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The System Works as Designed
Douglas Taylor
1-18-26

Sermon Video: https://youtu.be/d_DDPYDuzCY

“This is not the America I love.” I have heard people say. “We’re better than this!”  “What has happened to our country? I have heard. When we say this, we are trying to articulate a positive statement that the good country founded on good principles and civic values is not apparent … and that what is going on around us now is, by contrast, not good, not in keeping with those good values, that good foundation that we see.

And I want to let you know there is a flaw in that logic, there’s a flaw in that argument. Our country was founded through the genocide of the indigenous people. Our country was built on the labor of enslaved people. There is growing awareness that our criminal justice system is built around protecting property first, and originally that included slaves – and some argue there are echoes of that still happening today. Capitalism is structured not around benefiting creators and laborers or even society in general – it is structured around benefiting owners.

There is this tension that is in place when we say something “This is not the country I know and love.” Because it is. What we’re seeing now very often has an echo that can very easily and obviously be traced back to some of the flaws, some of the injustices, some of the cruelty that was backed into our country when we started.

But you’re also not wrong. There is a tension here. We as a country came together and wrote promises, saying who we are and who we long to be. Promises about equity and equality and ‘endowed with unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ That all people are created good. That was part of it!  

There’s a piece in the 1963 speech that King made – that is perhaps his most famous one, “I Have a Dream.” The beginning of it, before he gets rolling, he talks about a promissory note. He said, “we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.”

He said the ‘architects of our republic had made – with magnificent words in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence – promises and we see this as a promissory note, a guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He said:

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

He refused to let only the critique stay, but also that we had made a promise for who we could be.

“This is not my America,” we say. “This is not the country I love, what we are seeing in the streets.”  … well – yes it is. We are flawed from the beginning. And we have greatness baked into who we could be. But we must work for that part.

The tension is that we have both the rot and the promise at our foundation and we can feed the promise while cutting out the rot. Both are true. When you wonder about what’s going wrong – part of the answer is: things are going as planned. We are at the logical outcome of the trajectory we’ve been on for a while.

But that doesn’t mean we’re done. It means there is a tension in the system. So what are we to do about that? It means we need to participate. We need to build the more perfect union. We need to engage.

In that 1967 speech (Where Do We Go From Here?) that we used as our reading, Dr. King talked about – we would say today – intersectionality. He talked about the triple evils of Militarism, Materialism, and Racism. He wove all three into this one paragraph that I absolutely love:

In other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. (That’s the racism) And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. (There’s the poverty) And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.  

The entanglement of racism and poverty has been on most people’s radar for a while, economic struggle lands disproportionally on people of color. But King is also saying poor people are exploited in our current system. Full stop. Not just that poor black people are exploited, but that poor people of every race or ethnicity are exploited. And then he ties the military in by saying the country will need to prop itself up with foreign investments that need protecting – thus a military. King lived through the use of state violence against poor people and against African-Americans in particular. And yes we usually outsource our foreign wars to proxies lately, but who knows, that might change soon. But the militarism evil that he is talking about is not just beyond our borders. It’s happening without our borders against our own people.  

King called for non-violence. Often when folks wake up this reality or start calling out this reality, of this tension, of things that have gone wrong, sometimes they’ll lean into King and they’ll talk about his non-violence.

A lot of people remember King for non-violence and remember his speeches and his rallies. But it is incredibly important: King spoke of non-violent direct action. He never just spoke about non-violence. He was not in favor of passivity, of backing down, of non-violence in the sense of ‘I’m not going to get in the middle of anything because that might lead to violence.’ He was very encouraging of people getting in the middle of things, to direct action. To only speak of his non-violence is a perversion of his legacy.

Some of you have been in a class that Rev. Jo VonRue and I are co-leading over the fall. It is a class on democracy that meets online monthly with folks from several UU congregations in the area. The very first class talked about “Effective Strategic Escalation” which talked about various types and levels of protest.  

We used Gene Sharp’s analysis. Gene Sharp is a decades-long scholar on non-violent action; and he has, for example, this one book that talks about 198 versions of direct action. He breaks them into three type: symbolic action, noncooperation, and alternative cooperation or Intervention

Symbolic direct action is like a rally or hanging a banner. Non-Cooperation is like a strike or a boycott. Alternative Cooperation or Intervention is like a sit-in or traffic obstruction.

