This is my first time here, and my first experience with desert heat. Let me tell you, without the humidity it feels wonderful, right up until it does not. That heat will get you. It feels like somebody turned on a massive oven and we are all being baked like Thanksgiving dishes.
We have family here in Las Vegas, and it has been a joy to see them in their natural environment, to know them on their own ground. And one of the conversations we had around the breakfast table has stayed with me. We talked about the very real possibility that this part of the country is running out of water.
You can see it here. The reservoirs that made this desert bloom are marked with pale rings on the rock, high above the current waterline, showing where the water used to reach. Nobody painted those rings. The land itself is keeping the record. We are beginning to see, in plain sight, the real-world implications of climate change that many dismissed as exaggeration or made-for-television drama. Scientists warned us this is what would happen. It is now happening in front of us, here and around the globe.
Those of us in wealthier nations may be spared the worst of it for a while. Our country has a genuine gift for innovating its way out of problems, including problems we helped create through our own overconsumption. But it is not enough to lean back and trust that we will invent our way out while ignoring what climate change will do to people who do not live in resource-rich nations. Humanity has worked too hard, and come too far, lifting billions out of poverty and raising the standard of living across the world, to turn back the clock on that progress just as the bill for our own choices comes due.
Now, here is why I am telling you this in the week of our Fourth Principle. This Sunday we walk the principle that may be the most quietly radical sentence in our faith: a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. No one in our congregation will hand you the answers and demand you swallow them. Our faith trusts you to search, freely and responsibly, for what is true and for what your one life means. We honor the search itself as something sacred.
And notice, like last week’s principle, this one is held together by a small word carrying enormous weight. Free and responsible. The two halves need each other.
The free search is how we got here. Science is the free search wearing a lab coat. For two centuries, people have measured ice and counted seasons and followed the evidence wherever it led, without asking permission from any throne or creed. That searching is our principle in action, and its findings are not an attack on anyone’s way of life. They are a gift. Truth, offered in time to act on it.
But the principle does not stop at free, and this is where the desert becomes a preacher. Because once the search finds something, we are not free to un-know it. A faith that honors the search must also honor what the search uncovers. Responsible means the truth we find makes a claim on us. The rings on the canyon rock are not an opinion. They are a revelation, in the oldest sense of the word, something uncovered, something shown. And revelation always comes with a question attached: now that you know, what will you do?
There are two easy ways out, and they are both abandonments of our principle. One is denial, which quits the search because the findings are inconvenient. The other is a comfortable fatalism, which accepts the findings and then shrugs, trusting someone else’s invention to arrive on time. The first betrays the word free. The second betrays the word responsible. Our faith asks us to refuse both doors and stay in the harder room, where truth and duty sit at the same table.
Because here is the gospel hiding inside the bad news. A human-created problem is a human-solvable problem. The same species that measured the ice can mend its ways. As a people of faith, we are called to believe in possibility and then to put possibility to work, through our voices, our votes, our choices, and our stubborn refusal to look away from what we now know. That is what it means to search responsibly. The search does not end at the finding. It ends at the doing.
So this Sunday, come honor the search. Come honor the questioners, the measurers, the ones who followed the evidence into unwelcome places and told us the truth anyway. And come ready to honor them the only way that finally matters, by acting like what they found is true. Nature does not argue. It just shows you the waterline. The rest is up to us.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero