Reverend Billy’s brilliantly bombastic, boldly brief Earthalujah sermons — now available as a podcast! Watch more episodes and subscribe at revbilly.com/podcast

Sometimes people come up to me and ask “The Church of Earthalujah…what is that? Is it a political rally? Is it a real church? Is it a comedy sketch? What is it?!”

Question: Is consumerism, is consumption, is consuming too much killing us right now? Yes it is. In the Church of Earthalujah we are definitely fighting consumerism. And that starts with the flags, the banners of consumerism are labels. There’s a label on every product, Amen! So, let’s not label anything. Let’s get beyond labels – that’s the devil!

We have an Earth crisis right now that we can’t label. In the old days it seems like there used to be people who would run down to the village common and shout “there’s an emergency here!” The traditional town crier. Someone should be shouting “Hey! The atmosphere! Too much heat! Extinction! Everything’s dying! Do something!” Where’s that person now? There seems to be a giant hush from the governments, celebrities, corporations, religions, armies – all the people who are supposed to be leading us. There’s a hush because they don’t have the right labels. But they look around them and they see what we all see: fires, floods, tsunamis, quakes, typhoons, tornadoes…Yes! That is the town crier! That is the force that is so powerful it’s chasing the God-forsaken celebrities off the front page of the newspaper. And that is the Earth itself getting our attention, and killing some of us.

In the Church of Earthalujah we regard these events as expressions, as words, as communications from a living being. The Earth is talking to us not just through these tragedies but every time we love each other, the Earth is whispering in our ear. When we walk out across a field on a beautiful day the Earth is alive.

Lets continue to live here. Let us ask the Earth to teach us to save the Earth and save ourselves. Amen.

In April we experienced 600 tornadoes in the US. Last year the count for April was 110. The six fold increase is an astounding climate change. But how did 600 twisters happen? And why? In our public reports such basic questions are strangely restricted. No connection is made to other years, or to the other natural disasters – that long trail of shattering events leading back through time, today’s Mississippi floods, last week’s riot of tornadoes, before that the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, before that the Brazilian mudslides, the Australian floods, the Chinese quakes, the Pakistani floods, the Haitian and Chilean quakes, the Russian summer of fires… We self-censor in a very strict way. Why? Why are we afraid to apply common sense questions to the most impactful experience the Earth offers?

There I said it – “Earth offers.” We fear giving Earth-life any status with its own independent discretion, albeit on its massive planetary scale. When our discussion at our Facebook site veered into this territory, asking “Why is this happening to us?” – a man named Bob was alarmed. He posted this message: “Ascribing meaning to a natural disaster is a bit like seeing bunny rabbits or dragons in a Rorschach ink blot.”

So the natural world changes more and more, and we don’t notice an intention, a lesson, a statement… Very quickly we slide from the denial that such things have a living origin – all the way to the utter meaninglessness of natural events. This is uniformly the position of the leaders of nations, corporations, armies, religions and the arts. The leaders of our biggest institutions share a silence on the subject, and have for years.

Now just think. The physical systems of the Earth, the very air and water and ground that make our lives possible – cannot be openly and creatively discussed? Hey, we’re in trouble here! But as each tragedy unfolds, we tabloidize our reports into the usual heroes and victims, and the Earth, which would seem to have had a role this apocalypse, is left as a background figure. The Earth can cause the tsunami or tornado or devastating flood, but it loses the audition and is not cast in a lead role in the habitual plotting of our stories.

In the face of monstrous disasters we find a way to consign the natural world to the background. We fear the idea of Earth-life. When we stick to those emotional “human interest stories” and value-neutral reports (like weather reports) – then something paradoxical happens. When we demote the Earth we dismiss ourselves. Since the earth scientists tell us that we are the cause – we must take these evasive maneuvers to escape our own guilty role. This leaves us with such spectacles as three thousand words in the newspaper of record never suggesting that the 600 tornadoes are a response to the heating of the planet by human activity. We don’t want the 600 tornadoes to mean anything. That would be as if they were attempting to converse with us. And – tornadoes can’t talk, can they?