The story we shared with you, “Sunny-side Mary” has some of these elements in it. Sitting in the good seats, that was intervention, that was essentially a Sit-in. When she was wading in the water, that was some symbolic action. It drew the Shady Side folks’ attention and it got something moving symbolically. And when they were all sitting in the fountain that was some alternative cooperation – some intervention, something new and different. (I guess a strike or boycott would be if all the – they had to show up or risk detention – but they could boycott paying attention. That wasn’t in the story.)

Dr. King called people into a variety of styles of non-violent direct actions. He is famous from all the rallies and speeches. But it is too easy to only do symbolic action. And if all you are doing is symbolic action, 60 years later, our country’s oppressors have figured out how to ignore you by now. It’s not enough. It’s good to do and its not enough. You need to have other things going on so the systemic powers will not simply ignore you. We need direct actions that wake people up, that get’s people’s attention, that is coordinated and planned if they are going to be effective. But it needs to be direct action.

And, ultimately, all of that action needs to be accountable to the vulnerable people most impacted by the oppression and the consequences of our direct actions.

Which brings me around to an announcement. I have been invited and I am responding to a call to action. The clergy in Minneapolis have put out a call saying ‘ICE is here and we want you to show up.’ They link their call to Selma when King put out a call for clergy and lay people to come and witness.

It is not lost on me that part of the history of the 60’s and that Civil Rights Movement that a Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb went down and was killed. And when a white man from the north was killed, that had a different impact on the country than when all the other men and women – the people of color – had been killed and had not risen to the same level of attention.

I am not going to disparage anybody who is dramatically upset by the death of Renee Good, the murder of this white woman. Please also notice all of the black people ICE has killed in this past year.

Part of the systemic effectiveness we are called to is to allow Renee Good’s murder to activate us. We can unpack the racism of that eventually. We’ll get there.

But when King said we need to ‘begin to ask the question …’ – he began asking those questions about the triple evils 60 years ago. Are we still beginning to ask these question? No. We need to keep moving.

I have been invited to go to Minneapolis and to be accountable to the people who are there on the ground dealing with ICE directly.

When I went to Standing Rock almost 10 years ago, I had to specifically come back and say “I never wanted to risk arrest.” There were some folks here who were disappointed that I was not arrested. The badge of having done a resistance means you got arrested.

The clergy at Standing Rock were specifically not invited to do a civil disobedience that would risk arrest. In fact there was one dude who stood up at the training the day before and said ‘and those of us who want to risk arrest, come over the corner and we’ll talk about doing additional things.’

One of the grandmothers, one of the elders went to that circle … and there were a dozen white people sitting on the floor as this elder yelled at them. ‘That is not what we asked you to come do. Our Water Protectors will risk arrest. You are here to witness.’

I have been called to Minneapolis, I don’t know what they are going to ask of me. But I will be accountable to the people on the ground who are dealing with this directly. It has been made clear, it is not safe to go to Minneapolis right now. If you are a person of color or if you have a disability or if you are an obviously Trans person it may not be a good choice for you to come to Minneapolis to respond to this call. It is not currently safe in Minneapolis to be a protestor, to be an immigrant, to be racially-profile-able.

And we (attending this call) need to be accountable in any direct action we are invited into to the people who will be impacted by the consequences of that direct action. That’s incredibly important.

Yes, the injustices and oppression we are seeing today are cruel and beyond the pale. This is not the America we want. It is the America we have, the systems of oppression and injustice from our inception are echoing into our current situation. The system is working as designed. And there is another layer of design – a promise of equity and opportunity and liberty – a layer of design we need to engage and enact and make real.  We need to build the more perfect union.

May we hear the complaint as well as the call. May we learn that these calls are coming to you, to me; and that it is our work to respond, to build that new America that hope can be.

When I go to Minneapolis I want to carry you with me. I’m not going to go alone. This is the stole I will be wearing (a “side with love” stole.) I want to bring you with me. I don’t know exactly how your unique theology will respond to this but can you bless this? Can you bless me? Can you pray for me? Can you imbue this stole with your wishes for what might happen, what I might encounter, that you will be with me when I am there on the streets.

If that means you might come up and touch the stole, say a prayer, send good energy, drop extra money toward the discretionary fund. I don’t know how you bless things. But please, if you are willing, offer some blessing so that I can bring you with me when I go to Minneapolis, and that they will know that we are with them; and that we care about them and this world and this society that we are recreating – the whole system.

May we lean in to the call and to the voices of those most marginalized and targeted. May we embrace the holy work of caring for each other and for those in need as we build the more perfect union.

In a world without end, may it be so.  

