Sermon: Renewal and Regeneration

as preached for the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston’s online worship service, April 26, 2020

The theme of today’s service is renewal and regeneration. And in this sermon I invite us to consider the most pressing question immediately before us: What comes next?

The Governor of Texas has begun the process of re-opening the state. He has appointed a task force to get non-essential workers back to work and businesses back in business. The state, national, and world economy, meanwhile, are currently in a greater freefall than the one experienced during the Great Depression. Many people are hungry. Many people are scared. Many people are tired. And almost everyone is asking, what comes next?

But before I get to that vital question, I have to admit that I almost titled my sermon: for the love of all that is holy, will you please do your bleeping schoolwork?

The pandemic has been hard on a lot of people. Like many other families, my own continues to struggle to make it through the everyday. Now, normally, I avoid too much of a focus on my own quotidian challenges in my preaching. This is especially true when it comes to my children. Neither of them signed up to be preacher’s kids. I do not think it is appropriate to turn their lives into sermon illustrates.

However, in the nineteenth-century, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that the primary job of the preacher was to “convert life into truth.” He charged Unitarian ministers to offer up “life passed through the fire of thought.” And I think that I am not burdening my son with some unasked-for narrative by sharing that it is not easy trying to get him to engage with his schoolwork. Out experience is, after all, one shared by many families. The primary truth I can offer, from my own life, today, is demonstrated by the tension between the question at the heart of my sermon and my alternative sermon title. We need to ask: What comes next? And, at the same time, most of us are wrestling with our own variants of: for the love of all that is holy, will you please do your bleeping schoolwork?

The tension between our question and my alternative sermon title is not a new one. It might be reframed as another question: How do we look to the future when we find ourselves in the middle of tragedy? And to ask that question is essentially to ask, how shall we mourn?

It might seem counter-intuitive, but mourning is essentially a future oriented activity. When we mourn, we acknowledge that we have experienced a loss. We admit that we are suffering. And then we try to ask ourselves the difficult question: What comes next? What comes next itself contains two questions: How shall we remember those we have lost? And how shall we live without them?

This past week the COVID-19 death count in the United States passed fifty thousand. I suspect that most of you have been impacted by the virus. I know someone listening to this sermon is ill. I know someone hearing me preach has lost family or friends. I know someone considering my words has lost their job or their business. I know that almost everyone who is playing this video has been affected by this pandemic. We are all mourning.

As a historian, political philosopher, and a theologian, not to mention a parish minister, I have been finding it increasingly unhelpful to think of the situation we are in as unprecedented. There have been plagues and pandemics before. There have been tyrants before. The wealthy and powerful have feigned compassion for the poor before. There has been mass economic disruption before. And people have mourned before.

One of the central functions of a religious community is to help people mourn. We hold funerals and memorial services. We offer prayers and condolences. We write eulogies. We make meaning through mourning. We ask the question, through tears, what comes next?

For most of us, our primary experience of mourning has been mourning the deaths of individuals. Our grandparents or parents or partners or friends or even children have died. Their deaths might have been swift and tragic. They might have come at the end of a long illness. They might have arrived when those we loved were old, in their middle years, or when they were young. Whenever it has come, we, the mourners, who have survived have needed to ask the questions: What does this person’s life mean for me? What comes next?

I have lost my grandparents to old age and heart disease. I have lost friends to drug overdoses, violence, and suicide. I have had loved ones die of cancer. I have known people who were killed in car crashes and bicycle accidents. In each instance, the same questions: What does this person’s life mean for me? What comes next? How shall I mourn?

Right now, many of us feel like the writer Edith Sitwell when she was asked why she wore black. She replied that she was in mourning. “For whom are you in mourning?” came the response. “For the world,” she answered.

We are mourning the world. There is a sense of mourning the world in June Jordan’s poem, “Nobody Riding the Roads Today.” It was written long before COVID-19 blighted the globe. And yet, it captures much of the experience of isolation that I know many of us are feeling:

Nobody meeting on the streets
But I rage from the crowded
overtones of emptiness

…Nobody laughing anymore
But I see the world split
and twisted up like open stone

The world empty, the world split, the world twisted; we are mourning the world. We are asking ourselves, what did the way of life we had before the pandemic mean? We are asking, what comes next? And we, are doing this all, as all mourners must, in the midst of our ordinary, unaccustomed, struggles: illness, fear of illness, deaths of loved ones, job loss, housing insecurity, hunger and want, and, in the case of many an exasperated parent, the cry of, for the love of all that is holy, will you please do your bleeping schoolwork? Each struggle connecting to an aspect of what we have lost, of what we are mourning: health, the illusion of safety, economic security, work, and the school community. They each meant something different to us before the pandemic. And their meanings have changed now that we find ourselves living amid a worldwide pestilence.

The anthropologist David Graeber has written perceptively about mourning and the function of religion. Controversially, but correctly, Graeber believes that a central purpose of religion is, in his words, “the production of people.” In religious community, he writes, we “are constantly being socialized, trained, educated, mentored towards new roles… constantly being attended to and care for.” In community, we are “implicated in processes of transformation.”

It is a statement that I am sure rankles many of my more libertarian or individualistically oriented friends. One of the great myths of the United States is that we are self-made individuals. It is a myth that lies at the heart of the country’s economic system. It animates much of economic discourse and influential economists like F. A. Hayek have claimed “the individualistic tradition… has created Western civilization.”

Individualism sits at the core of the salvation narrative of conventional Christianity. After our deaths, we are promised, if we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, we will ascend to Heaven and enjoy life eternal. The emphasis is on what happens to your individual soul and to mine. It is not on what happens to us together.

Graeber’s anthropological understanding of religion suggests, instead, that we are social creatures and that in community we create each other. Mourning offers an illustration of this dynamic. “Rarely,” he argues, “do the political careers of important individuals end in death. Often political figures, as ancestors, martyrs, founders of institutions, can be far more important after their death than when they were alive.” What is true of political figures, can be true for all us. Our legacies, our contributions to the commonweal, last beyond our mortal shells.

Some years ago, I asked my friend, the now deceased Spanish Civil War veteran, anarchist, and union organizer Federico Arcos, what he thought about life after death. Federico was a militant atheist. He had little use for organized religion–though he greatly admired both Leo Tolstoy and Martin Luther King, Jr. I assumed he would simply tell me that it the idea of life after death was absurd.

Instead, he surprised me. “We are immortal,” he told me. “We live on the stories we are part of and in the things we create.” “You see this road,” we were driving, “the working people who built it will live on in it as long as it continues to exist. My dead friends,” he had lost most of his loved ones during the war, “live on in me through the stories I tell. And they will on in you because I am telling you their stories. And if you share their stories,” and I have, “they will continue. That is our immortality.”

We are narrative creatures. We tell the stories of our own lives to each other to make meaning from them. And other people tell stories about our lives to understand our social roles. A religious community is a community of memory. And, “it is from the community of memory that most of the significant movements of thought and action emerge,” wrote twentieth-century Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams. “It is only through a disciplined memory of the past,” he continued, “that one can judge properly of the present and play one’s own part rightly.”

We are mourning. We are asking what our stories have meant. And we are asking, what comes next? Since, we are in the Easter season, and because we are a religious community, I might point out that Christianity is, in many ways, a religion of mourning.

Jesus, the poor man, the rebel Rabbi, the overturner of the money changers’ tables, the preacher of the power of community and the living presence of the Kingdom of God, was put to death by the greatest empire of his day for suggesting that love was the most powerful earthly force. Jesus’s followers believed him to be the messiah, the individual who God had sent to proclaim, in the words of the Hebrew prophet Amos, “let justice well up like water, / Righteousness like an unfailing stream.”

Instead of bringing about the reign of the divine, peace to the cottages, and plenty to the tables, the story is told, Jesus was executed as a common criminal. He was nailed to a cross and placed between two thieves to die a humiliating and excruciating death.

Die he did. And his community had to ask the questions, amid pain and suffering, amid their experiences of grief and loss: What did his life mean? What comes next?

We might read the Christian New Testament and the non-canonical Christian texts, such as the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, as a series of arguments about how to answer these questions. In my Easter sermon, I suggested that one answer people found within these texts was a belief in the resurrection of dead–we shall only hope for heaven when we are dead. And I suggested that another answer was the resurrection of the living–opening ourselves to savoring what is and building the just community where we can. And I argued that the resurrection of the dead led to the politics of the dead. And that the resurrection of the living led to the politics of the living.

We can find debates about the politics of the dead and the politics of the living scattered throughout Christian texts. We can read Jesus proclaiming the politics of the living in the words, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.’” And we can read Paul proclaiming the politics of the dead in the words, “I have been crucified with Christ.”

In the texts, Paul can never quite seem to decide whether he believes in the politics of the living or the politics of the dead. In his Letter to the Galatians he makes one of the most forceful statements of the politics of living in any Christian text–canonical or otherwise. He writes, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” These are words that a humanist and a theological universalist such as myself, might re-interpret as saying, we all part of the same human family. The lesson of this pandemic, the story we should be telling while we mourn, is that we are all interconnected and what impacts one of us, impacts all of us.

In the Letter of the Galatians, Paul also provides words that have formed the theological basis of the politics of the dead: “yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” This statement was used by generations of later theologians–Augustine and Martin Luther in particular–to craft the idea that salvation is individual, it occurs in the next world, and it happens because of what we believe, not because of what we do. Such a focus on individual otherworldliness has often justified the negligence of earthly justice and the exploitation of the poor. It is behind Augustine counsel that obedience to the earthly authorities is obedience to God. It is in Martin Luther’s text, “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,” in which he denounces those who rebel against the world’s powers and principalities. Those who look for heaven in this world, who seek justice among the living, are, he claims, “the worst blasphemers of God and slanderers of his holy name.”

I mention Paul, his influence on Augustine and Luther, and his confusion about the politics of the dead and the politics of the living, because his presence in the communities that eventually became Christian offers important lessons for us as we mourn the world. Paul was the one of primary evangelists of religion that became Christianity. Much of the Christian New Testament consists of letters he wrote emerging Christian communities. And in them we can read of a struggle over who will determine how Jesus was to be mourned.

In Galatians, again, we find a revealing passage. Towards the beginning of the letter Paul wrote, “Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up in response to a revelation. Then I laid before them (though only in a private meeting with the acknowledged leaders) the gospel I proclaim.” This text, which continues and from which I shall not read in full, provides an account of a struggle for power within the emerging Christian community. The struggle was about who would determine how Jesus was to be mourned.

On one side, stood Paul, and, presumably, Barnabas and Titus. On the other side, was “the acknowledged leaders.” There were theological differences between these two groups. We do not actually know what “the acknowledged leaders” believed. The theological polemics that have come down to us, that is the letters in the Christian New Testament, are from Paul’s faction, not theirs. I suspect that the acknowledged leaders beliefs might have been more in line with the gnostic teachings, the resurrection of the living and the politics of life, found in the non-canonical gospels and attested to in portions of the canonical gospels, than the resurrection of the dead.

That is not important. What is important is that they included “James the Lord’s brother,” and other disciples who claimed to have known Jesus when he was alive. Paul, in contrast, never met the living Jesus. Instead, he “received… a revelation through Jesus Christ” and, that he stated, made him equal in authority to the authority Jesus had granted his friends while he was still alive.

