Living The Truth in Service to Life - A Sermon
Written and delivered by Beth Remmes at Unity of Savannah on Sunday, April 27, 2025.
I have been a student of Unity for about 18 years and on the Unity Worldwide EarthCare Team for about 13 years. Today, I thought I would give a talk about EarthCare and the Five Unity Principles.
As students of Unity, we know that the first principle is that God is absolute good, everywhere present. We affirm that “God is all there is.”
As the Rev. Ev often says, “We know that we know,” but have you ever had experiences in your life where you not only knew—but could actually feel—that God is absolute good and everywhere present? If you have, I would venture to guess that many of those times occurred while you were outside, maybe gazing at the ocean or a sky full of stars. This is because nature invites us into the sacred.
Roman Catholic priest Fr. Thomas Berry, who referred to himself as a geologian, writes, “The Divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the Divine.”
Theologian and Christian mystic Howard Thurman muses on this connection when he writes, “The magic of wind, sun, and rain creates a climate that nourishes every living thing. It is law, and more than law; it is order, and more than order — there is a brooding tenderness out of which it all comes. In the contemplation of the earth, I know that I am surrounded by the love of God.”
Franciscan priest Father Richard Rohr asserts that “God is the creative force behind sweeping galaxies and infinitesimal life forms, of bewildering fractal patterns and perfect seasonal cycles of mind-blowing beauty and pure potential.” He goes on to say, “Science and spirituality have made us more aware of the literal oneness of all things. God is the stars, the rocks, the animals, the people. God is the love, the creativity, the wisdom that human beings express.”
Whether you feel solace in a grove of trees, are awestruck by the beauty and wonder in grand vistas, inspired by the genius of the honeybee, or reassured by the rhythms and wisdom of the seasons, know that these are reminders of God’s universal presence in all things.
In “The Five Principles,” Ellen Debenport explains the second Unity principle. She writes, “Human beings have a spark of divinity within them. The Christ spirit within. Their very essence is of God, and therefore they are also inherently good.”
“We are all that God is.”
The law and order that Thurman refers to and the fractal patterns mentioned by Rohr show up in a mathematical language that explores the relationship between the parts and the whole, in nature and in the universe, known as sacred geometry.
The principles of sacred geometry are based on the idea that there is a fundamental order and harmony in the universe, and that this can be expressed through geometric shapes and patterns.
One of the most famous examples of sacred geometry is the golden ratio. The golden ratio—a relationship between two numbers that are next to each other in the Fibonacci sequence—is known as the divine proportion. It’s a mathematical ratio that has been revered for centuries for its aesthetic qualities. It is found in nature, art, and architecture, and is believed to have spiritual significance in many cultures. Sunflower seed heads, pinecones, nautilus and snail shells, and the human face are some examples.
We are part of this divine order, and nurturing the spark within us is akin to allowing the acorn to fulfill its potential to become an oak tree. As we dedicate ourselves to our own spiritual growth, we begin to realize our potential and the unique gifts we can offer to the world.
Lyla June, a Diné (Dih-neh), or Navajo, scholar and musician, writes, “Every being is here for a reason—every rock, every deer, every star, every person is here for a reason. Creator doesn’t just make things that don’t have a purpose or a function, or a part in the puzzle. And so we as human beings are trying to bring the human being back into the role of keystone species, where our presence on the land nourishes the land.”
Unity Principle No. 3 is the law of mind in action—human beings create their experiences by the activity of their thinking (thoughts + feelings = outcome).
Everything in the manifest realm has its beginning in thought. We are co-creators with God, creating reality through thoughts held in mind. Every possible outcome already exists in potential, but we draw forth our reality with our expectations and anticipation.
Given this principle, it might make sense that we would not want to listen to the news or the latest report on climate change because we don’t want to bring those images of destructive storms and mass extinctions into our reality, right?
However, if you dig a bit deeper into the third principle, it goes on to say that “paying attention to what we don’t want is useful only long enough to clarify what we do want and then create it in our experience by shifting focus.”
Unity has five principles, but life, which has been around for 3.8 billion years, has 27 principles, or strategies, that are found among the species surviving and thriving on Earth.
One of life’s principles is the use of feedback loops, which means that life engages in cyclic information flows to modify a reaction appropriately. This is how a system can adapt. For example, feedback loops in our own body: when our temperature rises, we perspire to cool; or when we have an infection, our immune system creates more white blood cells to fight it off. So we need to look at what is wrong long enough to take in information, and then shift our focus to take appropriate action.
Part of Unity Principle 3 is that “in a universe of many possible realities, there are numerous potential answers.”
And there are many potential answers to having a regenerative, rather than destructive, presence on Earth. Environmentalist and author Paul Hawken estimates that there are more than 1 million—and maybe even 2 million—organizations around the world working toward ecological sustainability and social justice, making it the largest social movement in all of human history. These organizations are humanity’s immune response to heal our relationship with the Earth and each other.