The year is turning into High Spring. All of the world’s cultures tell a creation story to go with this steamy moment of green shoots and flowers and sex-drunk birds singing all night long. The most famous stories are the Chosen-People-into-the-wilderness and Christ-on–the-Cross stories, a journey into the unknown to the Promised Land and another ascension to “Father’s Mansion” in the sky.

This year the Promised Land is catching us from behind. We’re interrupted by a thousand gangsta tornadoes and a monster-from-the-depths tsunami, by nuclear fall-out and WikiLeaks and Arab teenagers unafraid of dictators the Americans left in place on their trip from pillar of fire to pillar of fire. Now a refreshing Spring-like confusion has overtaken us, about the role of our collective will, our modern competence…

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We set out across the wilderness of America and the Garden of Eden was straight ahead. We were the Chosen People. We made a deal with an all-powerful God who would protect us from an America full of animals, and moaning, singing people who called out to each other with animal names. God agreed to tame the wilderness and kill our enemies.

We were the Chosen. We punched our ticket. We prayed. We buried our cigar box of dead presidents under the barn. The lonely war-god with his lovely dead son – they were supposed to defeat Appalachia, and the Ohio Valley after that, and the Mississippi and the Great Plains and Rockies and the Golden State and the Moon, but the Promised Land receded into the distance like a white whale the size of pixel. The pillar of fire that was supposed to get us home – the GPS was on the fritz. And then our Eden caught us from behind. It turned out to our surprise that the Promised Land was never in front of us.

The Promised Land caught us from behind because it was an inside job, the seeds and eggs and screaming birds. There is an Eden inside us, and we know there is. And to acknowledge this, as an ambitious American, is to start over completely, to defy Presidents and institutions and the religions that made the holy days like the Exodus and Easter a triumph over the wilderness. That roaring wild life, there’s no God violent enough to stop it. There’s no technology clever enough to stop it. The Promised Land catches us from behind, comes up our legs and into our heart and head. Even the Americans got the Holy Jiggly now -because its Spring.

There were hundreds of millions of Kindles and Nooks frozen in death, stuck on one page – “Why America Slept.” You can say one thing about us, we were a species that scribbled, texted, hologrammed and burst a blood vessel of pixels in the final years. Every last atrocity was broadcast virally. By 2015, every consumer could make a major feature film with a gadget fitted to the hand. We could dial in our imaginary laughing audience for the sound track. If the revolution wasn’t televised, the end of the world was. Millions of movies would be found on mounds of corpses, still flickering in fingers and suitcases. Of the five known mass extinctions in the history of the earth, this was the only one where the dying species seemed to know what it was doing.

It was not a pretty sight, as so much of homo sapiens went down. By 2020, there was a bitter suspicion that a privileged few would survive with secret technologies in the higher elevations. It was a planet racing with high budget rumors as it died. The bitterness was even directed at the coyotes and cockroaches that poured through the front-doors of suburban palaces as families packed their SUV’s for the final drive. Yes, these millions of corpses had sour expressions on their faces – and still the question floated among us. Why did America sleep? The United States of America was supposed to be the hero. “Saving the world” was the plot for most of the movies in theatres in those last years. In fact, at the end, most Americans still believed that their habitual heroism was in full force. But by then, we were stumbling back and forth between virtual and actual worlds. It was a struggle to the death by competing dreams.