Much of the debate in Galatians is over whether or not Paul’s revelation granted him this equal authority. He claims it did. And he claims that the “acknowledged leaders” “recognized the grace that had been given to me.” We have no way of knowing whether this was true or not. We have only Paul’s account of the argument. We have only him telling us how Jesus was to be mourned and how the community was to answer the question: What comes next?

And that elision, the silence of James the Lord’s brother and his friends, should speak us to across the centuries and provide a crucial warning as we go about mourning the world, as we struggle to make meaning of what we have lost and answer the question: What comes next? The warning is this: those who are closest to the levers of power, those who are the most privileged, will be the ones who will determine how we mourn unless we struggle for the resurrection of the living and the politics of the living.

The silence of James the Lord’s brother is not accidental. It is a product of who James was and who Paul was. James was like Jesus, a poor man, an outcast, a Jew in a pagan Empire who proclaimed that Caesar’s power was less than God’s, an undocumented brown skinned workingman, struggling to make it through the day–as so many people are struggling today. James almost certainly struggled to find housing, to find work, and to get enough to eat. James was persecuted for his beliefs.

Paul, on the other hand, was an educated Roman citizen. Unlike presumably James, for there is no authentic text from James, Paul could read, and he could write. He was trained in Greek philosophy and Jewish theology. He had been educated in rhetoric. He even had a career persecuting men like James before he had his revelation. And yet, it is his letters, his theological treatises, that form the major corpus of Christian epistles and not those of James or his friends. He is the one who has determined so much of how Jesus is to be mourned. He answered the question: What comes next?

It is there, in the Letter of the Galatians, an account of the rich and powerful determining how the poor and marginalized shall mourn. It is there, the replacement of the politics of the living–which Paul sometimes believed–with the politics of the dead–which Paul left as the major part of his legacy.

And that, in this age of pandemic, on this Sunday a few weeks after Easter, as we mourn, is a central issue we must wrestle with as we attempt to answer the question: What comes next? Who will determine the narrative we make, the story we tell, the meaning we create about the pandemic? Will it be the most privileged and powerful among us, for that is who Paul was, or will be it those like James, who are suffering the most?

Will we, like Paul, choose the politics of the dead, with their emphasis on individual salvation, individual economic activity, and claim that we are self-made? Our we will choose the politics of the living, found in Jesus’s words that the Kingdom of God is among you? Not among one of you, not only inside of me, but among all of us, and present, possible, here, now, in this world. That salvation is social, and not individual, that we must build the commonwealth if we are to recover from the pandemic and prevent the next one.

I could close here by offering policy prescriptions and prophetic denouncements drawn from the politics of the living. I could argue that the President’s refusal to heed the warnings and possibilities found within science are part of the politics of the dead. I could take Texas’s Lieutenant Governor to task for his belief that we should be willing die for the economy. I could offer an analysis of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to fund state governments during this pandemic as an attempt to destroy unions for civil servants by destroying the state pension systems. I could criticize House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for their constant refrain that real help for families “will be the centerpiece of our next legislation.” And I could claim that we need massive income redistribution and the creation of new social infrastructure if our country and our world is to emerge from the pandemic and prevent the next one.

But instead of offering such a lengthy discourse, I will close with turns to two texts that suggest the politics of the living. The first comes from the speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin. In her novel “Always Coming Home,” she imagines what comes next, after our present society experiences a collapse, and how the people of the future will mourn the world we have today. They discover new ways to live sustainably. At peace with each other, they do not fear or target the other. They not do not target immigrants or migrants but instead recognize that all are part of the same human family and invite travelers to: “Please bring strange things, / Please come bringing new things.” And welcome them with the words: “Return with us, return to us / be always coming home.”

In the future she invites us to imagine, the future that comes after whatever it is we have now, people come to recognize their interconnection with each other and with all that is. Her vision is a promise of what might be if we learn the lessons of the hour and reject the myth of individualism in favor of the truth that we are social creatures. Our salvation is social.

And finally, I turn to what is perhaps the greatest statement of the politics of the living from the twentieth century. It comes from Charlie Chaplin. At the close of his film “The Great Dictator” his character, the little tramp, his stand-in for the poor and marginalized, his cipher for James the Lords brother, makes a speech denouncing the fascists and fools, the powers and principalities, of his day, that were then hurtling the world into war and desolation:

“I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone — if possible — Jew, Gentile — black man — white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed…

To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people…

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” — not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power — the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then — in the name of democracy — let us use that power — let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world — a decent world that will give men a chance to work — that will give youth a future and old age a security…”

These are words that speak of the politics of life. Let them teach us how to mourn, how to make meaning from all that we have lost. And let them help us to answer the question: What comes next?

And, also, for the love of all that is holy, will you please do your bleeping schoolwork.

Let the congregation, absent in body, but present in spirit, say Amen.

Sermon: No Respecter of Persons

as preached online for the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, April 12, 2020

You might remember that our theme for worship for April is renewal. This is our Easter service. I am scheduled to be talking with you about renewal and rebirth. And in this sermon, we are going to be focusing on something that might be called the resurrection of the living. The inspiration for it comes from two scriptural lines. The first is found in a text in the Christian New Testament known as The Acts of the Apostles. In the old King James version it reads, “God is no respecter of persons.” The second comes from “The Treatise on the Resurrection,” a gnostic Christian text from the early second century. There we find this description of the answer to the question, “What is the resurrection” “It is truth standing firm. It is revelation of what is, and the transformation of things, and a transition into freshness.”

God is no respecter of persons, an ancient idea that bespeaks the truth that we are alike to the divine. Each person, the rich and the poor, will go the way of all flesh. The living resurrection, a transition into freshness. Taken together these texts teach us that we all share a common fate and all contain within us the possibility of awakening into a “revelation of what is.”

The lesson is echoed in the words of William Ellery Channing, the principal nineteenth-century Unitarian theologian. He said, in an Easter sermon, “here on earth the influence of Christ’s character is seen in awakening an active, self-sacrificing goodness” in the heart of each; taught that the purpose of religion was to rouse the “likeness to God” that lies within all; and claimed that heaven might be found on Earth. “A new sense, a new eye, might show the spiritual world compassing on every side,” he preached.

The living resurrection, my sermon, with its central message drawn from “The Treatise on the Resurrection,” might be divided into two parts. The first, a bit of context and some theological exposition. The second, a confession about our contemporary struggle.

Most of you have probably never heard of “The Treatise on the Resurrection.” Some of you self-identify as liberal Christians or come from Christian families. If this is the first time listening to one of our services marking the Christian high holidays, you might be surprised to hear a text read that deviates from the standard lectionary. You might have been expecting Acts and one of the Psalms or a reading from the canonical gospels of John or Matthew. But certainly not a passage from “The Treatise on the Resurrection.”

Here at First Unitarian Universalist, I always include a reading from the gnostic tradition in our holiday offerings. Unitarian Universalism has its roots in two heretical Christian traditions. Unitarians, like William Ellery Channing, believe that Jesus is best understood as a great moral teacher. They rejected the idea of what is called atonement theology, summarized best in the statement, “Jesus died for your sins.” As contemporary Unitarian Universalist theologian Rebecca Parker observes, “To say that Jesus’ executioners did what was historically necessary for salvation is to say that state terrorism is a good thing, that torture and murder are the will of God.” “The importance of Jesus,” she writes elsewhere, “is not that he paid the price for sin. Jesus is important because he embodied loving concern for others and called people to love their neighbors.” Jesus pointed to the possibility of what other great religious leaders–the Buddha or mystic Rabbis like the Baal Shem Tov–and have pointed to as well, religion should awaken us to the beauty of the world around us and the compassion within us.

Universalism is the other heretical Christian tradition that inspires us. Universalists celebrate the love of God for all. They believe that God loves everyone, without exception. “The scriptures declare that God is love, that he is a good Being, that he is no respecter of persons, but is good to all, and that his tender mercies are over all his works,” wrote the nineteenth-century Universalist Lucy Barns. Such a good and loving deity, Universalists think, cannot damn her creations to an eternity of suffering. Instead, they understand, death brings us humans a common fate. They know that whatever Hell we find, we make for ourselves in our earthly realm. The theological sentiment of the Universalists is captured well in a fragment of the singer Bobby McFerrin’s rendition of the 23rd Psalm. McFerrin speaks of his faith in the feminine divine:

She restores my soul, She rights my wrongs,
She leads me in a path of good things,
And fills my heart with songs.

Even though I walk, through a dark & dreary land,
There is nothing that can shake me,
She has said She won’t forsake me,
I’m in her hand.

Unitarianism, the knowledge that we can each open ourselves to the glory unfolding around us and the compassion within us. Universalism, the wisdom that we all share a common fate and that power of the divine is found in love. These are ancient heresies, teachings rejected by the powers and principalities of ancient Rome for their subversive nature. Each year during the high Christian holidays we read from texts like “The Treatise on the Resurrection” to remind ourselves that the core of our Unitarian Universalist theology is as old as the Christian tradition itself. It is just that we happen to be the heirs of those people who refused what the philosopher Cornel West and others have called Constantinian Christianity, the marriage between Christianity and the Roman Empire. Constantinian Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus without really asking questions: Why was he killed by the greatest Empire of his day? What did he teach that made him so threatening? The heretical Christians who wrote “The Treatise of the Resurrection” believed in resurrection of the living, “a transition into a new freshness.”

Constainian Christians instead preach of the resurrection of the dead. They sing the beautiful hymn, “This world is not my home I’m just a passing through / My treasurers are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.” The old heretical Christian asked instead, in the words of the labor hymn, “Shall we only hope for heaven when we’re dead?” Or shall we imagine the possibility that here, in our earthly realm, there might be, “joy and peace for all”? The resurrection of the living or the resurrection of the dead?

“The Treatise on the Resurrection,” this morning’s text, comes from heretical tradition called gnosticism. The teachings of William Ellery Channing resemble those of the gnostics. Contemporary scholar Elaine Pagels has distilled gnostic thought into three primary gestures. First, it taught that the resurrection of the living was the discovery that “self-knowledge is knowledge of God.” There is a flicker of the divine–what humanists might call the spark that leaps from each-to-each in times of common crisis–within each of us. We are resurrected to life when feed that spark.

Second, they claimed that Jesus was “a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding.” Following teachings such as those found in “The Treatise on the Resurrection” or the better known “Gospel of Thomas” offers us advice on how we might each kindle our own flame. Much of that teaching might be captured in the advice of the prophet Micah who rhetorically asked, “what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” The resurrection of the living, the gnostics believed, was available to all who opened themselves to the “revelation of what is” and sought “the transformation of things” and “transition into freshness.”

Third, they saw Jesus as a human being who pointed the way to the resurrection of the living, not someone who was the “Son of God in a unique way,” as Pagels puts it. Instead, those who underwent the resurrection of the living could become like Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas relates, “Jesus said, I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out… He who will drink from my mouth will become like as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.” The likeness of God, claimed William Ellery Channing, resides within each of us.

The resurrection of the living, here is where we reach my confession. I am having more than a little trouble believing in it this morning. As I speak to you, the words of the poet T. S. Eliot lie somewhere in the background, “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”

It is hard to preach about the resurrection of the living, to offer you a sense of renewal and the hope of rebirth, in this cruel month of April. Like a lot of people, I am struggling. I am blessed to continue to have a job and good health. But I am a single parent of a thirteen-year-old boy. We are sheltering in place together, in our 1,200 square foot apartment. Like a lot of parents, I am finding it difficult to stay home all day–with the exception of an hour walk in the evening–with a kid who has to attend school online, complete his homework, cannot see his friends, and who is not able to go outside all that often, to be hard. It is almost unbearable. Which is not to say that I do not love my son. It is more that juggling work–this sermon was written in a series of snatches between vain attempts to get schoolwork completed in a timely fashion–and having to do all the cooking and well, everything, else is more than a little hard. Most days I go to bed simply grateful to have made it through the day without entirely losing my mind.

