THE HOUSE IN WHICH WE DWELL

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Sunday April 18th, 2004


READING: Genesis 1:26-31a

I want to let you in on a little secret, just in case you weren't aware of it, but most of the sermon I am going to preach today is basically the same as the very first sermon I ever preached to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. It was Sunday April 29th, 1979, I was 22 years old at the time, a first-year student at the Harvard Divinity School, and my field-education supervisor, the Rev. Dr. Rhys Williams, had arranged for me to speak to the 1st Congregational Society, Unitarian Universalist, of Jamaica Plain, MA. I had six weeks to prepare that sermon, for which I was to be paid $50; and I got to practice it twice — once in front of my homiletics class at Harvard, and once for the entire staff of the First and Second Church in Boston. When the fateful day at last arrived, I woke up early, dressed in my best clothes, bought myself a big breakfast at the Mug & Muffin restaurant in Harvard Square (don’t bother looking for it; it isn’t there any more), rode the Red Line in to the Park Street station where I transferred to the Green Line out to Jamaica Plain, found the church, and was ushered into a huge Sanctuary which seated probably a minimum of three hundred people — twenty-two of whom happened to be in attendance there that Sunday morning, including myself, the organist, the soloist, and the sexton.

Coming up with a topic for that sermon was not so easy as you might imagine. As I’ve mentioned here before, Rhys had given me some very excellent advice: "Don't try to tell them everything you know the first Sunday," he had said to me (something that would have been a lot easier to attempt back then than it would be now), but even so, it still seemed at the time as though I had an overwhelming amount of spiritual wisdom and insight to communicate to those eighteen parishioners in a mere twenty minutes. I had taken my inspiration from an article I had read in the Boston Globe about some trouble the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority was having in their efforts to extend the Red Line north to Porter Square. MBTA engineers boring core samples along the planned route of the extension had discovered directly in the proposed path of the tunnel 40 thousand cubic yards of chemical sludge, which at one time had been dumped into a cesspool by a chemical manufacturing firm, and over a period of several decades had seeped out into the surrounding soil. Because the chemicals had continued to react long after their former owners had considered them garbage, no one could be certain of the exact properties of this sludge: how toxic or corrosive it might of been, whether it was going to present a significant problem in the construction of the subway, how much it would cost to clean it up, whether it could be burned or rendered chemically inert, or if they were simply going to have to dig it all up and transport it to another location. But the most outrageous part of the article was a comment by the president of the chemical company, who denied any responsibility whatsoever, asking instead "How were we supposed to know they were going to build a subway through there?"

Things really haven’t changed all that much in the last twenty-five years, have they? Well, maybe a little. There are now 129 certified members at the First Parish in Jamaica Plain, and when I go out on the road as a guest preacher these days I earn a little bit more than $50. But there is still a widespread belief in our society that those who want a strong economy, and those who want a sound ecology, are somehow working at cross-purposes. We can have forests or we can have houses; clean air and water, or automobiles and electric power — but to think that we might possibly have both somehow violates a fundamental law of the cosmos. Yet in the case of the Boston Subway we are confronted with the exact opposite of this belief: a situation in which a little ecological foresight might have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars of needless capital expenditure. And I'm sure that many of us can think of other, similar examples over the last quarter of a century — situations in which the ecologists and the economists have, in fact, had a mutual interest, and shared a common purpose. But this should really come as no surprise. Because, linguistically at least, the etymologies of the word "ecology" and the word "economy" are identical. Both stem from the Greek noun oikos, or "house," and its related verb form which means "to live in a house." Economics describes the rules or "laws" for running a house; Ecology refers to the "logic" or principles by which a house is run. In both disciplines, the object of study is the same. O Oikos en Oikoumena — "The House in Which We Dwell."

Why then is the belief I mentioned earlier so widespread? One would think that living under the same roof as we do, we would have been able to reach some sort of consensus about how best to put our house in order, and that we would have done so long ago. Are the conflicts between environmentalists and industrialists merely differences of opinion? And, if so, where does the truth really lie?

The etymologies offer us a clue to the origins and history of this conflict. As the translation suggests, in its earliest form the science of economics was roughly equivalent to what we today would call "home economics," or, more accurately, the rules for the management of a farm or "homestead." And the first significant economist of whom we have record was none other than Socrates, whose thoughts on this subject can be found in a dialog by Xenophon known as The Oeconomicus. After extolling the virtues of a pastoral lifestyle — that sublime symbiosis between a farmer and the earth which allows one to pass the winter with an abundance of fire and warm baths, and spend summers amidst cool water and breezes and shade, Socrates remarks:

It would seem wonderful to me if any free human being possessed anything more pleasant than this, or found a concern at once more pleasant and of greater benefit in life. Furthermore, [and here Socrates uses the Greek word Gaia] ...the Earth, being a goddess, teaches justice to those who are able to learn, for she gives the most goods to those who serve her best.