Sherri Mitchell, an author from the Penobscot Nation, advocates using the 80-10-10 rule. She suggests that we “use 10 percent of time and energy on determining and educating ourselves on what is harming us; another 10 percent to stop the harm, or in other words, stand in protection of life without harming other life; and 80 percent on envisioning and actively creating the world we wish to inhabit.”
So yes, read the news, know what’s happening in the world, then shift your focus to the many ways people are working to create a life-sustaining society and put your energy there.
It’s powerful to think of ourselves as part of the planetary immune system! But what if we don’t know how we can contribute? This brings us to Unity Principle No. 4—through prayer and meditation, we align our heart-mind with God. We affirm: “There is power in affirmative prayer and meditation.”
Let’s say you just read a great article on the Good News Network, and you’re feeling inspired but don’t know what to do next. Going into meditation, we can be silent—and listen—which, by the way, have the same letters!
Meditation helps us “center down,” as Howard Thurman calls it, giving our minds a chance to settle down and our God essence to rise to the surface. And remember, as Rumi said, “What you seek is seeking you.”
Thurman writes about this too in “Meditations of the Heart,” when he says, “With sustained excitement, I recall what, in my own urgency, I had forgotten: God is seeking me. Blessed remembrance! God is seeking me. Wonderful assurance. God is seeking me. This is the meaning of my longing, this is the warp of my desiring, this is my point. The searching that keeps the sand hot under my feet is but my response to His seeking. Therefore, this moment, I will be still, I will quiet my reaching out, I will abide; for to know really that God is seeking me, to be aware of that now is to be found of Him.”
Yesterday, I went to a workshop on Centering Prayer, a contemplative Christian practice where you choose a sacred word that you take into meditation as “a symbol of your consent to God’s presence and action within.” I was struck by the term “consent,” because that implies not only is God seeking me, but God took the first step toward me, and my consent means I’m giving permission to feel God’s presence.
Debenport writes, “Prayer is the time we take to focus, to align ourselves in oneness with the Divine and affirm that whatever we need is already ours… When you ask for anything, the One is asking the One — God is asking God… Like a wave asking the ocean.”
How many people here consider themselves seekers? I have felt that way my entire life, and the idea that I’m not striving to figure it out on my own — and instead am in co-creation with Spirit — feels like a weight is lifted off my chest. I am not alone in figuring out how to best be of service to life. What I seek is also seeking me, and maybe Spirit is even taking the first step toward me. I need to be sure to take time to be silent and listen.
We have connected with the Divine through nature, affirmed that the Divine is in us, and that we are here for a reason, opened ourselves up to a universe of many possible realities and some of the numerous potential answers, and taken time to center down and listen to what is bubbling up inside of us — the effervescence of Spirit.
Then we move to Unity Principle No. 5: “Through thoughts, words and actions, we must live the Truth we know.”
Now, given that this is an Earth Day service, you may think this is where I talk to you about living more sustainably—reduce, reuse, recycle—or give a handout on ways to save energy. But I want us to think about what living the Truth we know really looks like.
Debenport writes, “(People who are living the Truth) do not take action as much as provide a service… this happens naturally when we see the oneness in all beings… when we are living the first four principles, service is the next natural step. Service is not subservience, nor a chore to be dispatched. It is the Divine in us touching the Divine in another.”
Joanna Macy has been helping people remember this sense of oneness through decades of teaching and facilitating the Work That Reconnects. She says that we can train our heart-mind to abandon the responses that come from ego-self, as we open our imagination to experience our connection to the web of life. She tells the story of deep ecologist and rainforest activist John Seed. “There, facing bulldozers, what he sensed above all was the forest rising behind him. As he described it to me, he felt himself rooted in the immensely larger being that had brought him forth. That primordial cradle of life now claimed him… ‘I was no longer John Seed protecting the rainforest. I was the rainforest protecting herself through this little piece of the humanity I cradled into existence.’”
Now I’m not asking you all to chain yourself to a tree, but I would like to ask you to consider how you are being asked to serve in the world.
In “Holding Change,” author and activist adrienne maree brown writes, “In my work with generative somatics, we learned to make declarations, or commitments: statements that speak to who we are becoming in service of the world we are working to create. We speak our commitments in the pattern of ‘I am a commitment to,’ so that each time we say our commitment, we are declaring ourselves an embodiment of our longings.”
Right now, I am a commitment to deepening our sense of self from ego-self to eco-self, where we see ourselves as interconnected with all living beings in the web of life. Then it’s not about what we should do—rather, our actions come from a place of love, knowing that caring for the Earth is caring for each other—and that we do make a difference!
What are you a commitment to? Maybe it’s the word that you wrote on your white stone at the beginning of the year. Or maybe you are a commitment to living the Golden Rule—treating the human and more-than-human world the way you want to be treated.
I know I’ve been quoting a lot of Catholics—my Jesuit education is showing—but I want to end with a directive from Pope Francis in “Laudato Si.” He implores us “to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”
I look forward to hearing about—and seeing—the ways you commit to showing up on behalf of all life, because every day is Earth Day.