I do not tell you this elicit your sympathy. Rather, I tell you this to join my voice to the chorus of others making statements like, “It is OK not to be OK” or “Parents are not OK.” Voices from around the world tell us that they are not OK. From Italy, Sylvia Poggioli writes of “the grimmest [ritual]: the 6 o’clock televised press conference at which… the latest number of Covid-19 cases and the day’s body count” are announced. Hari Kunzru describes how the unrelenting deaths in Brooklyn are bringing “a rapid disintegration of all social and economic life [that] has exposed the terrible fragility of the American system.” Nicole Rudick observes from New Jersey that during this cruel April, “boring is the best you can hope for.” Staying in Oxford, England, Merve Emre, experiences “isolation,” walking “the empty aisles of the supermarket–no pasta, no beans, no peanut butter,” and learning of a “nurse who had worked for forty-eight hours straight crying in her car because she couldn’t find fresh fruit or vegetables after her shift ended.” In New Mexico, Danny Lyon meditates upon the impending death of a friend and asks the question: “When this horror passes, and it will, will the survivors accept a new way to live? The party is over… Is this the turning point? Will we emerge into a new and better world?”

The survivors… I pray that all who are watching this service, and all of your loved ones, will be among them. For this is likely to be one of the most difficult months that many of us have lived through. To date, more than a hundred thousand people have died from COVID-19, more than twenty thousand of them in the United States. In this country alone there are over five hundred thousand infected. The true number could be ten times that since testing has been such an abysmal failure. That would mean five million infected, one out of every sixty-six people living in the United States.

Epidemiologists are reporting that over the course of the pandemic at least sixty thousand people in this country will die. Some forecasts are much higher. The national death rate is supposed to reach its greatest height in the next weeks–suggesting that April will live up to its reputation for cruelty.

The cruel month of April is bringing massive job losses. Close to ten million people have lost their jobs since the beginning of the crisis. Another ten million will probably lose their jobs by the end of the month. Somewhere close to fifty percent of people under the age of forty-five have are now unemployed and huge numbers of people without healthcare. In most states, the unemployment system is overwhelmed and benefits have been slow in coming. Rent was due at the beginning of the month. Many families were forced to make the choice between paying it, buying food, and, in some cases, paying for medicine.

The cruelty of the month suggests that at least a few of you who are watching have experienced illness, are suffering from the virus, or have recently lost your job. If that describes you, I hope you will reach out to us here at First Unitarian Universalist. One of the purposes of a religious community is to take care of its members. The congregation is here for you during this time of pandemic. We will what we can to provide you with comfort and relief.

In the midst of such of a cruel month, it is difficult to preach a sermon on the resurrection of the living. I suspect it is difficult to preach an Easter sermon today from any tradition. Easter is supposed to be a grand and joyous holiday. Here at First Unitarian Universalist, we typically celebrate it with: magisterial organ music; an exuberant choir performance; bright, voluminous, bouquets of flowers; a few Easter bonnets; and our annual Easter parade. Each year, for more than twenty years, this congregation’s children have celebrated the holiday by marching down Fannin Street to the Emergency Aid Coalition with a rather sizable donation of canned goods.

None of that is happening. Instead, I find myself preaching again to an empty sanctuary–prerecording a message that I hope will provide you with a sense of connection, a bit of uplift, and perhaps some clarity during these strange days. It is Easter and the emptiness of the sanctuary provides us with the temptation to choose the theological analogy of the resurrection of the dead. For it is on Easter that Jesus’s disciples, the scriptures in the Christian New Testament claim, found the empty tomb. And it is on Easter that they became convinced he had been brought back to life–the resurrection of the dead.

The story is recounted that Jesus, the young peasant revolutionary from Nazareth, was executed on Friday. Jesus, the story says, a young peasant with brown skin–for any peasant born two thousand years ago in the town of Bethlehem would have brown skin–was put to death by the officials and soldiers of an imperial state. Jesus, the radical who, the Gospel of John tells us, “made a whip of cords and… upset the tables of the money-changers” and drove them from the Temple, and “whom,” the Acts of the Apostles in the old King James claims, “they slew and hanged on a tree,” and who, when his friends and loved ones went to reclaim his corpse, was discovered not to be in his tomb. Jesus–who, in a more contemporary translation of the Gospel of Luke, warned, “But alas for you who are rich; / you have had your time of happiness, / Alas for you who are well fed now; / you will go hungry / Alas for you who laugh now; / you will mourn and weep. / Alas for you when all speak well of you; / that is how their fathers treated the false prophets”–was not moldering in his grave. Instead, the Christian scripture declares, “God raised him to life on the third day.”

The empty tomb; God raised him to life on the third day, that is the story of the resurrection of the dead. The empty sanctuary; the suggestion that God will cause us to rise up again, after this pandemic, a non-heretical Easter metaphor. God will cause us to rise up again, the claim, the belief, the message that everything is going to be fine in the end, that we will return to the way things used to be, to “normal,” that stock market will resume its endless rise, that employment will come roaring back.

The resurrection of the dead… Last week Rev. Scott urged us to reframe hope. He quoted the writer David Whyte, “Hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.” Hoping that the world will return to “normal” after the pandemic ends or that we will all quickly return to work and profit making is hoping for the resurrection of the dead. Literally, it will require that some of us die so that others might resume making money–a wish that Texas’s Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has expressed. But it will also mean that we, as a society, have learned nothing from this pandemic and all the suffering it has brought.

Instead of hoping things will return to the way they were, instead of seeking the resurrection of the dead, I think, this Easter, as hard as it is, we must choose the resurrection of the living. The resurrection of the living, what does it mean for us in this moment? It is hard me to preach about it or seek it, as I struggle amid the chaos of an upended world to compose these words, but I suspect I know what it means: take pleasure in living and pursue the politics of the living.

Taking pleasure in living, awakening to the “revelation of what is.” The other night, I went for a late walk over by the Menil Collection. The museum was shuttered. The streets near empty. The darkness as dark as it gets in the middle of Houston. Live oak trees lined the sidewalks. Sculptures interrupted, as they always do, the symmetry of the Menil’s lawn–a lush and neat expanse surrounding the rectangular building with its inviting porches and columns. A flutter interrupted the sculptures, the trees, the lawn, the columns, the porch. A flutter and then flash of wings and legs, tufted feathers, the observant, silent, head of a tricolor heron. Never had I seen such a bird before–let alone in the midnight of the city. There it was: nature’s beauty, revealing to me how life continues, thrives, in the midst of a pandemic. A spark of the resurrection of the living.

You can awaken yourself to the resurrection of the living no matter where you are during this pandemic. The beauty of the world surrounds us. There are always complex patterns and unexpected openings–no matter how cramped we might be and no matter how much we suffer. And here I could offer a learned discourse on all of those who have found beauty among misery and horror. But instead, I will just quote the survivor of World War II, Sami Rosenstock, who wrote during that moment of terror, “Salt and fire await you on the mineral hill of the incandescence of living.”

The incandescence of living, if we are to experience the resurrection of the living we must pursue the politics of the living. This is what Jesus did. And this is why he died. The politics of the living follow the injunction that God is no respecter of persons. They urge us to remember the most vulnerable among us. They challenge us–be we white or black, Asian or Latinx, poor or rich–to recognize that the grave injustice of the disproportionate death rate among African Americans is a result of the politics of white supremacy. It is not an accident that black people are dying from the virus at a higher rate than white people. It is the result of a system that has spent generations creating riches for wealthy whites at the expense of people of color. Pursuing the politics of the living means heeding the call of Anthony Fauci who reminds us that the unequal death rate is a result of “health disparities [that] have always existed for the African American community.”

Again, there is much I could say about the politics of the living. But instead, since this is Easter, I will just quote Jesus who said, “Whatever you do for the least of these, you did for me.” The politics of the living come from the resurrection of the living. They challenge us to ask ourselves the question–most especially in the midst of a pandemic–what shall we do to make the world more beautiful for all?

The resurrection of the dead; the resurrection of the living… I confess to you, my friends, absent in body, though present in spirit, that this Easter I having trouble choosing the resurrection of the living. April is cruel. It will get crueler. I do not anticipate that sheltering in place will get easier. I do not believe that any of this will end soon.

But I will make what small movement I can towards the resurrection of the living. I will leave this place and go for a walk with my son. We will wear masks. We will keep our social distance from others. And, perhaps, we will see a tricolor heron or a flower or some other spark of beauty to awaken us to the “revelation of what is.” And it will remind us that no matter how difficult the hour, the glory of life is ever present.

And I will leave this place and do what I can to remember that God is no respecter of persons. I will speak out and demand that our society care for the least of these–which in this time of pandemic could become all of us. I will do what small things I can. Write my words. Call those who are struggling. And remember the rhetorical question, from the ancient prophet Micah, who called for the resurrection of the living when he asked, “what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

“Why do I seem to shout?” the ancient text inquires. “What is the resurrection?” it asks. Didactically it answers:

“It is truth standing firm. It is revelation of what is, and the transformation of things, and a transition into freshness.”

This Easter may each of us, no matter how along we might feel, no how matter vulnerable we are, no matter how much we are struggling, begin to undergo the resurrection of the living. For, “These are the symbols and images of resurrection. They establish its goodness.”

The goodness of the resurrection of the living is established. Hear those ancient words and remember that truth, my friends. And now, I invite you to remember that truth, hear my words, and present in spirit say, Amen.

Sermon: Illness is Not a Metaphor

as preached for the online service of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, March 29, 2020

I do not know about you, but in these strange days, I have found myself doing many new things. In the last couple of weeks, I have been invited to virtual dinners, virtual dance parties, and virtual cocktail hours. Recently, I was even invited to a virtual tea-time. There was a story on NPR about virtual first dates. My son is starting online–which is to say virtual–school on Tuesday. And, of course, right now you are joining us for virtual worship.

In essence, we are doing new things but calling them by old names. We are in a time of metaphors. “Metaphor,” Aristotle wrote many centuries ago, “consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” We use metaphors when we say that one thing is another thing. A metaphor is something that represents something else. Metaphor is essential to art and poetry. “And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Love is a stone / that settled on the sea-bed / under grey-water,” scribed Derek Walcott. “[V]erdad del río que se va perdiendo;” “the truth of the dying river,” we find in our morning’s reading by Amanda Berenguer. The sun is a bucketful of gold. Love is a stone. The river is dying. Each is a metaphor where one thing is said to be another.

I have come to realize, that for me, virtual worship is a metaphor for life as it used to be. This is our third week of recording our service in an empty sanctuary. There are only a handful of us here. We are practicing appropriate physical distancing.

We are also cleaning the pulpit, microphones, piano, and other equipment each time a different person uses them. In order to safely offer an online worship service, we are filming everything out of sequence. Alma and Scott recorded their portions of our liturgy prior to me recording mine. Mark recorded much of the music in his home studio. This week, he is not even here for the sermon.