MLK Keynote Speech 2025
Rev. Douglas Taylor
host by the MLK Commission of Broome County
Monday, January 20, 2025 at 6:00pm
at the Salvation Temple Church, 80 Main Street

When I was here last year, participating in the service, I shared a small anecdote about my personal connection to one of Dr. King’s early speeches. My mother’s father, Ashley Walter Strong served the as a leader in Old Stone Universalist Church in Schuyler Lake, NY. Grandpa Strong served as Moderator and then President of the New York State Convention of Universalists in the mid 1950’s. It was in that role that he met the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1956 the meeting in Cortland and Dr. King was the featured speaker; as moderator it was my grandfather’s responsibility to introduce him.

By this time, young Dr. King had successfully navigated the Montgomery bus boycott resulting in a U.S. district court decision that segregation of municipal buses is unconstitutional. 
(Although the official Supreme Court decision upholding the lower court decision was still a few months away.) Dr. King had been arrested once by this time; (although the first bomb would not appear on his front porch for another six months.) The summer of 1956 was before Dr. King and his wife traveled to India to study Mahatma Gandhi’s policies of nonviolence. It was before James Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi, before King was jailed in Birmingham where he wrote his stirring Letter from the Birmingham Jail, before the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech during the march on Washington. This was before King visited West Berlin, before he met with the Pope in Rome, before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This was before Malcolm X was murdered, before the march from Selma to Montgomery. It was before President Johnson signed the voting rights bill, before the 1967 riots in Detroit and in Newark and in Jackson Mississippi. It was almost twelve years before Martin Luther King was shot by James Earl Ray in Memphis.

My grandfather stood at the lectern to introduce Dr. King to the 1956 State Convention delegates and attendees and had no way of knowing what would unfold over the next dozen years for that man or for the nation. He knew about King’s education and vocation; he knew about the bus boycott and the scope of the issues King and others were trying to address. My grandfather knew these were issues that he and the other Universalists there were deeply concerned about. He could sense the fire and the passion in this man.

I have tried to imagine myself in my grandfather’s position. The Universalist, if you are unfamiliar, are a people of God’s love. Love has long been our central value, guiding our faith. Standing before a gathering of northern white religious people concerned for issues of racial injustice, introducing Dr. King.

When I asked my mother about it, she was 16 years old at the time, she wrote this to me:

I know he was so proud of being able to introduce Dr. King. Knowing Dad, I would say that he stood in the same spiritual awe as I did. Dad had a deep respect for the integrity and convictions [of] Dr. King. We were all so proud of being Universalists that day.

I’ve been thinking about the experience of white allies in the Civil Rights movement and anti-racism efforts beyond. I’ve been thinking about the message Dr. King preached to engage white people in the effort for desegregation and racial equality. Because the vision Dr. King put forth was of a multi-racial, multi-cultural Beloved Community, and that is not a message only for Black people. King was talking to white people as well.  

Early in my own ministry, I began preaching an MLK sermon on the Sunday before the national holiday. I have preached such a sermon nearly every year in my congregation these past twenty years. I often preach specifically about King and his message, although some years I focus on racism through the work of Michelle Alexander or Ta-Nahisi Coates, and sometimes I just preach about democracy with a few references to King. But my congregation has come to understand that I will be sharing King’s message and vision with them each year; and more – they have come to understand that King’s message is for them.

I strive to bring King’s message and vision to my predominantly white congregation, to encourage them – not that most of them need this encouragement – to heed his vision as applicable to them. The vision King offered the nation was a powerful vision calling us to move forward by staying true to the fundamental statements of who we are and who we have been as a country since our inception. King cast a vision of the beloved community united to defeat racism, united to defeat economic inequality, united to defeat the great sin of war.

It is interesting to note that nowadays we try to tame King’s message by saying only it is a message about racism. We try to contain it into a narrow concept consumable only as a nice story of something that happened once upon a time for black people. But the message cannot be so contained and ignored because King’s vision was not simply a vision of voting rights and desegregation. The message cannot be contained because the vision cannot be contained. King’s vision was of the beloved community and it included all God’s children.

King’s vision was as much about peace as he spoke out against the Vietnam War. His vision was as much about economic opportunity as he spoke in support of striking workers. King’s vision was not for some people during some time now past. His vision was for the nation to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, that all people are created equal. King’s vision was less about desegregation for blacks and more about stirring the rest of the nation to wake up to the injustices that were being experienced by the least of these in our midst.

