"Land, Palm Oil and Loneliness: Lend Me Your Voice"
Rev. Kathryn Ransdell
St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church
Sept. 30, 2012
This is the final Sunday of our church's observation of Creation Time. I have mixed feelings about this because these four weeks have touched a part of my heart and soul and has stirred a passion in me. And I know that the message of Creation Time has touched many of you...I've been accompanying you as pastor in different forms for several years, and this one topic has brought more conversation than anything we've chatted about on Sunday mornings.
For me, I don't know what will come of that heart touch and I don't know where it will lead. I do know that I'm open to where God will lead me. I'm open to listening and being curious...and waiting.
Today's sermon is going to be a bit of reviewing where we have been, unpacking a bit more of what I said, and daring to look across the horizon to where God might lead us. If I could give my sermon a second title, it might be, "Land, palm oil and loneliness."
"It's all about the land," was the mantra of Dr. Willie Jennings when he spoke of the situation of Israel and Palestinein 1998, just two years before President Bill Clinton attempted the Camp David peace talks. Dr. Jennings would then say it is hard for us immigrants, who are not indigenous to any land but rather a product of the fermentation of a melting pot, to understand what land means.
I will be honest. I'm still learning what he meant when he said that to us. Coming from Texas, I have a bit more understanding of what it means for your identity to be tied to the land where you born. At yesterday's wedding, with half of the party from Texas, one fellah (Texan for fellow) came up to me and said, "Now tell me who your people are and where you-re from." And I knew exactly what he was asking me.
Perhaps as products of colonialism, people who have access to global travel and relocation, as people whose identity to this land in North America only dates back 200-400 years, we don't understand the connections people have with their land. In the country of Liberia in Africa, one farmer said it this way, " “When I was born and opened my eyes, I saw this land..."
Creation Time has opened for me this new way of relating to land, not a specific land, but the land called Earth. In last week's sermon, I shared a bit of my learning...that Creation theologians are calling us to do away with our image for steward. No longer steward, but partner.
And not just any partner. As the story tells us, we are a partner who is made in the image and likeness of God, the whole motley group that we are. Which means when we come to the table of our partnership and there we are sitting at the table and there the land sits too, we must realize that we are also made in the image and likeness of God, that which God is, we are too. That which God does, we do too.
Our first Scripture this morning tells us what God does:
Isaiah 45:18 says (The Message), " God, Creator of the heavens—
he is, remember, God.
Maker of earth—
he put it on its foundations, built it from scratch.
God didn’t go to all that trouble
to just leave it empty, nothing in it.
God made it to be lived in.
If this is what God does, this is what we do to. We don't leave this earth empty with nothing in it because we've gotten ours and now we will leave the problems to our grandchildren, we are to make this earth inhabitable.
We are more than tillers of this earth, as discussed by Dr. John C. Holbert...In the KJV, the translators used the verb "to till" as to the reason why God put us in the garden...it was the best Hebrew word at the time to describe what we know now as "to serve." We are not tillers. We are servants of this earth.
No longer subduers, tillers and stewards. We are partners and servants to an Earth that in itself has intrinsic value.
We are partners with the land. Which brings me to Palm Oil and Liberia.
This past week, a gentleman came through our Sunday worship and our offices on Wednesday. He was a Liberian citizen who came to Canada and that's really enough about his story. Having had that encounter, I paid a bit more attention to an article about Liberia that was published in the Globe and Mail this week:
"In Liberia, the government has granted about half of the country to investors, usually on long-term leases. Nearly 6 per cent of Liberia’s total land mass has been leased to palm-oil companies alone. More than a million people live on those lands, and 150,000 will be affected in the first five years of the plantations, local activists say.
Palm oil, a vegetable oil used in hundreds of products from margarine to cosmetics, has become highly profitable, with global demand fuelled by the growth of processed food and biofuels. Its world price has tripled in the past decade, and demand is expected to double again by 2020."[1]
It's really hard to comprehend what an article like this is saying to me, one tiny individual who lives a stones throw from the Pacific Ocean. Half of all of Liberia has been leased to corporations. The leases are between the corporation and the government, so the people who inhabit that land often don't know that they have been evicted until the bulldozers come. And the dream of jobs that replace them...well, they are just that...dreams.
Depending on which side of the issue you are on, you might call this a land grab. And it's happening all over Africa with pieces of land larger than European countries being taken from the indigenous and given to global conglomerates.
And for the most part, we sit here in comfortable Vancouver with very little awareness as to what happens for us to have palm oil... [2] and what products utilize palm oil...here's just a few...