Christian and Alma take this out of sequence audio and video and splice it together so that we can provide you with an approximation of our regular Sunday morning service. We want to offer our regular Sunday morning worship participants a continuing feeling of connection to the religious community that is the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. And we want those of you who are joining us online without ever having entered either our sanctuary in Houston or sanctuary in Richmond to know that when we gather again in person you will be welcome among us. But we do so with the knowledge that virtual worship is not the same as in person worship. You are not sitting in a room filled with people. You are not joining your voices with a crowd of others in song–though I hope that you are singing along with Mark’s excellent arrangements of our hymns.

We do all of this in the hopes that our virtual worship will provide you with a sense of connection and comfort during these strange days. Our hopes for these online worship services remind me of a fable from the Hasidic tradition. In one of his books, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben recounts a version of it that he found in the work of the Jewish mystic and scholar Gershom Scholem.

The Hasidic tradition was founded by the Baal Shem Tov–the Master of the Good Name–in early eighteenth-century Europe. He was reputed to have been a pious, wise, and compassionate man. He was also supposed to have been a great worker of miracles.

It is told that when he had an insurmountable problem before him, he would go into the woods to a special place. There he would “light a fire and meditate in prayer.” And then the problem he had sought out to solve, the miracle he was hoping to perform, would be done.

After the Baal Shem died, his successor went to the same special place in the forest. He had forgotten a little about the ritual. He said, “We can no longer light a fire, but we can pray.” And then he was able to work a miracle.

The Baal Shem’s successor died. And the day came when the Rabbi of the next generation was faced with a great task. So, he went to the special place in the woods and said, “We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayers, but we know the place in the woods, and that can be sufficient.” And sufficient it was.

The fourth generation came into being. And the Rabbi of that generation was called upon to perform a great task. But he did not even know the place in the woods. And so, he said, “‘We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayer, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of all of this.’ And, once again, this was sufficient.”

Our online worship services make me feel like we are somewhere inside Gershom Scholem’s tale. We cannot kindle the fire of our faith together. We cannot meditate together. We cannot go to the woods–or gather in our sanctuary–together. But we can offer you a video, a story, about what worship might like if we were to gather.

And we can hope that it is sufficient.

Most of the metaphors we are offering each other these days are offered in the hope that they will be sufficient. We provide each other the metaphors of virtual schooling, virtual dance parties, virtual dinners, virtual dates, and virtual tea times in the hopes that they will be sufficient to see us through these strange days.

But, in these strange days, we need to be careful of our metaphors. Some of them can be dangerous. It is unwise to let some things stand in for others. And here we come, at last, to the title of our service: illness is not a metaphor. Illness does not stand in for something else. Illness is just illness. It is not something that should be freighted with moral weight or political valence. It should be for what is, a global health crisis, and not imagined as something else.

For the virus is not a metaphor. The virus is only a virus. It does not represent something else. It is, like all viruses, a small organic infectious agent that replicates within living cells. It replicates and it spreads, from host to host, and bringing suffering to those who it encounters.

The virus is not a metaphor. It does not have consciousness that imagines, that dreams, that tries to discern truth from lies, or that refers to one thing by calling it by another name. The virus does not write poetry or create the metaphors of music, painting, and photography.

What is more, the virus does not care about human metaphors. It does not respect national boundaries, or religious beliefs, or race or ethnic identities. It is not, as some would say, a Chinese virus. It can potentially infect everyone. There is no cure. There is no vaccine. And while we must pray that these are found soon, we must also recognize that until they are everyone is vulnerable.

That, indeed, is one of the lessons of the hour. That we humans, no matter how great or powerful, weak or marginalized, we might be are alike in our human mortality. The Prime Minister of Great Britain has tested positive for the virus. Rita Wilson and her husband Tom Hanks have tested positive for the virus. The basketball player Kevin Durant has tested positive for the virus. The playwright Terrence McNally has died from the virus. Indeed, many people–rich and poor alike–have been stricken ill and died from the virus: people in Italy, in New York, in China, and here in Houston.

There is a way in which the global pandemic reminds me of a verse from Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This was a verse beloved by many of our Universalist religious ancestors. It bespeaks the idea that God loves everyone, no exceptions, an idea that lies at the core of the theology of our Universalist forbearers and Unitarian Universalism today. It suggests a fundamental, non-metaphorical, truth: there is only one human family and we are each a part of it.

Today, we might consider re-casting the words from Galatians as there is neither Christian nor Muslim, neither Italian nor New Yorker, neither citizen nor undocumented migrant, for all are alike to the virus. There are some religious leaders who are saying that the virus must be understood as God’s judgement upon this country and the world. If it is, then the only interpretation that I can find is that we are being reminded, in the words of the Christian New Testament, “that God is no respecter of persons”–words meant to suggest that the divine does not care about human status but instead loves, and calls upon us to love, everyone the same. We are being reminded, in the sense of the seventh principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association, that we all part of the same interdependent web of existence. That we are each, in William Ellery Channing’s famous words, a part of the great family of all souls.

Yet, historically, people have often draw, precisely the opposite lesson from pandemics. They have turned illness into metaphor. One of the oldest ideas in human history is to view pandemics–which we sometimes call plagues–as forms of collective punishment. In such a narrative, one group of people, usually the powerful, label another group of people as responsible for the pandemic. In Europe, during the Black Death, Jewish people were often blamed for outbreaks of the plague. As a result, many Jewish communities were destroyed and many Jewish people were killed. And, of course, the truth was that Jewish people had no actual connection to the plague. They were just blamed for it because they were different from the rest of the population.

Some years ago, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic, before there was a treatment for HIV, the philosopher Susan Sontag wrote insightfully about the dangers of using illness as metaphor. She observed three dangerous things about illness as a metaphor. The first two I have already alluded to. The pandemic is cast as a form of collective, and sometimes individual, punishment. Responsibility for it assigned to “a tainted community.” And, finally, “the disease invariably comes from somewhere else.”

Over and over again, human history has shown each of these ideas to be false. Illness is not punishment. It has the potential to impact all alike. Cancer, one of the diseases that Sontag wrote about, can strike anyone. People across the world have been infected by HIV–babies have been infected with it by their mothers; and, though it was once cast as “gay cancer,” everyone must practice safer sex if they want to reduce their risk of contracting it.

Illness happens because we have organic, permeable, human bodies that can host viruses and bacteria. Illness happens because to be alive is to be mortal and subject to the possibility of pain and suffering. Illness is not a metaphor.

Responsibility for illness cannot be borne by a single community. The virus that causes COVID-19 might have started in China but it is not a Chinese virus. It does not recognize the imagined human community of nation. Instead, it reveals the truth that human beings are far more alike than we are different. Whether you live in Italy, China, New York, Houston, or Fort Bend County, you are vulnerable to the virus. Little can be accomplished by assigning blame for it to one group of people. Illness is not a metaphor.

The disease might have started in Wuhan, it might have come from there, but the virus is teaching us, again, that disease cannot be contained. Quarantines may slow the spread of the virus–and staying home continues to be one of the best things that non-essential workers can do–but they will not stop it. China has paused the spread of the virus and is now trying to prevent its resurgence by isolating anyone who visits from outside the country. This may slow the spread of the virus. But it will ultimately prevent it from continuing to inflict people in China.

Eventually, the virus will reach every corner of our globe. The virus is no respecter of nations, just as the scripture says God is no respecter of persons. It can only be slowed. Pathogens have always spread across humanity–smallpox might have started someplace in the Mediterranean but it eventually spread throughout the globe; syphilis could have originated in the Americas but it is now found everywhere. Every lifeform can become sick. Illness is not a metaphor.

Illness is not a metaphor. Illness is simply illness. But we can learn from illness. It can teach us that the entire human family is in this together and that each of us is vulnerable. All of us are mortal and our bodies are vulnerable to the virus. The threat of the virus will only end when a vaccine is found–not a vaccine for some of the people of the world but a vaccine for all of the people of the world. The spread of the virus will only be slowed when we all act together–engaging in only essential work and practicing physical distancing.

And that will only be possible when we recognize that in these strange days, when all but essential work must stop, most of us are economically vulnerable. I already know of people who are members of this congregation who have lost jobs. I have friends who are wondering if they are going to have to make the choice between paying rent, paying for medical bills, and eating. Some economists are anticipating that the unemployment rate will soon hit twenty, or even thirty, percent.

Such a high level of unemployment threatens massive social disruption. Many people who might, in other times, think of themselves as economically secure will suffer–I know of scientists with PhDs who have already lost their jobs. At such a time, we cannot afford to think of illness as a metaphor. The virus is not a respecter of persons. And the disruptions it brings do not care about your level of education or your current level of economic security. If this pandemic continues for twelve or eighteenth months–as many think it might–it will most likely upend the lives of many people.

At such a time as this, when illness is not a metaphor, we are challenged to rise to meet the situation with compassion. As Scott told us at the beginning of the month, “Sympathy is the ability to recognize that a person is in pain.” “And empathy is the ability to… experience some [of] their feelings,” he continued. But compassion is putting “those thoughts and feelings into action.” We demonstrate compassion when we move beyond simply worrying about other people, or the state of the world, and try to do something about it.

When we recognize that illness is not a metaphor, we come to understand that the only response to the global pandemic is a compassionate one. We do this, in part, because we recognize that we must protect the most vulnerable among us. It is the moral thing to do but it is also the necessary thing to do. In some cities, but not in Houston, homeless people are being given shelter in closed hotels so that they do not spread the virus. Such an action protects both the homeless and everyone else. For the virus does not recognize rich or poor.

The disruptions can impact everyone. And because of this, the disruptions will only be mitigated if we work to provide for all people during this time. And, here, I am reminded of another passage from the Christian New Testament, this time from the Gospel of Matthew. There we find Jesus say, “Truly I tell you: anything you did for one of… [the people] here, no matter how insignificant, you did for me… A curse is on you… [if I can say] For when I was hungry, you gave me nothing to eat; when thirsty, nothing to drink; when I was a stranger, you did not welcome me; when I was naked, you did not clothe me; when I was ill and in prison, you did not come to my help.”

Those ancient words speak a truth in a time of crisis like this, when illness is not a metaphor and when all of us are vulnerable. And that truth is this: we can only address the health and economic dimensions of this crisis by acting together and protecting everyone. That means that everyone is vulnerable. Everyone must be protected–and that everyone who needs them be given access to personal protective equipment. Such equipment is now, to slow the spread of the virus, a need for all people and something that federal government should be mobilizing to produce on a mass level. If it will not, then local cities and counties must step into the gap.

Here in Houston, we had a troubling illustration of what happens when we personal protective equipment is not available to all. On Thursday and Friday, the Houston Independent School District had to shut down its food distribution sites. A lack of personal protective equipment made them unsafe for both people distributing and collecting food.

At a time when people are food insecure at greater rates than every before a lack of equipment, here in the richest country in the history of the world, made it even more difficult for people to get food.

When we recognize that illness is not a metaphor we also recognize that the only way the virus will contained is if we have a coordinated health care policy that makes treatment and testing available for all. And that the state of Texas is wrong for declaring that some essential health care services, such as abortion and family planning, should not be available at this time. Such actions will prompt to travel. And that brings the risk that they will spread the virus further. If we do not treat health care as a human right, in this time when illness is not a metaphor, then it will be impossible to coordinate efforts to slow the spread of the virus and, eventually, find and distribute a cure.

It is only by recognizing that illness is not a metaphor that we will be able to end this time of living primarily in metaphors. It is only by acknowledging that illness is not a metaphor that we will be able to return to actual shared dinners, dance parties, tea times, and cocktail hours. It is only by rejecting illness as a metaphor that school and non-essential work will resume. And it is only be casting off illness as a metaphor that we will be able gather together, as a religious community, in worship and in fellowship and physically unite in the difficult, though rewarding, work of building the beloved community.