The 1956 sermon King delivered to the Universalists is not my only connection to King. Ten years later, in 1966, Dr. King spoke to a larger convention, the General Assembly of Unitarian Universalists delivering the distinguished Ware Lecture.

Over the years the Ware Lecture has been delivered by Jane Addams, Howard Thurman, Linus Pauling, Helen Caldicott, Krista Tippett, Van Jones, Eboo Patel, and Cornell West. It is an impressive list. In 1966, the speaker was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his title of his talk was “Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution.” Dr. King was invited to speak to the gathered Unitarian Universalists, a predominantly white faith tradition, and the message he chose to bring us was to wake up!  

Dr. King began his speech to us with the story of Rip van Winkle. In case the tale has fallen out of fashion; briefly, it is a short story by Washington Irving about a man who falls asleep up in the Catskill mountains for 20 years. Most cogently, he falls asleep while King George the third of England rules the land and wakes to find President George Washington in charge. Rip van Winkle slept through a revolution.

In drawing the parallel, King said to us,

“One of the great misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.” (MLK Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution)

He then goes on to describe the demands of “the new situation” as well as what he means by “the new attitudes and outlooks” needed to face it.

He talked about the shift underway in how racism is experienced in America after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were signed into law. He talked about the ongoing pervasive attitude of racial superiority (or ‘white supremacy’ as we might say today.) He told us about the ongoing threats of violence and annihilation. Dr. King warned us about the apathy of the church, the tragic sin of standing by while people were oppressed and degraded. He warned us against sleeping through the revolution.

And frankly, in all fairness, we Unitarian Universalists – like many good white liberals – we did fall asleep after we experienced an internal implosion over racial issues just a few years after King spoke with us. As a religious movement, we pretty much stopped talking about race through the 70’s and 80’s and much of the 90’s. Now, that’s a broad and un-nuanced way of putting it, but it is largely true.

But a new day has arrived. The current generation faces much the same adversity folks faced the 60’s. There are remarkable similarities. There is an upswell in calls for civil rights and justice for marginalized identities. Young people are riled up and the older generation doesn’t quite understand why. Back in the ‘60’s, Dr. King would often cite three evils for us to deal with as a nation: racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. Are we not still facing these three evils today?

So, in 1966, Dr. King said, “all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands.” And the great period of change he referred to then is strikingly similar to the great period of change we are now in today. We can add a few problems and difficulties that were not in play back then. Healthcare, for example, was not a ‘for-profit’ endeavor back then; we invented that problem in the 70’s. And the climate crisis has grown dramatically worse since King’s time. The need for human rights and civil rights for other marginalized groups has expanded, but echoes the work King and others had done in their time.

Many people who were deeply involved in the hard work of justice-making in the 60’s may be rightly disheartened that we find ourselves in so similar a situation today. But I tell you the fires have not died and there are workers in the field today building toward a better world, where justice will roll down like waters and peace like a mighty stream.

Dr. King told that gathering of white religious liberals in 1966 that we would need new attitudes and outlooks to address the situation. As you might suspect, the new attitudes and outlooks he called for over 50 years ago – I’m going to tell you are applicable today. Indeed the ‘new’ attitudes and outlooks he called for back then, while radical, were not really new in the 60’s.

There were two particular ideas, theological ideas, that he mentioned in his speech to the Unitarian Universalists as the attitudes and outlooks needed for those times. 

The first in the mindset of interconnectedness as a perspective of renewal. In the 1966 Ware Lecture he said it like this: “All life is inter-related, and somehow we are all tied together. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” In other speeches he talked about it as a “network of mutuality, a single garment of destiny,” in which we are all caught up together; and how “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It’s all inter-related. This theological premise that we are interconnected led King and it leads us today into the work of justice.

It becomes important to be in relationship with the poor and oppressed, that you understand the condition of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. Dr. King said “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” I am suggesting our interconnectedness calls us to have relationships with people who are vulnerable and suffering today.

The second theological perspective he mentioned is that of the Beloved Community. Dr. King kept the vision of a Beloved Community fresh in the people’s minds, as a beacon toward which we were striving. The whole underpinning of the I Have a Dream speech is that the ‘dream’ was really a social vision of the Beloved Community.

The dream is the goal. And here is the trick. This is what King came to say to the Unitarian Universalist back in in 1966.  To achieve the dream, good people like me and other progressive white liberals need to first wake up and stay awake through the revolution.

What are we going to do? What are you willing to do? It is all inter-related and our goal is nothing less than Beloved Community. What are we going to do?

