Archived Sermons

Introductory Words
Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman wrote of his people many years ago, “There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. The Native American would deem it sacrilege to build a house for the Spirit who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky!

Whenever, in the course of the daily hunt, the red hunter comes upon a scene that is strikingly beautiful and sublime —a black thunder-cloud with the rainbow's glowing arch above the mountain; a white waterfall in the heart of a green gorge; a vast prairie tinged with the blood-red of sunset— he pauses for an instant in the attitude of worship. Every act of his life is, in a very real sense, a religious act.”

Worshipping is about valuing. It is about holding something up and saying this is important--this is of worth. It is saying this idea, belief, way of being is central to who we are--is essential to a good, honorable, compassionate life.

To worship makes a lot of sense. It makes sense to honor those things we think are vitally important. We honor them to increase the likelihood that we will manifest them in our lives. And so we worth-ship.

Most often we think that worship takes place in churches, temples, or mosques. People commonly associate worship in these settings with the honoring of the traditional concept of a God -- a conscious being that rules the universe.

In this church, and in other Unitarian Universalist churches, we worship a little differently. We don't often worship an anthropomorphic image of God, rather we focus on the many faces of the holy that can be found in this world -- like caring community, acts of compassion, concern for justice, wisdom, and right relationship. We look for the face of God all around us—and it is not unusual for us to repeatedly find it in the natural world. Many UUs attest to the fact that they feel most spiritual, feel the most connection with the great powers that underlie existence, (the Great Spirit, if you will) when they are in the natural world.

We are not alone of course. This is central to Native American spirituality and to others as well. Nina Leopold Bradley, daughter of Aldo Leopold author of A Sand County Almanac, similarly wrote of her grandmother and father. “I remember visiting my father’s mother in Iowa. [Our] Mother was bundling us up, getting ready to go to church, and my grandmother, Dad’s mother, waved good-bye to us, and said, ‘I’m going to my church.’ She went out on the bluff of the river, where she had her bench, and that was her church.”

[And in terms of my father] “the love of the land was Dad’s religion. It had nothing to do with the ceremonies of church. [And] To me he was the most religious man I’ve ever known.”

This morning we are again called to worship. This morning we're called to worship the holiness of existence -- the awesome beauty and interrelatedness of creation. This morning we look for the face of God in the sanctuary we call the natural world—in particular the prairie.

Private Conversion by Reid Baer

I remember my first
Secret meeting with God
I hid from my parents

Crawling out on the roof
On a star-lit summer night
Looking into the firmament

Knowing my quiet thoughts
Were heard and smiled upon
But I never told them

Music

Sermon
What did Aldo Leopold’s mother experience when she worshipped from a top that bluff overlooking the river and the Iowa prairie?

Let me tell you what I think she saw and felt.

She saw a sea of grass, blowing to and fro in the wind. And speckled throughout the grass was an array of colors -- the colors of prairie flowers. It was beautiful.

She saw an incredibly diverse ecosystem. In a few acres of the prairie she would find over a hundred species of plants. Nearby agricultural fields would have a small fraction of this. She would have seen species of birds and butterflies and other animals found only in the grasslands. Some which have disappeared along with the great expanses of the prairie.

She knew that below the ground was a thick layer of dark rich dirt—a layer one to 2 ft. in depth. This is the soil that is the envy of the world. Soil made by thousands of years of prairie growth and death. One doesn't find such riches in other areas. Even the lush forests, over thousands of years, create only a few inches of dark topsoil. It is the prairie that produces such wealth—rich soil that now feeds so much of the world.

And I imagine she felt overwhelmed by the awesomeness of what she saw--overwhelmed by the beauty, the complexity and interdependence, the cycles of life and death, the powerful forces of nature. She would feel overwhelmed and swept up in the holiness of the creation. She would feel that she is not alone, but intimately a part of the world around her. She lost a sense of separateness and knew deep in her soul that she was a sister to the grasses and trees and insects and birds. And she felt no fear that the cycles of life and death would carry her along and eventually she would return to the prairie soil.

She felt a sense of peace, tranquillity, and well being that was absent from most moments of her day. She felt at home in the world. She felt contentment.

Gardening by Dave Bishop

Posture
is the most important thing in gardening.