These are my words for you, offered to you from Houston, Texas, in the midst of a pandemic, as part of a virtual worship service, that is a metaphor for religious community. In this time of anxiety and illness, I pray that they are sufficient. And so, I invite you, wherever you are, to say Amen.

Once Upon a Time… We Had Time

as preached for the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, March 22, 2020, online worship

These are strange days. If you are anything like me, you are probably finding that you have to adjust to a new–and rapidly changing–situation. I certainly never imagined myself leading a congregation that is worshipping exclusively online. And I bet that most of you never imagined that you would be participating in worship remotely. The First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston has been around for over a hundred years and in all that time the congregation has always met in person for worship, fellowship, and the difficult but vital work of building the beloved community.

But these are strange days, and I find myself missing seeing you and sharing the regular rituals of our worship service. As I preach this sermon, I find myself looking out over an expanse of empty wooden pews. As I preach this sermon, I find myself glancing over to where our choir usually sits and seeing only Mark Vogel, our Music Director. As I preach this sermon, I find myself thinking about our Thoreau campus where some of us regularly gather to worship and watch videos of the sermons. Thoreau has a lovely sanctuary that overlooks a clover filled expanse of greenery. That sanctuary is vacant now. And as I preach this sermon, I find myself wondering who exactly is listening. Are you one of our members, friends, or one of our regular visitors? Did you stumble upon this service online? Are you listening to it in the Third Ward, in Montrose, in Sugarland, or in Richmond? Are you listening from someplace far away?

I imagine you are in your home, sheltering in place. It is what most of us are doing during these strange days. I have been limiting myself to my apartment and trips to the church. Some of you are probably working entirely from home–maybe it has even been a few days since you have been outside. You might be listening to this service on Sunday. You could be seeking solace at the same time this congregation usually gathers in person. Or you may be doing what I did last week when I listened to Scott’s moving sermon. I made dinner while I took comfort from his compassionate words and my cat chirped at my feet, trying to convince me that he deserved an early feeding, and my son played video games in the other room.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, I hope that our service is providing you with a sense of connection and consolation during these strange days. As Scott told us last week, “during troubling times it’s good to be part of a community such as this.” I have been renewed by Mark’s music and Scott’s words. And the exquisite images from the Hubble Telescope and that donna e. perkins and Rania Matar have shared with us have provided me a needed balm. Art, music, poetry, are important reminders that it is always possible for humans to bring more beauty into the world. There has been poetry written during war, and economic depressions, and forced migrations, and unjust imprisonments, and, yes, even bouts of pestilence and plague.

We have words from Julian of Norwich, whom Scott quoted last week, and who pointed towards transcendence within: “I saw the soul as wide as if it were an infinite world, and as if it were a blessed kingdom.”

We have words from Carl Sandburg, who survived the 1918 flu pandemic, and wrote of our shared mortality:

I saw a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a fat broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspapers that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.

When I saw him,
He sat bending his head over a plate,
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.

We have words from Mark Doty, who survived the HIV crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and wanted us to know:

A bird who’d sing himself into an angel
in the highest reaches of the garden,
the morning’s flaming arrow?
Any small thing can save you.

And, now, we have words from Lynn Ungar, who invites us to:

Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

We have words, and paintings, and sculptures, and music, that testify to the power of humanity to bring more beauty into the world even when we humans find ourselves at the end of the world. And that is where we find ourselves now, at the end of the world.

We find ourselves at the end of the world, in our remaining time together, I want to talk with you about three things. First, we need to admit that in some, real, non-metaphorical way, the world has ended. Second, living at the end of the world means that we are living amid an apocalypse. “The Greek word apokalypsis means to unveil, to disclose, to reveal,” the theologian Catherine Keller tells us. There are many things being unveiled, disclosed, and revealed right now. We should pay careful attention to them. Our human future depends on it. We would do well to heed James Baldwin’s words, “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.” Third, we should turn to our theme for worship: compassion. At the end of the world, during these apocalyptic times, compassion is what is going to see us through. At the end of the world, during these apocalyptic times, as we peer into the murky cloud of the future we must recognize that today, tomorrow, and each day we collectively struggle with the pandemic, we will be forced to make a choice between compassion and callousness. It is only by choosing compassion that we can learn the lessons of the hour.

We find ourselves at the end of the world. The rapid spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 has changed how we live and interact. The safest thing we can do right now is to avoid as many people as possible. Keeping our distance, sheltering in place, it means that so many things that seemed perfectly normal even a few days ago are foolish and dangerous now.

We have closed to the church buildings to the public. Most of the staff is working from home. Gustavo is still here, making sure our Museum District is properly maintained–we have a volunteer checking in on our Richmond campus. And Cheryl and Tawanna are coming in some of the time to process the mail, to handle the banking, and to make sure that all the bills get paid. The ministerial and worship staff is here occasionally–to produce this service and, beginning next week, a midweek forum. But, starting Monday, all of our staff meetings will be online. There will be no regular staff lunch, no just dropping by someone’s office when I have an idea I want to share or pastoral matter I want to talk through.

In the last week we have worked hard to take our congregational programs entirely online. In the next days we will be offering some form of almost all our programs through Zoom. We will have small group ministries and religious education programs for children and youth. On Sundays, we will have virtual gatherings for the whole congregation. In April, Scott and I will each be leading spiritual development and support programs for adults. I’m going to offer one on the religious and philosophical classics that might see us through these strange days–we will start with Albert Camus’s “The Plague.” But none of this will take place in person. And most of it will be open to anyone online who wants to register and join with us. Our virtual community will be different than our physical community.

I am hopeful it will be safe for us to regather as a worship community in September. But whenever we do, we will be different. We will have gone through this experience of online worship together. And we will have a different sense of who our community is and what it does. Something will have ended and something else will be beginning. Because we find ourselves at the end of the world.

How has your work life changed? I know a lot of people who are now working from home. Colleges and universities are closed. Most of my academic friends are teaching classes online. Big corporate offices are closed. My friends who are engineers or accountants are almost all now working remotely. What about you? Where are you working? Or are you working?

A lot of people have already lost their jobs. I have friends who are restaurant workers. Many of their workplaces have shutdown. And I have a friend who is a yoga teacher. In the last couple of weeks, she has lost every single one of her paid teaching gigs. Many people are financially vulnerable and scared. Some cannot pay their rent or buy enough food to feed their families. Jobs that seemed solid ten days ago have evaporated.

Middle and upper income people on the verge of retirement–or those who have retired–have lost large sums of money. They are worried that they will not be able to support themselves or return to the workforce. The plans of a lifetime–work for forty years and then retire–appear precarious or threatened. In some real sense, the world has ended for them. They no longer make the economic assumptions that they once did.

It is not just our work lives and economic situations that have changed. Many other things have shifted. Like me, a lot of parents are trying to juggle parenting while working from home. My son’s school has closed. It will not physically reopen until the autumn. He is now mostly at home–except when he goes to the park. It is not safe for him to have friends over. So, he spends a lot of time online–which is something that so many of us are doing now. Will the nature childhood be the same when it safe for him to gather with his friends again? Probably not, for we have reached the end of the world.

A lot of people, like me, have made the wise decision to severely limit their physical contact with others. And, here, I find myself thinking of all the older members this congregation, and of my parents, and of all of those I know and love who are over the age of sixty-five. The virus that causes COVID-19 is particularly dangerous for them. It is not safe for many of them to leave their homes. A lot them are doing what my parents are doing, hunkering down for the unknown duration, not planning on venturing to the grocery store, but having food delivered, truly sheltering in place.

I hope that this service is providing them a sense of connection while they are in self-isolation. As Scott said last week, “We will get through this together.” And we here on the staff of First Houston will help you get through this by reaching out and by helping you reach out to each other.

We find ourselves at the end of the world. The global political order of the last seventy-five years has come to crashing end. The United States is no longer the world’s dominant power. The inept bungling of the current President and the federal executive that he decimated mean that the pandemic will have dramatic consequences for this country. Ideological decisions to cut the budget for pandemic management have left the federal government ill-equipped to respond to the rapidly metastasizing situation. The economic damage will be severe. But just as severe will be the political damage. The politics of America First will prompt the government to look inwards, to persecute immigrants, and to expel foreign nationals. None of this will solve anything. In a global health pandemic, the only polity–understanding of who or what is the political community–that makes any sense is a global one. Humanity is all in this together. Martin Luther King, Jr. was right, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Whenever this is over, and it will eventually end, the world will not be the same. Religious communities will not be the same. Friendships will not be the same. Families will not be the same. School will not be the same. Work will not be the same. Global politics will not be the same. We find ourselves at the end of the world.

We are living in apocalyptic times. Apocalypse, the word itself comes from the Greek, by way of the Latin. It means to uncover or to disclose or to reveal. And that is exactly what this virus is doing, it is revealing fundamental truths about our society. Things that appeared solid have proved illusory and I cannot help but think of Karl Marx’s famous line, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Whatever you might think of Marx, and there’s a lot to dislike, his words name the dynamic of apocalyptic crisis. In these times, we see what really matters. We learn we need food, shelter, health, and connection–even if can only come through a screen. In these times, we discover whose work really matters.

The health care workers, the farmers, the grocery workers, the food service workers, the transportation workers, the maintenance workers, society cannot function without you. It is you who will keep the rest of us going while we shelter in place. You are the ones who are risking your lives so that the rest of us can get through this viral pandemic. Without your willingness to work, to endanger yourselves, and your families, no one else would have any chance of getting through this.

Your labor is essential. And this unveiling, this bringing into plain sight that which is so often is hidden, should prompt you to recognize how vital you are to society. For I cannot but look at the heroic work you are doing and hear words of the old labor anthem:

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong

Those phrases might some members of our regular Sunday morning congregation uncomfortable. But apocalyptic times, and apocalyptic visions, are not easy to bear. When the veil is torn away, we see things we have hidden from ourselves. And this country has hidden the fundamental truth that the labor of food workers, and health care workers, and transport workers, and day care workers, are essential to keeping society functioning. And for too long, so many of you have had to eke out precarious existences, barely paying the rent, working too hard, working too many hours, and now so many of you are being asked to do even more than that. I know grocery workers who are putting in seventy hours a week to food on the shelves. And companies like Whole Foods are telling workers that they will not give them paid sick leave. Instead, they are being told to give their earned time off to their sick co-workers. And I remember the old words, “[W]ithout your brain and muscle not a single wheel will turn.” What you do is essential. The veil has been ripped off.

The veil has been ripped off and the truth is shining through. Low wage workers, Whole Foods workers, Amazon delivery people, you have great power. Our society cannot function without you. In this apocalyptic moment you have the possibility to use that power to organize, to go on strike, to make demands, and to win yourself more pay. No one whose labor is essential should ever have trouble paying their bills, finding a place to live, or affording enough food to feed their family. No one who must take care of others in these strange days, in these apocalyptic times, should worry about whether or not they have health care.

And, now I know that I am making some of my regular congregants uncomfortable. But apocalyptic visions are like fever dreams–perhaps an apt but uncomfortable metaphor–and they can make us squirm. And it the preacher’s job to offer up the prophetic voice, to speak the truth that must be spoken, to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. And if we are to learn the lessons of the hour, that is precisely what must be done, we must comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. If we do not then society will not change. And if society does not change then I fear we will be unprepared the next time the veil is ripped up away and we face a global crisis.