Food:
Balance Bar
Ben & Jerry's
Check out our "Candy List"
Clif Bar
Enfamil Products
Food Crisps
GeniSoy
Girl Scout Cookies
Glenny's
Harmony Premium Trail Mix
Harmony Yogurt Flavored Raisin Nut Mix
Jell-O No Bake Homestyle Cheese Cake Desert
Jewel Chocolate Chip Cookies
Little Debbie
Luna Bar
McDonald's
Mercer Vanilla Waves
Met-Rx
Milk (various products may contain Vitamin A palmitate)
Mrs. Fields
Nissin Noodles / Ramen
Odwalla Soy Milk
Pepperidge Farm
Power Bar
Quaker
Raspberry Danish Fine Baked Goods
Russell Stover
South Beach Diet foods
Soy Milk (various)
Sun Ridge Farms
Sweet'N Low
Sunshine Cheez-it
Walkers Snacks
Whole Foods brand pie
WorldWide Sport Nutrition
Zone Perfect
Personal Care Products:
Accem Scott
Aloette Cosmetics
Avon
Borghese
Bumble & Bumble
California Baby
Channoine
Clinique
Cornelia
Cover Girl
Day & Night Minerals
DebLynne Soaps
Dial
Dr. Bronner's
Earth Therapeutics
Ecco Bella Botanical cosmetics
Genome Cosmetique
Herbal Essences
Hoffmans House of Treasure
Island Soap Company
Isomers Laboratories (makeup)
Jerome Alexander cosmetics
Juice Beauty
Kiss My Face Big Kiss Organic Palm Oil Soap
Lancome
La Série (beauty products)
Mary Kay
MD Skincare
Mountain Country
Neutrogena
One With Nature
Palmer's
Prai Beauty Products
Protameen
Pür Minerals
Regena Cell / Anti-Aging Cream
Revlon
Sappo Hill Skin Care Products
Senna Cosmetics
Sensaria
Sephora
Skin Biology
Skin Scope
Soma Therapy products
South of France
Tasha & Co.
Urban Decay cosmetics
ZENMED
I don't even know what it takes to make palm oil, much less what the implications of a doubling of the global demand of palm oil does to this earth and the people who live on it.
Perhaps I don't need one more McSandwich sandwich and CoverGirl fresh-n-clean. Because think of what those things are doing to me...the McFoods...and beauty and advertising...and the appropriation of women's bodies...these things that are conveniences are slowly killing us...
...and their production is stripping people from the only way of life.
The Liberian farmer, in referring to the palm plantation that "sprung up" on his land said, “It’s such a big area, and we are suffering,” he says. “I feel like hell, because there’s no more land and there’s no place for me to go.”
We are partners to the land. And things like Palm Oil displace the farmer. And things like advertising and consumerism and pressures to be like everyone else displaces us. And the result is loneliness.
Several of you gave me a copy of the article, "Breaking Vancouver's Lonely Culture" from The Georgia Straight. (I want to be sure I quote everything appropriately so I don't pull a Margaret Wente.)
A recent survey has shown that more Vancouver citizens are "distressed by a growing sense of isolation and disconnection." In the article, a person is quoted, "We don't have public spaces anymore where people come together across class, across age, across all lines. We have libraries and community centres, and during the Olympics we had some public spaces. But there's resurgence in this region to want that. There's a gurgling up of people saying, 'We want more intellectual engagement; we want to exchange ideas and we want a place and a space where we can substantively collect." The person adds: "This summit is a response to that."
Church, whatever we must do...confess, repent, say I'm sorry, change the way we say hello, what we wear or when we worship, but we are a public space. And if we have done something where society considers us private and not public, then let's turn that ship around, take down our sacred walls and be what God meant for us to be...partners with this land.
I honestly believe loneliness is not solved by one less condo building or one more greenspace. It may be that trying to solve loneliness in the context of the political lens where things are looked at microscopic time frames rather than a 50-, 100-, or 200-year span, we may not realize that we are lonely because we have disconnected ourselves from the land, the earth, our partner on this journey of life.
If there is something sacred and deep and a way of being known that we have lost connection to--then no wonder we are lost. When was the last time you ate a fresh tomato from the garden? That is the kind of connection we have lost. You get used to BC-grown cucumbers then someone slips you a genetically-modified cucumber and it tastes like plastic.
And then one day you wake up and everything you eat comes from the center of the grocery store and every thing you ingest in one day as palm oil as an ingredient.
And our loneliness might be more comfortable than the farmer who literally has no home and no food and no shelter and no concept of future.
But friend, we share loneliness because we have both lost the land.
So when Paul speaks of labor pains, that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now...loneliness is a symptom of that groaning.
"For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God..."
...for people who know it really is all about the land, about being at peace with one another, about being connected to earth so that the wisdom of earth can hold us, simple-minded creatures that we really are. May we never be fooled to think that we are anything greater than or above are partner in this journey. The earth. Somewhere there is a place for us.iii
[3] In
choosing the well-known Broadway song, Somewhere, as today's anthem in
worship, the intention is theological, with the pronoun "us" meaning
creation, human creatures being just one part of the "us."
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