living, a new way of ordering our societies and our lives in order to dwell together in peace.  And I must tell you that in the last few months those moments of my own doubt have become ever more fleeting.  Every day I feel a greater sense of hope and amazement. 

There are a growing number of us in this church reading and reflecting upon the idea of the Great Turning.  The Great Turning is the shorthand term for a rapidly spreading, worldwide people’s movement. 

Its rallying cry is a new vision of human living. It is a vision of cooperation, equality, and stewardship. This vision decries the worldview of domination, exploitation, and violence that has ordered human living for the last 5000 years.  The vision embraces mutuality, respect, and reverence for our earth home.  Some call this vision Earth Community. Our Universalist forbears called it Heaven on Earth.  The Reverend Martin Luther King’s term for it was the Beloved Community.

I have to interrupt myself right now to remind us all that King’s work was far larger than just the cause of civil rights.  His message has been tamed and reduced to little more than: “Let’s all be nice to each other.” 

But King was a uniquely American prophet of social transformation. Before he died he had become an outspoken critic of the imperial agenda.  Last week as I watched the various commemorations of him, I thought of how passionate and broad his vision was and how we have turned away from that dream. 

But once again the vision rises in us.  Once again we have decided to look behind the scenery of the world and notice how things are really structured.  Once again we are asking ourselves, “Is this how it has to be?  Is the world indeed ordered this way, or can we choose a new way?” Once again a great possibility stands before us.

As I said two weeks ago, the term “The Great Turning,” comes from the realization that our grandchildren will look back on these times and say one of two things:  Either they will say: “That’s when it all came unraveled,” or they will say, “That’s when human kind made a great turning.”

This work of social change is more than just an ecological movement.  It is more than an anti-war or anti-imperial movement.  It is more than just a feminist or anti-racist movement.  It is beyond political parties or economic systems. The idea of the Great Turning transcends all of these things. 

The Great Turning reminds us that all injustices are interwoven—we have lived for 5000 years in a worldview that is patriarchal and supremacist.  A worldview that tells us the world exists so that we can extract and exploit it for our own pleasure and ease.  That tells us violence is the ultimate answer to conflict, and that the powerful have rightful authority over those without power.  A worldview constructed upon a myth of natural hierarchies.

Every day more and more people are waking up to the costs of this old narrative.  Every day more of us are rubbing the scales from our eyes.  And we are weaving a new story—a story of compassionate, egalitarian relationships. A story in which we see ourselves as part of nature, and we revere rather than destroy the web of life.

If this sounds like a massive social change—well, it is.  Changing a civilization on such a scale has historically occurred only when a society faced immediate peril or exterior threat.  The good news is that we are in just such a time.  We can choose to unravel, or we can choose to turn. 

But I believe it’s no longer a choice.  I believe the Great Turning is already happening.  I have seen it myself.  People are beginning to wake up, and they are coming together in groups all over the world to organize themselves and nurture this new vision.  I believe the Beloved Community is coming.  And I believe that it already lives among us as possibility.

I believe that it is still a fledgling story, a dream that needs more dreamers to become reality.  It requires our imagination and our perseverance to bring it to full blossom…and it will need all of us to bring it fully into being.

If we will accomplish the Great Turning and bring in the Beloved Community, we cannot labor alone.  It is too much for one person to stand against the powers of Domination and Empire.  The lies are too insidious and the work is too exhausting for one soul alone. We need others to help us see where our own minds have been colonized.  As one person said, “It’s hard to fight the enemy when they have outposts in your head.” A group is needed, an ekklesia, or assembly, they called it in Greek.  The Buddhists call it a sangha.  We might call it a church.

Religions have for too long aided and abetted the Domination System.  Though prophets have called us into repentance over and over, from Buddha and Isaiah and Jesus to modern prophets Gandhi and King and Dorothy Day and the Dalai Lama, still the religions have been complicit in great evils.  But, as the prophets have long told us, the church has a true vocation in the fulfillment of the vision.  The church must return to its original tasks.

The first task is to unveil the myth of Empire, “the Dragon’s game” as one writer calls it,¹ and all of its subsidiary lies about violence and power and supremacy. The church must re-embrace its prophetic tradition and tear away the curtain of lies that we might see things as they truly are.  This is how we begin to change the worldview of Domination. 

Religions are the shapers and keepers of the largest cultural narratives of human society.  We can attempt to reject that role and play small with our part in this, or we can embrace that role and decide to be active co-creators of the new story—the new vision.

For centuries the churches have struggled with two narratives, and it is time for us to irrevocably choose the story of love and creativity and human possibility.