Kneeling
in the warm, moist soil,
inhaling the fresh scents of spring;

Kneading
the earth, handful by handful,
bedding seed,
giving birth,
touching the flesh of God.

Music

One of the spiritual lessons that may be learned from an encounter with the prairie is that we are estranged -- that so many of us feel alienated from the natural world-- from the fundamental forces that move the universe -- from God, if you will. We don’t feel this sense of oneness spoken of by the Native Americans, this feeling of being awesomely a part of a magnificent whole. For too many of us this is a condition of our civilized and “advanced” culture.

At Eden's Edge by William Carroll
He disdains the filth of Nature.
The mud and muck that dirty all;
Her buzzing wings and raucous calls,
Irreverent of his stature.

He loathes that world's lack of order.
Its meanderings and tangles
That ignore straight lines and angles
Demarcating his starched borders.

Behind spring's green, he smells offense;
Bites and stings that haunt the garden.
Letting blood like mortar harden;
Pulling his skin barbed wire tense;
At Eden's edge he builds the fence.

From experience I know that such a sense of alienation undermines our sense of peace and well being. I know when we see ourselves as outside the natural world, nature then becomes a threat. It's chaos becomes a threat, it cycle of birth and death become a threat, its incredible power becomes a threat. We find ourselves in a world that menaces us—that threatens the order we are trying to impose. As a result we find ourselves more fearful—we find ourselves at war with the very forces that underlie our lives—the very source of life from which we arose. And so we build fences -- fences that cut us off from the fullness of existence. Fences that separate us from our greater family.

For those who have erected such fences, and we probably all have to various degrees, it is time to recognize the consequences of our actions. It is time to recognize the pain that such estrangement brings us and the world. And it is time to take them down- to take them down so we can experience a holiness found only when one encounters with reverence and awe the natural world.

Out of Urban by Dave Bishop

Come out of urban:
Come with me to the soil,
the flesh and blood of everything.
Wrap yourself in bare earth and come
together with every living thing
that has its time and grows to dust.

Come out of urban's
paper wealth and live;
light to dark to light,
young to old to young again.

Let the random rains
swell your breasts with prairie summer
and wait the hard of winter.
Sleep with me in snow
and throw yourself away with fall.

There is no dissevering
the all of us,
except by extinguishing the star
or washing our hands of the dirt.

Music

The question is, which path is ultimately most fulfilling. Is it to believe that we humans own the world and see nature as an “it” to be used with little regard for its health and stability. Is our earth something to be consumed, its web of life shredded to satisfy our every craving. Are we the only creatures with rights—the only ones that really matter.

Or would we find life more satisfying if we understood that we are only one strand in the interdependent web of life. That from God’s perspective we are no more important then the ant or oak tree. They are all an essential part this amazing creation, and in order to feel truly at home in this world we must respect and care about them. We must see them as brothers and sisters in the family of life.

The question is, which path is ultimately most fulfilling.

Aldo Leopold’s answer was this. [The] “Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of [wisdom and] humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who talk of empires – political and economic – that will last a thousand years. It is only the wise who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.

There are those who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question of whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.”

I close with a reading inspired by a letter from Chief Seattle to the United States government, 1852.

The earth is sacred
Every flower-blazed prairie
Covering gently rounded hills
Is sacred

As the eagle watches the earth,
The rustling wild grain speaks for us.
Prairie bird songs float echoless
On the soft breeze—they are our songs.

We are born of the earth
And taught by its nature.

If we know the bear, the deer, the elk,
The creatures of the earth,
We know ourselves.

As the prairie flower has
Roots in the soil,
We too have roots.

The water that flows
Is like the blood in our veins.

Reflections in the shining waters
Speak of ancestral memories.
The murmuring streams
Tell us of our fathers and mothers.

The wind gave us our first breath
And receives our last sigh.
The spirit of life comes to our children
On the wings of the wind

The earth does not belong to us.
We belong to the earth.
The fate of the earth is our fate.

The web of life is not woven by us.
We are merely a strand in the web.
Whatever we do to the web
We do to ourselves.

Our life is brief
Like the flight of an eagle.
Our souls, delicate,
Like the fragrance of a prairie flower.


©2004 Rev. Daniel S. Brosier