America was sleeping deeply, in a dream whose creators were hiding inside skyscrapers with smoked glass. One wonders – could we ever have looked critically at the heavily financed dream-state that became adopted as “normal living.” Normal living became horrific apocalyptic screaming media, cosmetic heroism, and left-over fundamentalist religions. This media was often produced by self-identified liberal environmentalists, while off-screen the air and water was utterly poisoned, with tsunamis coming in like big, consciously directed erasers. If only we had found a way to examine the waking dream by riding into it on the back of a strong counter-dream, like some artists did back in the 20th century…

The American dream turned out to be deadly because it sold tickets to a long series of apocalypses – they are the epitome of good (funny-scary) entertainment. Then, something went terribly wrong when dying spectacularly made good media – a diverting nightmare shall we say – but we could not go forward with ordinary living, where death has a natural place. The leaders of the dream, the captains of consumption and militarism – culturally silenced those who thought that death was a natural part of living. The special effects of mass death continued, while individual death was pushed into endless assisted living, and Americans slept on and on. We took our imperial eternity for granted. We shopped and bombed to push back the emptiness. We swiped the plastic for yet another amazing funny apocalypse. And then one of them, in mid-joke —-

The Earth is inside us, rotating in there like a conscience.  These freak storms tsunamis droughts and extinctions only confirm what we carry inside.  Each of us knows that we will have to change some personal consumption in the next few minutes.  It might be a light switch, a perfume, a heated pool or a bite of food. Here it comes!

But changing can be so tricky.  We can change for days and discover we were only spending money.  The simulation of change looms over us, a massive slippery language, an avalanche of songs, gestures, billboards….  The promise of change has been the main wedge into our psyches by corporate marketing – for decades.  To embark on actual personal change and then do this in a social movement with others?  This means walking through one hell of a distortion field.

We are lucky to have change come looking for us lately. Tunis and Cairo and Yemen, and the brave public space crowdings in that part of the world, and Wisconsin too…
We’ve been shown what it takes.  These people break through the advertising, the guns, the fake monarchies.  They break through to their own commons and stand there and shout there, taking the dare of freedom.

There’s a clue for us in how this flood of humanity roaring down to the commons in the center  – so resembles the floods of fire and wind and water in nature’s uprisings…

The choir and I rode and biked to a field on Saturday, a lovely field of shore dunes and ravines in East New York, sometimes called Brownsville.  The place has an uncertain future.  It is slated for development and over the years communities gathered to make a plan.  They imagined a friendly kind of town with smaller businesses and space for walking, for schools and playgrounds.  Now the billionaire mayor and his friends are arranging for an addition to the plan:  They want to plop a big Walmart box in the middle of the community plan.

Of course we can rise up indignantly and have all the right reasons for doing so.  The bad jobs, the mono-culture of the sweatshop store, all the traffic and the death of bodegas and longtime local shops.  This Walmart, the first in NYC, could be righteously opposed by all of us.  But that won’t be enough to stop it.  We all sense this.  Saturday we stood in the field and admitted to ourselves that our activism won’t succeed if it re-cycles the old issues and copies the activism of the past.   Oh we dream will always dream of recreating Selma or Stonewall or the Berlin Wall.  But our movement now – will have to have its own life.  In fact the movements that have created change in the past had their own strange newness then.  We will have to walk through counter-intuitive risky-weird actions and it might not seem very connected to those famous heroic events of the past.

We wondered Saturday – is this Earth, this worn-out looking field we’re standing in, would it connect with us somehow?  We called out to it.  We knew this lonely field, surrounded on all sides by sprawl, was as complex as any personality.  We felt its power, even if it was a site for old detergent bottles and beer cans and the treads of dune-cycles, just an afterthought of a vacant lot.  We knew that our ability to save the community plan from the world’s biggest retailer and the corporate mayor would somehow come from teaming up our lives with the life of this place.

Standing in that field, we made a promise on an intuition, not knowing precisely how it would work out. We start by letting some parts of the community plan enter the field ahead of schedule, while the lawyers continue their fight.  Make that playground. Make a contest – make music, make films here in this field.  Find the old-timers who grew up here.  And there are neighborhood children, of course, that use it as a secret place of adventure.  So the stories come back.  From the dunes, it seems like this was shore-line once.  You can sense that the ocean was here.

If we save the life of this field, it will be because the field saved us.  If we really believe in this field of change, then what we do in resistance to police and bulldozers won’t be a question of bravery, or ego, or correct-thinking.  Imagine what we can do.

Earthalujah!