The church must also return wholly to its ancient calling to struggle for liberation of the oppressed.  The church must insist that all people are inside the great circle of love and that no people or nations are less worthy than others. The church must amplify the cries of the poor and the dispossessed. 

The church can no longer be a complacent home for the middle-class, content with gestures of solidarity and tokens of charity.  Instead, the church must return to its true vocation of embodying in word and deed mercy, justice, and love.

The next task is the work of faith.  By this I do not mean believing certain things about God or Jesus or any other deities.  I do not mean subscribing to a creed or a dogma.  By faith I mean believing in the possibility—the reality—of the Beloved Community. 

The word belief has at its root the meaning “to set your heart upon,” and this is what I am talking about.  Faith is the assurance of things unseen…and we set our hearts upon the possibility of their fulfillment.

Faith also means living as though the Beloved Community has already arrived.  The theologian Walter Wink writes:

“History belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being. This is not simply a religious statement. It is also true of Communists and capitalists and anarchists. The future belongs to whoever can envision a new and desirable possibility, which faith then fixes upon as inevitable.

“This is the politics of hope [long before that became a political slogan]. Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs.

“The future is not closed.  There are fields of forces whose interactions are somewhat predictable. But how they will interact is not.  Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future are the intercessors who call out of the future the longed for new present.”

That is our task—to be the intercessors.  I call the new future into being.

And our final task is that of spiritual action.  Now, I know that some people here may feel some discomfort with the word spirituality.  Let’s clear this up and move on to a more useful conversation than whether or not spirituality is important. Spirituality is simply the act of connecting to that which restores us to our truest selves and gives us wisdom, hope, and a greater lovingkindness. 

There are many, many ways of being spiritual.  Some people find their spirituality in prayers or chants or rituals.  Some people use meditation and some poetry. Some people need yoga or tai chi. Some find themselves restored to wholeness in the presence of trees and rivers.  Some people need beauty or art. Some need music; indeed some need to make music to feel that connection to all life. Some people need to be with others in community. 

Some people need silence—in fact, in this overly busy world, a world that tells us that we can be saved through hyperactivity; for many people silence is crucial to restoring themselves and finding that quiet wisdom within.  That’s one reason we keep silence in church—because it is such a rare experience in the world today.

Indeed, we do most of these things in our services: music, silence, poetry, prayer, gathering with others. We even have art and trees, here behind me. 

Folks, it doesn’t matter how you get your spirituality—only that you get it. We cannot do this work of the Great Turning if we do not sustain our spirits.  We need to restore ourselves and renew our wisdom.  We need to return to the source of our own lovingkindness.  And we need to unplug from a violent and materialist culture long enough to remind ourselves that the way things are now is not how they are supposed to be.  The church must be a place where we return to our senses.

And we need that restoration more often than just once a week, which is why we have meditation classes and covenant groups and all other kinds of ways to connect with each other spiritually.

These four tasks: to unveil the lies, to cry for justice, to embody the Beloved Community, and to restore people to wholeness as they strive for the new vision; this is the work of the church.  This is our holy calling, this and no other.  And my friends, this work is already happening!

I have seen a sign that the Great Turning is coming—a sign of hope in these uncertain times. It is this church and the work so many of you are doing. Here you are, people of relative power and privilege in the world, and you know that to create Heaven on Earth you will have to renounce a life of comfort and ease.  You know that you will have to live differently, more cooperatively, with greater concern for the impact of your actions.  You know that you will have to restrain your desires and reduce your consumption. 

You know that you will have to share power with those who are different from you.  You know that you will have to love peace more than luxury. You know that all of this change will be hard, and you sometimes wish that it did not have to be so. And yet you are turning towards this vision.  You have decided that the old lies are no longer as compelling as the new community.  You have decided that whatever may come, you’d rather be fully alive than half-asleep.

You are working with courage and integrity.  You are embodying the teaching of theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz.  She says, “Real solidarity does not mean denying one has privilege.  Real solidarity is using one’s privilege to bring about radical change.”  You are doing that.  And for me, you are a signal and a promise of the Beloved Community.

We are beginning to see that the church is not about being comforted and comfortable in a kind of oasis from the world, but that the church is gathered in common loving purpose. 

We are beginning to see the church as a place of radical transformative love, a love that goes beyond these walls in service to all. 

We are beginning to tell ourselves the new story, a story of wonder and promise.  A story in which the eyes of all children are lit with hope for the future. In which we live as partners and not competitors with one another. In which we know ourselves as a part of the humming web of creation.

We are indeed going to make this Great Turn, and we will know that Heaven on Earth, that Beloved Community.  Let us take up this great work, glad of our own part in the vision.

May it be so.

AMEN.