So, grocery workers, delivery workers, health care workers, if you want to take the lessons of hour and use the opportunity to struggle for better, safer, wages and conditions, here is what you might do. You might find one of your trusted co-workers and ask them the questions: Are you safe at your work? Are people getting sick? Are you being paid enough to live? And then you might suggest that you and your trusted co-worker each meet individually with your other co-workers and ask them the same questions. Get everyone’s email and phone number. Make a plan. Promise to support each other. Set a day and a time. Walk off your job, but keep your social distance, and, as a group, tell your employer you demand better wages and safety condition–you demand adequate masks and gloves so that you won’t get sick and sufficient pay so that you can afford your home and feed your family.

Do not just do it for yourselves. Do it for the rest of us. Because here is the truth, the real unveiling, the lesson of this apocalyptic moment, most of the good things we have in this society–Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, all of the programs that came from the New Deal and ended the Great Depression–came about because people like you in early generations, during the Great Depression, who were performing essential work, refused to work anymore until they could work safely and be paid enough to support themselves and their loved ones.

The federal government is not taking the actions it needs to address the viral pandemic. It is not repurposing industry to build ventilators for sick people, to build hospitals, or take masks. Ask yourself, how quickly would things change if the Amazon workers said: We will not deliver anything else until the government focuses on building us hospital beds if we get sick. Ask yourself, how quickly would things change if the grocery workers said: We will not stock the grocery shelves until masks are made for us to safely interact with our customers?

The veil has been lifted. The essential work of society has been revealed. And I hear, echoing in the distance, but perhaps creeping closer, the old question, put into poetry by William Butler Yeats: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

We have reached the end of the world, we are living in apocalyptic times, and now, what beast shall it be? Shall it be a compassionate one or callous one? Yeats’s verse hints at both possibilities–for Bethlehem is where the Christians believe that their messiah was born and, yet, the beast is rough.

So, we come to the final point of our sermon. “Once upon a time we had… time… And now we seem to have lost it,” Catherine Keller observes. And now we must choose between compassion and callousness.

For we are rapidly running out time. The viral outbreak grows ever more dire. And we now must choose between compassion and callousness. The choice cannot be deferred any longer. Deferring the choice to immediately mobilize, to immediately act, means choosing to callousness. Yes, those of us who can, who are not essential workers, need to shelter in place. That is a compassionate act, for it will slow the spread of the virus.

But we need to do more than that we, we need to choose compassion as our guiding principle going forward. And we need to recognize that we are in extraordinary times. We are in a crisis and we should listen to the economist Milton Friedman, “only a crisis–actual or perceived–produces real change.” Real change is going to come from this crisis. The only question is: will it be compassionate change or callous change?

Already the current President is using the pandemic to pursue the politics of callousness that he has long sought to enact. He is sending asylum seekers back to Mexico. He is undermining the ability of unions to collect dues from federal workers. He is demanding the relaxation of environmental protections. Each action, he claims, is somehow related to fighting the pandemic.

We can choose differently. We can use this crisis to pursue the politics of compassion. We can society’s quick mobilization as lesson that it is possible to act rapidly to address the climate emergency. We can take the truth that all of us are vulnerable to the virus; that our health care system cannot continue in its current form; and that we need universal health care now. We can recognize that we are all dependent upon each other and, so, therefore we must all take care of each other. We can choose the politics of compassion.

We have reached the end of the world. We are living amid an apocalypse. The veil has been lifted. Will we choose the politics of callousness or the politics of compassion? “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise,” said James Baldwin. What shall we choose? What will you choose? How shall we act? How shall we take the lessons of the hour? These are the questions that haunt us in these strange days. And I end not by precisely answering them but by raising them. For truthfully, they are not my questions to answer alone. They are questions we must answer together. We must answer them together, even as we social distance, because we are rapidly running out of time. Let us choose wisely.

The case count is rising. The virus is spreading. Please, take good care, be safe, know that you are loved, and that this congregation is here for you, and now, I invite you to say with me, wherever you are, Amen.

An Important Announcement: the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston is Closed

Effective tomorrow, March 17th, the Museum District and Thoreau campuses of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston will be closed to small groups and renters. The staff will continue to work onsite at Museum District for the foreseeable future. We will be taking necessary precautions while working to maintain services for our members and our physical campuses.

Staff members are available by phone or video conferencing for pastoral care and other consultations. Our March 15th online service is currently available (HERE) and our March 22nd online service will be available at 10:30 a.m. on that day. Details about our additional online services will be available later this week.

In the meantime, we urge those of you who do not know your neighbors to safely connect with them. Community is more needed than ever during this difficult time. If you are under the age of 65, you might consider placing a letter along these lines outside of your neighbors’ homes:

Dear Neighbor:

Please forgive the intrusion. I am your neighbor [at your address]. My name is [your name]. I live with [whoever you live with]. You can reach me on my cell phone at [your cell phone].

These are extraordinary times. COVID-19 is rapidly spreading. We do not know what will happen. If things get worse we may well need to rely upon each other in unprecedented ways. I think it would be useful for us to have each other’s cell phone numbers and a group message chain/WhatsApp. If you agree, please text me your name, home/apartment number, and cell phone number. I will share it with everyone else who wants to participate.

If you get sick, are elderly, or have a compromised immune system please let me know and I will do what I can to help you.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

Look for more information from the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. Stay safe, practice social distancing, and, please, go wash your hands!

love, 

Colin

Sermon: Now is the Time

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, March 8, 2020

This month in worship we are focusing on compassion. Rev. Scott got us started last week with a sermon in which he affirmed the psychotherapist David Richo’s claim, “Compassion is love’s response to pain.”

“Sympathy is the ability to recognize that a person is in pain,” Rev. Scott told us. “And empathy is the ability to… experience some [of] their feelings,” he continued. But compassion is putting “those thoughts and feelings into action.” We demonstrate compassion when we move beyond simply worrying about other people, or the state of the world, and try to do something about it.

Compassion is a core Unitarian Universalist value. Our tradition claims that love is the most powerful force in human life. Love beats hate. In theist terms, we argue, God is love. Love is God. God loves everyone, no exceptions. In humanist terms, we recognize that love, more than anything else, is what knits human life together. And as Unitarian Universalists we strive we be a loving community, instantiating among ourselves what Josiah Royce, and then Martin Luther King, Jr. after him, called the beloved community. We struggle to be a space where everyone, without exception, can find their place and be encouraged, and supported, in living into their full human potential. And then we work to take that vision of the beloved community into the wider world.

Compassion, having sympathetic thoughts and feelings for others and then seeking to put those thoughts and feelings into action. Compassion, love’s response to pain. Compassion, it is something I suspect we are all going to be called to exercise in significant amounts in the coming weeks. The coronavirus is spreading throughout all of humanity. It is here in the United States. It has reached Houston. And our religious tradition calls us to be compassionate as we, collectively, respond to the viral outbreak.

This compassion should take several forms. We should demand that our public officials allocate adequate resources and take shift appropriate action to slow the spread of the coronavirus. We should not stigmatize or shun particular groups of people–people of Asian descent, for instance–because we irrationally blame them for the virus. The virus has the potential to impact everyone and people of all ages and ethnicities have been infected with it.

And we should each do our part to limit the rate at which the virus propagates. Wash your hands frequently, with hot water and ample soap–hum Happy Birthday twice the way through. Do not shake hands, I have been encouraging people to bump forearms instead. Cover your cough with a kleenex and then throw that kleenex away. If you feel ill stay at home–we offer paid sick leave to our employees here at First Church, if your workplace does not and you are sick and worried about missing a paycheck contact me or Rev. Scott and we will see how we can help you. Clean surfaces like doorknobs that people frequently touch. And hardest of all, avoid touching your face.

They might seem banal, but these are compassionate actions. They are ways we put our concerns for others–concerns that they might be stricken by the virus–into action. If the viral outbreak reaches epidemic portions here in Houston the staff and I are prepared to continue to offer Sunday services and pastoral counseling online as part of our compassionate efforts to help the community weather the viral storm.

Compassion, looking around our sanctuary am I sure you have noticed that it looks a bit different this morning. We have close to sixty photographs on our walls here and in the Fireside room because of my belief that art can stir sympathy, empathy, and, ultimately, compassion within us.

This year our congregation is part of FotoFest. FotoFest is the longest-running international Biennial of photography and lens-based art in the United States. It is one of the largest photography festivals in the world. It has an audience of around 275,000. We are serving as a Participating Space. That means that we are one of about eighty venues from around the city who have chosen to be part of FotoFest and exhibit art throughout the festival. Some of the other venues include the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Menil Collection, the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, the Houston Museum of African American Culture, and the Houston Center for Photography. So, we are in pretty good company.

FotoFest opened yesterday. That is why, I should note, that we are focusing on it today and not Women’s History. We will observing Women’s History throughout the month by drawing our readings exclusively from women. With the exception of today, when Zsófia invited us to support the International Convocation of Unitarian Universalist Women, we will be supporting Planned Parenthood through our shared offering for most of the month. And at the end of the month, I will give the sermon drawing explicitly from feminist and womanist theology that I would normally have given on the Sunday nearest March 8th.

Our exhibition is called “Now is the Time: Leonard Freed’s Photographs of South Africa’s 1994 Election.” My father, Dr. Howard Bossen, and I curated it together. My Dad is with us this morning. And I would like to thank him and my Mom, Kathy, for their tireless efforts to make this exhibit happen. I would also like to thank First Church’s fine staff. Alex, Alma, Carol, Gustavo, Jon, and Scott all put in–and continue to put in–an extraordinary amount of work for “Now is the Time.” Tawanna, our wonderful Business Administrator, deserves special mention since, on top of all of her other duties, she served as project manager. We also had help from the staff at the Libraries of Michigan State University, CrateWorks Fine Art Services, and Artists Framing Resource. We owe Bill Harrison thanks. Bill printed the images and then he did a rush job to print a second set after UPS lost the first one. And we owe Justin Griswold from CrateWorks particular gratitude. He was here until 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday evening hanging the show. And, of course, none of this would have been possible without our funders: Michigan State University, Thorpe Butler and Rita Saylors, and Lindley Doran and Charles Holman. And showing the exhibit would not continue to be possible without the assistance of all our volunteer docents. We have a lot of shifts to cover and if you have not volunteered to be a docent there is certainly still the opportunity to do so.

Before we move into the rest of the sermon I want to tell you how the show came about. A key part of FotoFest is its portfolio review program. This is where artists and curators, editors, gallery owners, publishers and other industry professional meet with photographers to look at the artists’ work. My father is a Professor of Photography and Visual Communication at Michigan State University. He has been one of FotoFest’s reviewers for close to twenty years. When I moved to Houston, FotoFest’s Executive Director, Steven Evans, asked my Dad if he would ask me if we would be willing to serve as Participating Space. Apparently, the folks at FotoFest have been interested in partnering with our congregation for many years. My Dad put us in touch and Steven paired First Church with a curator.

This was back in June of last year. We spent about five months working with this curator. And then in late November, I got a call from that curator. They had been unable to raise the money they needed for the exhibit that they were planning. They were backing out. I asked Steven what to do. He told me it was way too late to pair us with another curator. All of the deadlines for Participating Spaces are in early autumn. So, he said to me, “Why don’t you do something with your Dad? We would really like First Church to be part of FotoFest. I can give you a week to figure something out.” A week is not a long time to come up with a plan for an exhibit. But, I called my Dad, and well, here we are.

