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Sermon at Davies Memorial UU Church

By Preston Mears

There are two things I want to share with you this morning:

1.Our religion should be informed by our science and our science inspired by our religion.

2.Be thankful for the challenges we have and not just for the bounty many of us get to indulge in later this month.

But first, let’s start at the beginning. In the beginning there was a sphere and on this sphere there were many gardens. In the lushest and finest of the gardens a creature awoke recognizing itself as a part of the garden but, at the same time, different. The creature established primacy over the garden and everything in it by naming all the plants and the animals. And the creature exaulted and called itself the beginning and the end. It lay down to rest only to awake in a wilderness and recognized it was not the beginning and the end!

Many creation mythologies start with a image of wholeness and health, that something got broken and that there is an underneath universal yearning to find that original state of health and wholeness, of oneness. This yearning underlies the human inclination towards religion.

A scientist will come and say that this has nothing to do with our origins and will start talking about the “Big Bang,” “String Theory,” and “Evolution.” Some religionists will come along and say science is fine until is conflicts with divinely revealed truth. Both are wrong because what creation mythologies are really about is what we yearn for: Health, wholeness and oneness. True religion in its manifold expressions is poetry and metaphor about life today knowing that today contains all our tomorrows. True science is a discipline to explore and understand the world as it is.

For example, the believer sees the garden he would grow. The gardner uses all the scientific knowledge available as to soil, climate, nutrients, and plant life he can taking into account short and long term implications of pests and pesticides--not using science narrowly, but, if you would, with a view towards the long term health and wholeness of the environment. Mind you, despite this gardner’s desire to inclusive, I do end up cursing the local ground hog population as the devil’s spawn--the world is not perfect. You get my point, the vision of the garden is a goal, a vision and not something in the past. There is no conflict between my religion and my science!

I want to take this understanding to a larger canvas, if you would. The world is larger than Preston’s garden! Not unlike the Al Gore movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” we need always the larger picture, the longer reach of time. A short term profit plan won’t do it.
The canvas I want to paint for you is an environmental view expressed by George Washington Carver and used as our opening meditation:

“I believe the Great Creator has put ores and oil on this earth to give us a breathing spell…. As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms which are God’s true store house and can never be exhausted. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow.”

George Washington Carver’s life’s worship was that of a detailed, disciplined research plant scientist who explored plant matter down to its most basic components. His quest, dare I say, his religious quest, was to discern and discover the nature and value of all plant matter. His belief was that it all had value that had but to be understood.

He also understood that the “ores and oil” are really an opportunity, a kind of leveraging of ourselves into a world that is rich and lush in abundance and wonderful, helpful technologies. His vision was not a limited one of a time for some to enjoy a rapacious gobbling up of the stored up energy in fossil fuels while they last, and then a return to subsistence farming with plow and mule. I will explain briefly a sense of that vision as it is now coming to be grasped.

However, a footnote on anti-racism, since as a people here at this place and time, we strive to be inclusive. I date myself but when I studied about George Washington Carver in the 50’s, I was given a particular impression: Even though George Washington Carver had only died in 1943, my white, Yankee text book, portrayed a patronizing picture of a “good” member of his race who figured out things about peanuts that were good for his people in the rural backward South. The code language there was that he knew his “place” in the social scheme of things. What a way to demean greatness.

In truth, he understood religiously and scientifically, our human “place” in the created order. Simply stated, George Washington Carver was a great and visionary scientist far ahead of his times. I wish I had been taught what he saw.

What has happened to his vision and his scientific work? I was privileged to have an advance copy of a scientific presentation that was just given to a meeting of the American Society of Engineers in Phoenix, Arizona last month.