In the speech he gave to the Unitarian Universalists Dr. King quoted Victor Hugo who had once said there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. I would cautiously suggest that time is cyclical and the time has come again for the grand ideas of freedom and justice in our country. And it is the church that needs to herald these ideas, it is the church that must wake up and shout such things in the highways and byways of our nation.

In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? King wrote:

“The church has an opportunity and a duty to lift up its voice like a trumpet and declare unto the people the immorality of segregation.  It must affirm that every human life is a reflection of divinity, and that every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man.”

This is the call for religion to recognize its role in ushering in a solution to national problems. 

In his Letter from the Birmingham Jail he wrote that the church had been behaving like a thermometer of culture when it used to be like a thermostat! During Dr. King’s time, the church had an opportunity and a duty to lift up its voice like a trumpet and declare unto the people the immorality of racism. Churches did so then and need to do so now. Will we? He called on churches to be champions once more for the poor, to cry out against the sin of economic inequality. Will we? King called on churches to raise their voices against the oppressive machinery of war and destruction. Will we? 

The message of Dr. King was not contained as only a message against racism. He spoke out against the triple threat of racism, militarism and economic disparity. A key demand in his I Have a Dream speech, for example, was for “a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living.” (A line that often gets missed!)

Dr. King was killed while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, TN who were struggling for a living wage and for their dignity. Dr. King said,

“There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American worker whether a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer.”

Dr. King’s vision still serves for our current situation, as there are still parts of that vision we have not realized. We can yet work against racism. We still can take part in speaking out against endless war. There is still more to do, right here in downtown Binghamton to change systems and support individuals struggling with poverty and economic inequality. Dr. King shared with us the dream but to achieve the dream we must first wake up. 

To achieve the dream of economic equality, we must wake up enough to recognize that nearly 40 million people in American living in poverty is unacceptable and that we can do something about it. To achieve the dream of a day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” we need to first wake up to the fact that we have more than 11 million children living in poverty in this country, which is unacceptable and something we can address if we wanted to address it.

To achieve the dream of a day when increasing our teachers’ take-home pay will triumph over tax-breaks for tycoons; when providing for the poor pulls rank over putting them in prison; when we adjust our attitude as a society about the possibility of putting people of color into positions of power … then we must first wake up to the myth of meritocracy and the insidious reality of white supremacy culture.

I share the dream of a day when we put our great wisdom and wealth to work feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and caring for the sick. I share the dream of a day when our nation is once more recognized as the leader of the free world not by of the magnitude of our military but by the capacity of our compassion. I share the dream of a day when we wake up and realize that before we can be a great nation, we must first be a good nation. We all have a role in bringing that Dream to fruition. It is time for us to again wake up and join the work of building the Beloved Community for today.

In a world without end,

May it be so.

Prevailing Green

Rev. Douglas Taylor

9-29-24

Friday night (Sept 27) Hurricane Helene made landfall. It was a category 4 storm and by Saturday morning, reports revealed it left a path of destruction through ten states, causing millions of residents and businesses to lose power, and leaving over 50 people dead so far.

NOAA hurricane scientist Jeff Masters has said Helene’s landfall “gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years. (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U. S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 or 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.” (As read in Heather Cox Richardson)

This is not going to go away. Record-breaking hurricane events have become part of our regular experience of the climate crisis we are in. Do we have that in our awareness living here in upstate New York? I know the people down in Florida and Georgia have had to grapple with this a they consider the messages they are receiving from their political leaders. But do we hear it up here? We have regular record-breaking natural disasters now.

Have you ever ridden the teacups at a carnival? I remember one time when our oldest Brin was maybe 3 years old there was a rinky-dink carnival set up in the parking lot of a run-down mall. They had very little business at that hour and we climbed into the teacup ride.

Brin were so excited. The operator smiled at us and started the ride. If you know the ride, you know the whole thing starts slow and builds up in speed, and as the whole ride circles around, each teacup can also spin. So we’re spinning away and I look at my child’s grinning face and ask, “Do you want to go faster?” They nod excitedly.

I no longer remember exactly how it worked, if I leaned forward or leaned back to get it spinning faster, but all the sudden we started whipping around. And the blood drained out of my child’s face. The operator of the ride noticed and quickly shut down the ride. Nice guy. I bought Brin some ice cream to help them perk back up. I double checked online recently to see if my memory of this ride was correct and found the line: “Under modern H&S guidelines children’s rides should not spin faster than eight times per minute.”

