By Rev. Kirk Ballin
April 5, 2015
Responsive Reading #628 “Rolling Away the Stone†– Campbell
Reading # 593 “Liberation Is Costly†– Tutu
Reading:
“Our current crisis requires transformation. It’s less about changing a few individual behaviors and more about imagining radical new ways of living.
Our current paradigm assumes the expendability of some people and species in service to the dominant culture. In it, we willingly forgo human health and even human and non-human life on this planet as long as we can live in comfort and convenience today. In this paradigm, we willingly sacrifice the people on the margins of society—generally people of color, immigrants, and people who live with great financial instability—to maintain the industrial growth economy. This economic system assumes ecosystems, communities, cultures, and non-human beings are all externalities that are expendable in the pursuit of maximizing profit.
Today, Unitarian Universalists and other people of faith and conscience begin to think deeply together about altering social norms and creating climate justice. Climate justice is a global fight to dismantle the paradigm that disadvantages marginalized people and approaches Earth as supply source and sewer rather than a system of interdependent life, a single, beloved community. Climate justice pays deep attention to those most affected by climate change to find transformative solutions grounded in profound connections with Earth and each other.†— www.commit2respond.org
Unless our brains are undeveloped or damaged in some way, every human being requires culture in order to live…. As long as we have the self-aware, conscious brains that are unique to our being human, culture is as necessary to our survival as food, water, and shelter. Culture is the framework of meaning and purpose that our human minds must create in order to foster our survival. If you take culture with its myriad of expressions out of the human picture – we are not human. And even though this unique capacity for creating culture is inherent to every conscious human being, it is in the context of human communities, human societies that culture is most expressed and developed; culture is a collective necessity for the survival of the group, the survival of the species.
Each of us here, this morning, lives our lives dependent upon a cultural framework for our day to day living, giving us purpose, meaning, and means by which to survive. And much of that cultural framework is something we share in, sustain, and support as a society. So all human beings, especially human beings living socially with others, MUST have culture to survive, and there must be a high degree of conformity in the dependence on culture as it has developed in a society, in order for the society to sustain itself.
But it is this dependence and conformity that I want to hit on this morning; that even though culture is essential to our survival as human societies, what has served as the cultural status quo of a society for long periods of time, is not always continuing to serve the best interests of the society and its survival, of the survival of humanity. Yet we can be so easily compelled, conditioned, controlled by the established culture that we are essentially enslaved by the culture rather than being conscious and empowered to change the culture to serve what is in the best interest of our survival.
A fairly benign but timely example is Easter. Why do we feel compelled to celebrate and acknowledge Easter? I doubt if any of us are here, today, Easter Sunday, because of THE Christian Holy Day that celebrates the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God who rose from the dead as an act of forgiveness for our sins! And except for those of us who have the opportunity to be with young children to hide colored eggs, and celebrate in the fun of Easter (more pagan than anything else), there isn’t much point to it than what we make ourselves to do for Easter – perhaps celebrate the arrival of spring!. Yet we still feel compelled to call it Easter Sunday and do something as if it is a required part of our existence! It is entirely a culturally determined requisite for many of us! We do it because our culture says to do it!
So we UU ministers and congregations work hard to find a way to make it relevant to us – and sometimes that is not very successful of meaningful.
But Friday evening was also the beginning of another culturally determined holy time for many people who culturally identify themselves as Jewish. Passover began after sunset on Friday, April 3, and will go through Saturday, April 11, ending at sunset. This is THE time when Jews celebrate and remember their ancestors’ flight from Egypt and the challenges they faced in fleeing their oppression and finding a promised land of liberation to worship God as they understood God to be.
So the two stories, one from the Christian understanding of liberation and one from the Jewish understanding of liberation, can serve as opportunities for us to understand what I am trying to get at when talking about being “enslaved†to culture in a way that is not serving the welfare of human society.
For Jews, the escape from the oppressive culture of the Pharoahic system, was transformative, liberating, and empowering that allowed the formation of a new cultural system that was more or less intent on preserving the survival of the Jewish people, and still serves that purpose today in the annual celebration of Passover; the distinction of Judaism as a unique identity with political and social implications.
For Christians, the persecution of Jesus, his gruesome death, and his subsequent resurrection and forgiveness of sins was a powerful message of hope, transformation, and liberation for those who did not benefit from the political powers, the dominant cultural forces that prevailed in society, whether it was the Romans or the wealthy Pharisees, a powerful Jewish class that controlled the Temples and dictated proper behavior and practices. And it is still a powerful message of liberation for many throughout the world. The image of the massive stone being moved from Jesus’ tomb simply by the force of Jesus’ inherent power from God, is inspiring to many believers as a symbol of liberation from the oppression of society. But of course, the Church, in many respects, has used that as a means to assert its own cultural enslavement on many, many people.