I am excited that are we able to be a venue for “Now is the Time.” Leonard Freed, whose work we are featuring, was a major American photographer. He was a member of Magnum Photos, the world’s premier photography collective, and for more than fifty years he travelled the world documenting major events. He used his art to stir sympathy and compassion and, during the 1950s and 1960s, break the “almost complete isolation between the races.” His work is in the collections of places like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.

Freed is best known for his photographs of the civil rights movement, particularly the set of images that were included in his 1968 “Black in White America.” It is a beautiful book. It documents African American life in the last days of Jim Crow. And it documents African American life right after the end of legal segregation.

There are lot of powerful pictures in that book. One of the most effecting is of a line of eight or nine African Americans standing in line to vote in a federal election for the first time in Washington, DC. They are in one those utilitarian spaces that often serve as polling places–I imagine it is a school gym or cafeteria or, maybe, a church basement. They are all ages. There is a tall distinguished gentleman wearing what looks like a tweed jacket, well pressed slacks, and perfectly shined shoes. There is a young woman in a long coat and knee length skirt with a large purse under her right arm. In her right hand she is grasping a white slip of paper, presumably documenting that she is eligible to vote. Everyone in the photograph looks like they have been waiting a long time–which, of course, they have been. They have been waiting however long they have been waiting in that line. And they have been waiting however long they have been alive. For this is the first that any of them have been able to vote in a national election. It does not matter that the man is probably over eighty and that the woman is most likely under thirty. They have both been waiting precisely the same amount of time: their whole lives. And they look tired–because I bet that line is a long one–and they look determined–because winning the right to vote was not easy.

Viewed from the vantage of Houston, Texas in the year 2020, the photograph is actual quite disturbing. It could have been taken on Tuesday. It could have been taken here in the Fourth Ward. It could have been taken in Third Ward. It could have been taken in almost any community of color in the state of Texas. Since 2012, the state’s Republican leadership has worked to close 750 polling places throughout the state. The vast majority of them have been closed in communities of color.

On Tuesday, I voted in polling place near Montrose in River Oaks. There were about a half dozen polling places for me to choose from in easy reach of my apartment. Now, I live in an affluent and predominately white area. And when I went to a polling place, I waited about fifteen minutes in line. I have a friend who lives in the Fourth Ward. She waited over an hour and a half to vote. And some people who voted at Texas Southern University–a historically black university–had to wait as many as six hours in line.

Compassion is not just having sympathy for those people who had to wait for hours and hours to vote. It is putting that sympathy into action and organizing to demand that people have easy access to voting.

Compassion, you can find images of people waiting to vote almost anywhere online. And these days, we are inundated by visual images at almost all times. They can overwhelm us. How many of you have a smartphone? And how many of you use Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter? I have them all on my phone. They have a common feature called endless scroll. Endless scroll is what repopulates your phone with images as you move your finger down the screen. No matter how many “friends” you have on Facebook or “followers” you have on Twitter, the social media companies constantly refresh your account so that you never run out of images. Endless scroll is just that–a string that seemingly goes on forever that you can never reach the end of, that is always presenting you with new content, new images, new videos, new sources of stimulation.

Endless scroll can be entrancing. I do not know about you, but I sometimes have the experience of scrolling from image to image on Instagram without even knowing that I am doing it. Sometimes I look up and realize that fifteen minutes have passed. It would be difficult for me to tell you what images I saw or engaged with during that time. They all went by in a catatonic blur.

The social media accounts that I follow come from all over the world. I follow news sources like the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Guardian, and La Jornada–a very fine daily out of Mexico City. I follow a painter from Japan, anarchist labor union activists from Spain, organizers from Northern Syria, photographers from the Czech Republic, historians, philosophers, theologians, and religious leaders, from well, really, almost anywhere. And then there are my actual friends, who, in our highly connected global society, live on every continent except Antartica.

One of the wonderful things about social media is that is it actually can link people from throughout the world together. I have, through my smart phone or computer, access to the words, sounds, and images from people who live in bustling cities and in remote villages. If I want to, I can actually communicate directly with them and find out something more about their human experience. I share with them some of mine. And maybe our digital interaction can open us up to being compassionate towards each other and help us recognize that truth about the human experience–lifted up in the seventh principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association–we are all connected, we are all part of the great web of being, we are all members of the great family of all souls, and what happens to you, in some way, minor or major, happens to me also.

One of the terrible things about social media is that it can make people numb to what is going on throughout the world. I have had this experience myself. I look at my phone and there are images of people dying under Assad’s brutal regime in Syria. I look at my phone and there are images of people suffering from the coronavirus first in China, then in Italy, and now, well, here in the United States. I look at my phone and there’s an image of a young African American man who has been killed by the police. I look at my phone and there’s images of the children who Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have placed in cages. There are images of people who have been deported back to Central America and killed by gangs. There are images of… Well, there are a lot of awful images out there–images that provide a testament to just how terrible we humans can be to each other.

And you know what, I usually think to myself, “I cannot deal with this right now.” And scroll past the world’s horrors to look at pictures of a friend’s dog’s birthday party, a friend drinking beer at the cutest graffiti coated bar I have ever seen, a very nice looking breaking competition, a couple’s anniversary–one partner in a striking red dress, the other in an elegant tuxedo–, a delicious meal of fresh brilliant colored market vegetables, and, of course, cats. Like a whole lot of the world, I like images of cats–running, sleeping, or playing with some kind of improbable object. Cats are cute. Cats are goofy. Cats can easily bring a smile to my face. Cats can help me forgot the brutal things we do to each other.

Do you ever have the same experience? Where you look at the difficult news of the world and think to yourself, “I just can’t?” A bit more than a decade ago, when she was trying to grapple with the constant barrage of images of the Bush regime’s torture policies that were appearing in the New York Times and other places in the then dominant print media, the philosopher Susan Sontag observed, “An ample reserve of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry.”

I suspect that the constant barrage of graphic images induces compassion fatigue in a lot of us. Compassion fatigue is the anger, dissociation, anxiety, and even nightmares that we experience from feeling powerless to change the world’s ills. It comes from what Sontag called “a quintessential modern experience,” “[b]eing a spectator of calamities taking place in another” place.

Endless scroll offers us the opportunity to spectate endless and exhausting calamities. It can dilute the power of the image to open us to compassion. And that is one reason why I think exhibits like “Now is the Time” and social documentary photography remain important even when we are constantly inundated with images. The framed image, mounted on the wall, allows us, offers us, the chance to stop and consider the human experience–or the natural world–in a moment of time.

Now, of course, all photographs are curated representations of reality. There is always something outside of the frame. The image is always partial and seen through the lens of the photographer. The photographer’s aesthetics and ethics–their choice of what they represent and how they represent it–is always shaping the image. When they produce an image, they are indicating that this transitory moment in time, this flitting bit of consciousness, matter, and experience, is worth preserving.

Freed’s work in “Now is the Time” preserves impressions of an historic shift, the end of apartheid in South Africa. He travelled there for three weeks to document the country’s first multi-racial election. As a white Jewish man from the United States, a white Jewish man who knew about the Holocaust and Jim Crow and the struggle for civil rights, he created his curated representations of the election that brought Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to power.

His images are not the images that would have been made by someone with a different social location–they are not the images of a black South African who participated in the struggle to end apartheid. And they are not the images of a person who had suffered the social stigma of apartheid or Jim Crow. Nonetheless, they are designed to open their viewers to the fullness of the human experience–to remind us that there is joy and friendship and wonder. That human society can shift. That apartheid ended.

The title of the exhibit comes from one of the African National Congress’s slogans during the 1994 election, “Now is the Time.” The slogan is evocative of Freed’s photograph of the people waiting in line to vote. Now is the time for change. It has finally come, after all these years of suffering and struggling and waiting and waiting. Now is the time, it has arrived. Now is the time to be compassionate towards each other and act together. Now is the time, if you want to learn more about the exhibit, my father will be offering a lecture about it next Sunday at 7:00 p.m. And I will be doing at least one gallery talk between now and when the exhibit closes at the end of April.

I hope that you will take time after the service or during the exhibit’s hours to study the photographs. There are a few that we have placed behind a curtain because they are not appropriate for Sunday mornings. But all them will offer you an opportunity to interrupt the endless scroll of visual imagery and look carefully at transitory moments of time, constructed representations, that, will do a little to help you with whatever compassion fatigue you might be experiencing. As you do, I invite you to remember words from Nikki Giovanni that we heard earlier in the service:

we must believe in each other’s dreams
i’m told and i dream
of me accepting you and you accepting yourself

Such words remind us of the possibility of compassion.

As you view Freed’s images, I invite you to consider these words by Nelson Mandela, words that he offered in his inaugural address as President of South Africa:

“We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success.

We must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for nation building, for the birth of a new world.

Let there be justice for all.

Let there be peace for all.

Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.”

We would do well to hear Mandela’s word. They challenge us to be compassionate–to take our sympathy and empathy for others, sympathy and empathy that are rooted in our shared human experience, and transform them into the action of compassion.

We would also do well to pause, and look, and see if we can be stirred to compassion by all the rich visual imagery on display throughout the city of Houston during FotoFest. Our faith calls us to be compassionate. And the art which surrounds during these festival months has the possibility of inspiring us to greater depths of compassion–to transform our sympathy and empathy into action.

We are one human family, one world community, whether we like it or not. If we are to survive and thrive we must be compassionate towards each other. Let us remember that and, in doing so, let us recognize that now is the time to act–to work for voting rights, to do what we can to combat the coronavirus (no shaking hands after the service), to seek justice, and to build the beloved community.

Now is the time.

That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.

Sermon: To Be Human

Note: I recently received an email from Greg Coleridge, the Outreach Director for Move to Amend, asking if I could share a sermon that I preached back in 2010 in support of Move to Amend and in opposition to corporate personhood. I’ve posted it here so that Greg can share it and others can read it. It reflects a different preaching style than the one I use these days but it reflects my views. 

as preached at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland, April 11, 2010

There are times when I wonder if I have wandered into a science fiction story. The recent United States Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission was one of them. You have probably heard about the case. In this five-to-four decision the Supreme Court opened the door for corporate advocacy during elections. The court decided that restrictions on corporate spending for political advertising were violations of a corporation’s right to free speech. The court’s logic requires them to equate spending money with exercising free speech and accepting that corporations are legal persons with the same rights under the United States Constitution as human beings.

This decision, as the legal scholar Jamin Raskin argues, is “threatening a fundamental change in the character of American political democracy.” It will allow companies like Enron, Walmart, and Blackwater to take money directly from their corporate treasuries and put them into campaigns for political candidates. True, they still will not be allowed to contribute directly to a political candidate. However, they will be allowed to finance political ads endorsing and attacking candidates. This, as retiring Justice John Paul Stevens has written, could well lead to, “corporate domination of the electoral process.”

And if corporations dominate the electoral process it will be difficult to place checks upon their powers. It is hard to imagine Congress passing regulatory laws on anything that impedes corporate profits if all of its members owe their seats to corporate financing. Under such a scenario our elected officials could become little more than proxies for their corporate backers. The United States would cease, in any meaningful way, to be, in Lincoln’s memorable words, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Instead it would become government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations. And any form of even rudimentary democracy might then perish from the Earth.