The title of the presentation was: “The Future is Biomass.” It began with the quote from George Washington Carver--yes, I got a religiously oriented reference from a scientist! A few of the fundamentals in the presentation in “lay” terms:

“Biomass” simply refers to a lot of collected plant matter. It can be tons of chopped up corn stalk, a great stack of trees, a very large of pile of manure--somewhat processed grasses and grains!
Envision our earth and its atmosphere much like a greenhouse that has a large pool of water. The water is there not only to water the plants, but as great medium for storing excess heat and saving it up for cold nights. In addition to energy stored in the water as heat, synthetic fuels, made from plant matter power equipment. The two byproducts from the clean burning fuel are H2O and CO2--water and carbon dioxide. The water is returned to the environment as it is condensed and certain technologies are used to capture and sequester the CO2 for later distribution and use. The carbon dioxide is used to promote plant life when plants most need it--it isn’t needed for an overheated environment!!

What is, I believe a miracle, growing plants, through the process of photosynthesis, capture energy from the sun and combine it with the C02 and grow new plant matter. We had a story about a basic food for us this morning about bread. Bread provides us with a basic energy component called “carbohydrates.” The carbon cylce is integral to us!

A USDA scientist in Beltsville, Maryland demonstrated the power of the relationship between CO2 and plants by making a long, narrow seed bed of grass, perhaps 30 feet long, and enclosed it in a plastic tube approximately 3 foot in diameter. At the front end of the tube he pumped in air enriched with extra CO2.

The plants at the beginning of the tube got to use up the CO2 before the plants towards the end. The result was dramatic. The grass in the first few feet of the tube grew quickly to be two foot tall and, by the end of the tube, the grass was only a few inches tall. The picture I saw of this was really quite dramatic.

Some among you might say all well and fine for a green house but the earth is too big and it is just impractical. It is an argument that gets made in economic terms and has slowed important forward momentum in the environmental field.

Perhaps Hurricane Katrina was something of a wake-up call and this past weeks election return reflects a determination to return to addressing our environmental concerns. Waste heat and gases can be captured and recycled. That is why we have engineers and scientists.

The details are not trivial, but ultimately, they are details. If you were to see the presentation and take in the knowledge and technology we already have, I believe you would agree with me, “Yes, we can do this!” Some of you here are scientists and engineers and know of what I speak better than I.

All of us can recycle and become increasingly fuel efficient. Our homes and buildings are all mini-systems and we can and should do all we can to have them be as energy efficient as possible. Laurie and I are investing in our home’s windows to have them be more energy efficient, as an example.

The miracle of photosynthesis is the under-girding reality for all of this. Fossil fuels exist because of plant life and photosynthesis; in reality, all they are is stored up carbon. The sun is our system’s external energy source which can enable us to continue for millions of years.

Perhaps, the ancients who worshipped the sun, had a point. But, we can’t destroy land and topsoil needed for crops and plants; we can’t pollute and make our environment so toxic that plants don’t grow. As the lecturer suggested, “The Future is Biomass!”

I must come clean with you since, as most of you know I am trained in theology and early church history. I happened to get an advance on the lecture and have the benefit of an untechnical version of it because it was given by a scientist, my brother, Dr. David R. Mears. He is a professor at Rutgers University and is known in his field of Agricultural Engineering internationally.

We do get along wonderfully well, once I got past my bratty stage, and rely on each other and have been learning from each other for a long time. Religion and science, we rely on each other. We don’t argue, we just need enough time to listen to each other.

This Thanksgiving, we will be together with our families and our sister and her family (she inspires and motivates her brothers with her art) and we will give thanks deeply, for all the bounty we do enjoy. We will pray that there be food a plenty for all because there are many who are without. But even more, I would have us be thankful for the opportunity and the challenge we have to build earth’s gardens as envisioned by George Washington Carver and that is in souls of people and expressed in creation stories.
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A big part of mine and Laurie’s Thanksgiving and our daughter Rachel’s family, her partner Sandra, as well as Lily and Asher are you, the people of Davies. We share the opportunity of being and becoming a whole people, a reconciling people, inclusive, multi-cultural, anti-racist people--people. Without all of us the garden may well never become. Without all of us in it, the garden will not be complete.

Thank you

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