So we as UUs do have something to learn from these well established, cultural structures that define the lives of many, many human beings and communities. They serve as good examples of the need for human beings to break away from the cultural norms that do not foster those human beings’ survival.
But they also serve as good examples of how easy it is for us as human beings, as human societies to be similarly enslaved by those cultural structures that once empowered us and fostered our survival. What once set us free, and assured our survival and sustenance, can and does become our new cultural prisons. It is an ongoing dichotomy of being dependent on culture to have a structure to hang our human-beings on so we have meaning and purpose and means to survive, while trying to keep that structure from imprisoning our lives. For human beings, culture is our greatest ally for survival and it is our greatest threat for survival. And now that the human community is not limited to our own tribe, or own community, or own nation, but rather is a world community, the cultural structures that we have supported and depended upon, and been enslaved to are no longer serving our needs for survival. To the contrary, these cultural structures are contributing more to our demise as a species rather than our survival.
And no more apparent is this reality than in the cultural structures that divide humanity into competing forces for cultural dominance, whatever the cultural criteria might be, whether it is skin color, gender identity, wealth, religious beliefs, geography, military might, or resource control and ownership. That which works against the cultural identity of a healthy world community is not serving the survival of humanity, rather it is serving to ultimately eliminate humanity by its own hand. To the extent that you and I continue to be enslaved to these cultural structures that do not serve the welfare of the world community, we are contributing to the demise of our own species.
And hand in hand with this is the issue of climate change and humanity’s role in its cause and in its future. What a powerful example of how a dominant cultural structure, one dependent on fossil fuels, in many ways liberated human beings in profound and transforming ways that fostered human survival and population growth has become our self-imposed prison of threat to our survival! The consequences of human, culturally created climate change not only affect you and me in our daily lives, but the lives of every form of life on this planet! Life itself might not ultimately be doomed, because Life will find its way to evolve and persist. Evolution is in charge! But the quality of life for us and certainly for future human beings will be severely compromised, if not lead to the extinction of human life, if we human beings do not drastically change the oppressive consequences of supporting a fossil fuel culture. And there again every single one of us in this room is enslaved to that culture in some way, so each of us continues to support a culture that is not ultimately serving the survival of the world community.
Each of us needs to consciously and intentionally look at ways of lessening our support for that culture, while fostering the emergence of cultural structures that liberate and sustain us as a world community. Don’t expect others to do it for you and don’t judge others if you’re not looking at what you can do!
Cultures don’t change overnight; it sometimes takes a mighty effort to move that enormous stone that is blocking our ability to be transformed into a new way of living; it takes hardship, determination, and faith to flee the oppressive forces of a dominant culture and find freedom and sustenance in a new vision of humanity. But it will take the effort of each of us to make it happen.
So culture can be the means for our survival, but it can easily become the source of our demise. That is why as healthy, enlightened human beings we must always be diligently monitoring the role of culture in our lives. Is it serving that which fosters our well-being and survival or is it undermining our well-being and survival?
And I truly believe that we have in our Seven Principles the means by which to take stock of the cultures we live in. By passing our cultures through the prism of the Seven Principles, we can assess the worthiness of the cultural structures we live by and in, as to whether they are serving our well-being as a world community. By passing them through the affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, justice, equity, and compassion in human relations, acceptance of one another encouragement to spiritual growth, a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, the right of conscience and use of the democratic process in our communities, a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all, and the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part, we are using our own cultural structure to foster our shared wellbeing.
Perhaps these 7 Principles will someday become oppressive in their own way and need to be abandoned, but right now I think they are powerful forces for moving the massive rock away from our tomb of divisiveness to be united as one humanity, and powerful forces for guiding us through the wilderness to a promised land free from war and an environmental apocalypse.
And instead of we Unitarian Universalists feeling culturally compelled, every year, to accommodate Easter or even Passover, perhaps we can take this time of the year to evaluate what it is we are continuing to do to support cultural enslavement, what we are doing to further divisiveness in the world community and to further degrade our life supporting ecosystems. To instead re-pledge our commitment to the use of our 7 Principles to affirm and promote a culture of inclusiveness, empowerment, accountability, sustainability –and freedom!
So that’s my UU Minister effort at making this Easter Sunday a culturally relevant event! Thanks.