A parable for our times (shared with the congregation during worship on March 23):

Chalice has participated in two beach cleanups in the past five months (in coordination with regularly scheduled cleanups organized by the Surfrider Foundation). Now, when I go for a walk around my house, I see things that are obviously litter—cups and things—and we pick them up while we walk. But the beach isn’t really like that. Yes, if you’re the first person to hit the beach on Saturday morning, maybe you’re seeing obvious litter. But at a beach cleanup, there’s a lot of us, and the beach seems pretty clean at first glance. I think those of us who have gone have had that experience of thinking, “do I even need to be here? It doesn’t look that bad.”

But you keep finding little bits of plastic and next thing you know, you have a half pound of plastic in just your bag. And there’s 40 people on the beach who are helping with the beach cleanup. If each person has a half pound of plastic, well, that’s 20 pounds of plastic we’ve picked up.

At the last beach cleanup earlier this month, we were done picking up, and I was walking with some Chalice congregants back to the Surfrider Foundation table to check out and to put our litter in the trash. And just as we were walking and chatting, I looked down and spotted another big piece of plastic. And I realized, it’s really hard to spot all of the litter on the beach.

The other thing that was just sort of gross to all of us who were there was that we kept seeing these little white bubbles and we eventually realized it was Styrofoam. It doesn’t decompose—not quickly anyway—it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces.  I don’t know when’s the last time I used Styrofoam, but it really brought home to me how dangerous it is. They’re so little and they’re everywhere and you can hardly see it.

I think the story of cleaning up a beach is a good parable for our times. One person can’t do it all. The 40 of us definitely didn’t get all of the litter that was there that week. And you know, people were going to be to the beach later on that day, leaving more litter after them.

So, you know, we all have to work together. It takes continuous work. We need to keep coming back. And that’s just the work of living near the beach, that ongoing work of trying to keep it picked up.

I think that’s a good to remember in our politics and the things we’d like to change in the world. I wish we could just make one big effort and have the work be done. But of course, we see that’s not the case. We have to keep working at it. Progress will be made and then there will be backward steps.

So I wanted to offer that as an image to keep with you as we do justice work. We all have to work together, with everybody doing their part, and we have to keep at it.

Bright blessings,
Sharon