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Unitarian Universalist Society of Fairhaven "A Cup of Justice" Rev. Ann C. Fox |
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Today marks the beginning of what Christians call Holy Week. As we look around our church, we can imagine that this church must have entered fully into the meaning of Holy Week, at least within its Unitarian understanding. While we still indeed honor the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and the life he lived, many of us believe that were he alive today, he would have expressed his view of the holy to include the Earth and all of its creatures, animate and inanimate. He spoke appropriately to the people in the time in which he lived; so would he now. The story of the Garden of Eden is a myth of an ideal world where Earth, Nature, God, and humankind were one. The loss of Eden is the story of the loss of oneness consciousness with All That Is. The spiritual journey of humankind must eventually include the return to oneness consciousness. The expression in Unitarian Universalism of oneness consciousness is our Seventh Principle, "We covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." This principle has a wide embrace. Today, let us take two major aspects of it. First, Unitarian Universalism encourages caring for the Earth, upon which we, and all future generations, depend for physical and spiritual sustenance. We care overtly for the earth by reducing, reusing, and recycling its resources to the utmost of our ability. We support policies that sustain the environment. And we raise our consciousness every year by celebrating Earth Day. Today is that day. I know that Earth Day is officially 22nd April. However, because Easter came so close to it this year, most people have decided to make this weekend Earth Day weekend instead. For myself, I am also choosing to buy more and more organically grown products for I know that although pesticides help us expand our food resources, pesticides are also poisoning our ground water, our rivers and streams, our wetlands, and eventually our bays and oceans. Today and for the next few weeks, our religious education classes for children are focusing on our Seventh Principle and upon caring for the earth by composting. Our Director of Religious Education, Lisa Elliott has had worms composting just about all kitchen wastes this week. You can go over to Harrop Center afterwards and see and hear the wiggly creatures munching away in the kitchen. Leo and I are avidly composting everything we can. Lisa has sent off for lots of information on composting and growing natural lawns. It is marvelous information and I've put it on a table in the Parish House for you to take. Our church staff is reducing, reusing, and recycling everything we possibly can. One day, I dearly hope that a bold and dedicated individual will come forward and lead us in using china cups on a Sunday morning and for all church events instead of paper goods. (We do have a very good dish washing machine!) If we truly want to care for this earth, we will have to learn to live very differently than the wasteful way we do now and be willing to educate ourselves about how to do it. Perhaps we will select to join dozens of other UU churches and declare ourselves a Green Sanctuary and follow this program that the UUA has developed for us. Meanwhile, in your Order of Service is a flyer that describes an Earth Day Procession at 12:30 today from here to Pope's Island where we will meet New Bedfordites for celebration and fun. I will put my sneakers on and join you after the Child Dedication I'm doing at 12:30. Don't you just want to know what Earth Tunes, Miracle Fish Puppet Theatre , and High Flyers Kites are? And I see there're food booths as well. So that's the first part of our interdependent web in our Seventh Principle. Now the second part of the interdependent web principle is the spiritual part. I remind us that 72% of this congregation identified in a survey Earth Centered Spirituality as part of their religious faith. The definition of this is "celebrate the sacred circle of life and live in harmony with the rhythms of nature." Many of you told us how much you liked our Winter Solstice service here in the sanctuary and the solstice spiral in the Parish Hall. I know that many of you derive great satisfaction from working in your gardens and being in Nature, including sailing on the bay and the ocean. Today, I ask us to combine the spiritual and the social justice aspects of caring for the earth and its people. As I wrote this sermon, I sipped on a mug of fine, organically grown, French-roast coffee from Nicaragua, Columbia, Mexico, or from Kilimanjaro, Tanzania or some other Third World country. I sipped away knowing that I was drinking a cup of justice. What makes it a cup of justice? First, the coffee is Fairly Traded coffee; this means that cooperatives of small coffee farmers sell their coffee not to middle men and then processors, U.S. brokers, coffee companies, food distributors, store, and finally the consumer. The small farmers grow and harvest their crops together in democratically organized cooperatives, helping