Had the science of economics remained at this level — The Earth helps those who help the Earth — today's disagreements between conservationists and developers would have a far different tenor. But although Socrates may be remembered today as the founder of humanism, he is not considered the founder of modern economics — that honor falls instead upon Adam Smith, whose 18th century book The Wealth of Nations is now recognized as the cornerstone of Western Economic theory. Smith was a proponent of what is known as laissez faire or "free market" economics: the cost of goods is based upon the relationship between the desire for those goods and the amount of goods available, and governed by the "invisible hand" of a market economy. The goal of economically sophisticated individuals is to buy low and sell high — to acquire the things they desire at the lowest possible price while maximizing the value of their own labor and resources. In an unregulated marketplace, an equilibrium of costs and prices will be reached through the competition between various suppliers of the same goods and services, thus establishing a "fair market value" — the price the market will bear. I've simplified Smith's position considerably here, but the important thing for us to remember is that Smith and those who follow him think of the economic system primarily in terms of the metaphor of the marketplace: an arena in which commodities are exchanged.

A contemporary of Adam Smith was the Reverend Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population was one of the major inspirations of Charles Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. If Smith can be thought of as the founder of modern economics, then Malthus might be thought of as the founder of modern ecology, at least to the extent that he was among the first to address many of the same issues which confront environmentalists today. Malthus noted that because the supplies of all commodities, and especially the supply of food, increase at a rate far slower than that of the population, there inevitably will come a time when the demand for essential commodities simply cannot be met by the available supply at any price. The competition of the marketplace, which Smith believed would insure the lowest possible price for all, instead becomes a struggle based on "the survival of the fittest," in which some individuals live and thrive while others are left to starve and perish. In the absence of an ecologically sustainable, "steady-state" economy, the invisible hand of the Goddess, Gaia, reaches out to strike us down, lashing back in self-defense at the fools who refuse to learn.

It was a Unitarian Universalist, Buckminster Fuller, who first coined the term "Spaceship Earth" back in 1964, in an effort to describe, metaphorically, the synergistic nature of that "interdependent web of all existence" in which economics and ecology find their synthesis as a single science of global survival. Since that time concepts like Acid Rain, the Ozone hole, Greenhouse gasses and Global Warming, have become parts of our everyday vocabulary; and many of us have also come to see the one fallacy contained in Fuller's excellent metaphor. The Earth is not a machine, a product of technology: it was not launched with "all systems go," it has no control panel by which we can easily manipulate its course, it has no ultimate destination, whereupon our arrival we will all disembark and make speeches to the media. If anything, the Earth resembles, not a spaceship, but a single living organism. The Biosphere has all of the characteristics of a living creature save one, that of consciousness; and even this criterion can be fulfilled if we are willing to recognize that our own species, homo sapiens, is itself a part of the biosphere — a part which can think. Just as within our own bodies exist organisms such as the mitochondria, which have an independent DNA structure yet play an essential role in the functioning of a cell, so too do we exist within the context of a larger, living being — the being Socrates called Gaia, or Earth.

When the economic laws of supply and demand fail to accurately reflect the ecological expense of producing certain products, we fool ourselves into thinking that we're getting a bargain. But instead we end up on the short end of the deal: we pay the bill for our technology in the price of our health care, the cost of our carelessness is subtracted from the quality of our future. When we think only of ourselves and our own profits, and fail to think and act prophetically for the Earth, we shortsightedly cut ourselves off from the true and ultimate source of value in our lives: we become, not the Mind of Gaia, but rather dangerous parasites which threaten the survival of the entire biosphere.

In the book of Genesis we read that on the Sixth Day of Creation, the creatures, male and female, who had been created in the image of God, were given dominion over the earth by the One who had created them. But this was a gift shared with others: with every beast upon the earth, every bird of the air, everything that creeps upon the ground, everything that has the breath of life...these too were given every green plant for food. And when the Creator saw everything that had been made, "Behold, it was very good."

And it still is good. But we have been poor stewards of our inheritance. In our post-Enlightenment attempts to make humanity the measure of all things, we have forgotten that more fundamental maxim of humanism taught by Socrates: to know ourselves. Our ignorance and our arrogance have combined to turn a garden into a desert, our house into a cesspool. Through our thoughtlessness we have abandoned our responsibilities to our Creator, and are discovering that we must indeed pay the price for this original sin. For we live here not as owners, but merely tenants in this garden. It is time for us to begin to put our house in better order. It is time to make our house into our home.