My point in telling you this story is that like the mechanical tea cup ride, we can manipulate the situation to spin faster if we want to. In the past century or so, the human species has made great strides in eradicating some major diseases, dramatically extended the average lifespan, and created an abundance of luxury available at our fingertips – or at least at the fingertips of some.

Our distribution of the abundance we have extracted from the earth is still problematic but the amount is indisputable. We have pushed the carrying capacity well beyond the limit because we have manipulated the situation to spin faster. We are spinning our tea cup beyond the guidelines for such rides, spinning faster than is recommended. We can reign it in. We can adjust our use of this ride we are on to better match the outcome we need.

Back in 2006, Al Gore’s film Inconvenient Truth came out. I bought a copy the DVD and we showed it here in our sanctuary. A few years later, our congregation was on its way to becoming a Green Sanctuary. We were buying reusable bags, changing out our lightbulbs, and boycotting bottled water. Eventually we got solar panels and air source heating and cooling units in the building, working to reduce our carbon footprint. And our renovation was grounded in a commitment to environmental awareness. We’ve been working on this for a while.

And we are far from the only ones. Did you hear in that list of positive stories we had for our reading https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/06/energy-transition-positive-climate-change/, that clean, renewable energy will likely become the world’s largest source of power by 2025? Did you hear the part about the vast offshore windfarm at full capacity, and the countries functioning fully under renewable energy, and the commitments to hold companies accountable for destruction of the environment? There are measurable actions happening that have noticeable impacts on the environment. The last line of our reading notices that we are headed in the right direction. And it ends with the question: are we traveling fast enough?

I would argue that question is irrelevant. That question is loaded to take us into a fruitless conversation of hand-wringing and apprehension that will undermine the work we have underway to build a better way forward. That question leads us into saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, tempts us into either denial or despair.

But the better answer is the one I often pull up when talking about climate change. Johanna Macy’s ‘three responses.’ Some stay in denial, refusing to acknowledge to looming disruption. Some succumb to despair, seeing no hope in the looming disruption. I refuse to either ignore the situation or despair of our chances. And Macy proposes the third way, the way of the Great Turning, the choice to hold hope. Not denial or despair; decision. Make the decision to keep seeking a new way, to remain hopeful, to keep working toward the better world. In Darwin’s theory of evolution, when we wrote about the ‘fittest’ surviving, he was referring to those that can accurately perceive their changing environment and adapt to it.

I remain hopeful that we will harness the creative resilience that has marked our species throughout time. Resiliency is the response nature offers after environmental trauma. We do well to lean into the fact that we are part of nature and our species can also be resilient. Creativity is the key. New solutions are always unfolding. In many ways, the biggest trick is to adjust our perspective enough to reimagine a new era together. The spirit is always moving among us as we respond.

And bell hooks reminds us “Rarely if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” We are meant to respond to life as a collective. We don’t need to find a super hero. We need to collectively become the answer we need. That list of positive things happening for the environment did not have a single person saving anything. It was all about the community doing the work together.

And here I want to emphasize, ‘the work’ may not be what you think it is. Because the trauma is spread around and the impacts show up in many ways. There is an intersectionality to the crisis and there must be an intersectionality in our response. All our efforts weave back into each other. Nearly every justice effort needs climate justice to be included. And climate justice needs every other justice effort included to be effective.

If you are passionate about fair housing or food scarcity, about racism or immigration, about voting rights or universal healthcare – there is a climate component directly or indirectly tangled up in the issues.

Locally, we can get involved in voter registration and voter turnout. We can work with groups creating better access to food and fair housing. We can take part in efforts to better empower marginalize people and vulnerable populations – locally, right now.

Because for us to see improvement toward environmental resiliency, we need to also see improvement in these other areas. The issues are connected and the traumas are overlapping. So the call this morning is not to drop everything and start campaigning for the environment. It is to notice and honor all the work we are doing and the ways it intersects with the work others are doing.

We are in this together, supporting disaster relief for the south and responding to food scarcity in Binghamton’s first ward. We are in this together, staffing the phone banks for voter registration for Pennsylvanians and donating blood at our next blood drive on Tuesday. We are in this together, lobbying congress to take up green energy bills and supporting local programs for at-risk queer youth.

There is so much we can do to support our earth and each other. As my colleague Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto writes, “All of us need all of us to make it.” As we respond to the call for Climate Justice, as we respond to another devastating hurricane, as we hear the question – are we doing enough … We are the answer, together. We are the answer, together.

In a world without end

May it be so.

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