one another to grow and harvest their beans, then send them to the Equal Exchange company that processes them and sends the coffee to the stores or directly to consumers, like us. The Equal Exchange Company guarantees the farmers a fixed price, no matter how much the price fluctuates on the world market. Equal Exchange provides low interest credit, technical and agricultural training, and encourages ecologically-sustainable farming practices. For example, the organic coffees are grown in the shade, which is "a traditional farming method which benefits the farmer and the local environment. A typical shade grown farm is made up of coffee trees grown alongside other food crops under a canopy of taller trees. These taller trees provide fruit, wood and other valuable products to the farmer while offering protection and nutrients to the coffee plants and preventing erosion of the soil. Shade grown coffee farms also provide vital wildlife habitat. Each year, billions of migratory birds make the journey from the temperate climates of North America, where they breed, to the more tropical climate of the [southern hemisphere]. . . .By drinking fairly traded coffee, [we] can help support small-scale farmers, enabling them to farm sustainably, preserving wildlife habitats and protecting the environment." [Equal Exchange info. Packet.] Part of what the farmers receive must go back into their community for schools, clinics, and agricultural training for better farming techniques. Now that they are no longer living well below the poverty line, these farmers are not forced to abandon their farms to live in shantytowns in cities. Instead, this new found confidence in their ability to support themselves has unleashed creativity for them to try other products, like cocoa, with the direct, long-term partnership of their American company and support of people like us. Some of these small farmers have been brought here to tell us about their success story that has been made possible because Americans are their trading partners, just by buying their coffee. Some of them are widows or abandoned women with children. In fact, we can hear them speak through translators this month in Quincy. What about the coffee itself? For the last year, Leo and I have been buying the organic French Roast because we like the dark roast flavor, which is also lower in caffeine and is low acid. We have brought some of it today for you to try. Our sexton, Bill Paiva, has made fair trade coffee for us to try this morning, both regular and decaf. If we like it, we might think of having it on a regular basis. Now, what about the cost? My French Roast is $5 for a 12oz bag because I buy it wholesale directly from Equal Exchange by the 12-packet case. If you buy it in Shaw's, the French Roast Coffee costs $9, not $5. The coffee for our church perculator, costs $5 per lb. or 5 cents for an 8 oz cup of Fellowship Java. This is almost twice as much as Folgers. But that is like comparing a silk purse with a sow's ear! Folgers and Maxwell House, and the like, keep the small farmers in dire poverty and the coffee is not grown with methods that are focused on sustaining the environment. Seventy per cent of all the world's coffee comes from small farmers, so it is a significant difference we can make in the lives of so many just by buying fair trade coffee. And I am wondering if a mass switch-over to organic coffee that is grown in the shade will also begin the healing of the environment, at least in Third World countries if not in our own. This program is called The Interfaith Program through our own Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC). We are also joined by the Friends, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, and especially the Lutheran Church, that provided the seed funds to make it all happen in the 1980's. More than 60% of our Ballou-Channing District churches already have fair trade coffee. The Social Action Committee and I hope you won't mind trying Fair Trade coffee for the next four weeks to see whether we might consider switching to it. The Social Action Committee will bring it to our semi-annual congregational meeting in May for you to vote on, as we would for anything that affects you. You can of course order your own as I do. If you order it online, there's no shipping charge at all. I notice there is a fair trade coffee called Organic Mind, Body and Soul Vienna Roast-just the right name for a church and a spiritually uplifting attitude to our daily drink! All of this info rmation and much more is on a table in the Parish House. By the way, you can also get Fair Trade tea! Not only the small farmers a world away from us, but the Earth itself, are held in our loving embrace when we are willing to change our lives, for the sake of both. We would be living our Seventh Principle, "the respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." May we embrace our Seventh Principle by supporting people and their products that are sustaining themselves and the environment. And may our thoughts and actions be informed by oneness consciousness to enrich our very being. |
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