William Gibson imagines such a world in his cyberpunk novels. In works like his Sprawl Trilogy of “Neuromancer,” “Count Zero” and “Mona Lisa Overdrive” he envisions a society where corporations are sovereign states unto themselves. In this world, corporations retain their own armies, make their own laws and compete against each other for the most profitable competitive edge. Sometimes the competition grows violent and corporate soldiers kidnap or coerce a competitors prize employees or forcibly steal trade secrets. Human beings are reduced to their potential for generating profit. And all of humanity is divided into roughly three classes–the privileged elite that own the corporations, the less privileged middle classes who work for the corporations, and the masses who exist at the margins of society eking out an existence in low-wage factories, in dump heaps and in the ruins of the world’s great cities.

This world is not unlike our own. Some of the best of science fiction comes from observing current societal trends and following them to their logical conclusions. Gibson’s world is a projection of the path that we might take if society continues to progress along its present trajectory. It resembles our own but with a few crucial differences, differences that could eventually be rendered naught.

In Gibson’s world the environment has been completely despoiled in the pursuit of profit–even horses have gone extinct–and technology has become indistinguishable from what our ancestors would have called magic. Human flesh and machine mesh. Many people have computers directly wired into their brains. Microchips allow for the acquisition of language and motor skills. If you cannot fly a helicopter you can buy a chip that will automatically give you the skill to do so. Reality and virtual reality form one seamless whole. Computers create sensory experiences in individuals.

It is a dystopian future. Humanity has lost control of its destiny. The great rule the many and use them for their own ends with nothing–no unions, no governments, no civic organizations–to check their power.

I fear that court cases like that of Citizens United represent the birth pangs of such a dystopian world. Already many large corporations are more powerful than the majority of the world’s governments. The boundaries of the recent healthcare debate were set far more by the healthcare industry than they were by the public. Gibson’s future is, in some fashion, here. The vast inequities of global wealth are increasing. Sweatshop labor is replacing unionized manufacturing jobs. Ecological catastrophe looms–the Earth grows ever warmer and the Earth’s species ever fewer.

Whether a Gibsonian dystopia arrives fully born or whether a different world is coming depends on how we address the question of corporate power. Corporations, like any other human institution, are tools to accomplish specific purposes. Despite their many guises their purpose all boils down to the same thing: to achieve the highest profit margins possible. A corporation might make medical supplies, print school books, or sell organic foods. Its legal obligation is not to produce the best quality of these items it can. It is instead to provide the corporation’s owners, the stockholders, with the highest return on their investment possible.

Corporations have been around for a long time. They predate the founding of this country. Some have argued that the American Revolution was as much a rebellion against corporate power as it was against the colonial rule of the crown. The “British colonies were chartered by the king and given the right to govern…and…British law forced the colonists to trade under disadvantageous terms with the East India Company…the American Revolution overthrew not only King George III’s sovereignty…but also the power of the first huge corporations…”, writes Tom Stites, the former editor of the UU World.

After the American Revolution it took a long time for corporations to begin to re-establish their sovereignty. Some of the founders of the United States were quite skeptical of corporate power. Thomas Jefferson wanted to insert a clause about freedom from monopolies into the United States Constitution and wrote, “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of moneyed corporations.” Jefferson was not heeded and as the country grew corporations gained in power.

The Industrial Revolution and Civil War brought corporations to a new level of size and development. Originally they had been chartered by individual states for a specific scope and period of time. Gradually business interests convinced state legislators to expand the corporate purview and grant charters that lasted in perpetuity. After the Civil War came the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment–aimed to ensure that freed slaves had full personhood and citizenship. In what some might regard as a perversion of the law, corporate lawyers used this amendment to gain personhood for corporations, affording them the same protections under the Bill of Rights as human beings. This greatly reduced the ability of city governments and state legislatures to regulate them.

I am not a lawyer. I find this logic difficult to grasp. I do not understand how a law clearly written with the intention of protecting the rights of freed slaves could be interpreted to bolster corporate power. The logic escaped some on the Supreme Court as well. Justice Hugo Black wrote that the “history of the amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments.” Black’s opinions were not those of the majority and corporate personhood remains a legal fact until the laws are changed.

The question of what makes someone or something a person has many dimensions. As Emily so aptly noted in her reflection earlier personhood is something that we bestow upon others. As a society we grant certain people but not others the right to participate as full members and enjoy the full protection of the law. Individuals or communities may bestow personhood on different entities than the state. The state may, in turn, hold some entities to be persons that individuals or communities do not.

The lens of the expansion of personhood provides an interesting interpretation of the history of the United States. At the country’s founding the only human beings who the law recognized as having full personhood were land owning white males. Through the course of much struggle, and the sacrifices of many brave souls, personhood was expanded. It shifted, under the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, to include white non-land owning males. Then, in the wake of the Civil War, it enlarged to include, in theory, African American males. With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment women gained personhood. The Civil Rights movement made the promises of the Fourteenth Amendment reality and African American women and men secured personhood. Today there are those like the ethicist Peter Singer who extend personhood to animals. There are also those in the anti-abortion movement who would claim personhood for human fetuses.

In the contemporary United States there continue to be many human beings who are not afforded full personhood by our society. Undocumented immigrants and enemy combatants are not guaranteed many of the protections of the Bill of Rights. This has left them vulnerable to torture, trials without juries or due process and loss of life and liberty. Here in Ohio, and elsewhere throughout the United States, members of the BGLT community lack the rights that those in heterosexual partnerships or with binary gender norms enjoy. Members of the BGLT community can be discriminated against in housing or in employment situations. They do not have the right to marry. Our society has also demonstrated that it does not respect the personhood of many in the developing world. Our willingness to tolerate sweatshop labor in the manufacture of consumer goods and our indifference at inflicting gross civilian casualties during wartime offer substantive proof of this.

It is perverse that with so many human beings still outside the circle of personhood corporations are allowed inside it. Large corporations–the big Wall Street firms, the large manufacturing companies, the airlines and oil combines–are far more the tools of the rich and powerful than they are of those on the margins of society. The recent mining disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia should here prove to be illustrative. On the one hand there is Massey Energy whose CEO Don Blankenship’s annual compensation approaches $10,000,000. On the other hand there are the miners who make about $60,000 a year. By granting personhood to corporations our society reinforces the dynamic whereby the wealthy have more voice than the rest of us. Massey Energy advocates for the ability of Blankenship to make ever more money selling coal. The Upper Big Branch miners, without a union, have little to advocate for them.

This is a problem. Whatever is in Massey’s best interest is what will make Massey’s shareholders the most money. The best interest of the miners are different. The more money Massey pays the miners the less the company’s owners will earn in profits. More troubling, the greater the company’s expenditures on safety, the lower its’ profit margins. Last night on NPR’s “All Things Considered” Gerald Stern, a lawyer who represents the families of the victims of mine disasters, described the dynamic this way: “You don’t find anybody becoming President of a coal company who came up through the safety side of the industry. You come up through the production side. That incentive, to focus on production and not to reward those who say I need to close the mine for a day or two to… make sure the mine is safe, that is the problem here.”

The situation reminds me of another science fiction story, this time from the British television show Doctor Who. The episode, called “The Green Death” and made in the early 1970s, unfolds when the Doctor and his companion Jo travel to South Wales to investigate the mysterious death of a miner in an abandoned coal mine. Once in Wales the Doctor and Jo discover that the mine is filled with some sort of strange glowing material that kills all who contact it. As the plot unfolds they learn that Global Chemical, a nearby oil company, has been pumping the mine full of waste from a secret energy project.

In order to pursue maximum efficiency and obtain the highest profits the head of Global Chemicals has turned operations of the company over to a computer system named BOSS. BOSS shows little regard for human life and either brainwashes or kills all who stand its way. Nothing is to be allowed to impede maximum efficiency.

BOSS is an almost perfect metaphor for corporate personhood. Like the corporation, it blindly pursues its end without regard to the human consequences. And like the corporation, in the pursuit of this end many people get hurt.

Here I think we come to the primary problem of corporate personhood. While the legal fiction affords corporations with many of the rights of human beings it does not couple the corporation with human limitations. Corporations can live forever. Corporations are, ironically, non-corporal and need not breath, eat, seek shelter or sleep to perpetuate themselves. Most importantly, corporations lack conscience.

Considering this issue Tom Stites has written, “The right of conscience is the essence of freedom…it is the essence of what makes us human. No other creatures are known to have consciences; corporations certainly do not.” The absence of conscience means that if corporations are to consider anything other than maximizing their profits then it must be outside forces that compel them to do so.

This a political problem but it is also a spiritual one. It is a political problem because how decisions are made, and who gets to make them, are ultimately questions of politics. Restraining corporate power, and ending corporate personhood, will only come about if people organize to do so. With the Supreme Court on the side corporate personhood it is clear that change will not come from the courts. Instead what is needed is a constitutional amendment delineating that corporations are not afforded protection under the Bill of Rights. Currently the grassroots campaign Move to Amend is pushing just such an amendment. Whether they succeed or not will depend upon how much support they get.

It is a spiritual problem because what differentiates us humans from corporations is spirit. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning breath. Spirit is often equated with the force that propels life forward. Corporations lack this force. They follow a different trajectory. It is trajectory that leads towards a Gibsonian dystopia where the richest live in abundance, the masses in squalor and the planet is threatened with extinction.

The alternative is a world where spirit reigns and the life force is honored above profit. In such a world, to quote Emily, “humanity and personhood… [might] not completely overlap” but personhood would be limited to those entities that either have or serve spirit. With personhood so limited we would not fear that profits would be valued over people or that the environment would be despoiled to enrich the few. Instead of profit decisions would be guided by what is best for the many.

Which world will come to be? The decision is ours. What we choose is a matter of our conscience. Conscience is something we all have. It is something we can use to build a better society. Reflecting on the crisis of fascism and its relationship to conscience the German poet Bertolt Brecht once wrote:

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect;
It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect;
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill,
But he has one defect;
He can think.

This defect is something that all of us share. It is what makes us humans and renders corporations mere legal fictions. Let us remember this. In doing so we might serve the spirit–the breath of life–and bring about not a science fiction dystopia but a life-affirming world where justice flows like a river and peace like a ever flowing stream.

May it be so.

Amen.

Sermon: Freedom Dreams

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, February 23, 2020

As you know, we are in the midst of stewardship season. And I want to thank all of you who have made your pledges to support First Church so far. We had a really lovely early pledgers party last night. The stewardship team put on a great event with good conversation, good food, and, my favorite, good dancing. It was a pleasure to proverbially cut a rug with some of you. I think we may have to do it more often. And I want to lift up Dick Doughty for bringing his DJ skills to the party. I very much enjoyed the mix of World Beat infused electronica he provided us–and the bit of Chicago house he played to humor me. It was a lovely reminder that we humans share a universal need to, as the adage runs, shake what your mother gave you. As the funk anthem goes, we are one nation under a groove.

The poet Rumi wrote:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and right doing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

I sometimes think that the field he was talking about was the dance floor–that space where we can come together beyond words and just experience the pleasure of connectedness through sound and movement.

So, thank you stewardship team and Dick for creating that space. I hope that the early pledger party will become a tradition. It is something that can be open everyone who contributes to sustain the beautiful community that is this congregation–an opportunity to celebrate the joy, compassion, and love that bind First Church together.

Speaking of stewardship, one of the many things that your gifts to this congregation allow us to do is bring fabulous guest preachers. This month, we have had two talented religious leaders come and bless us with powerful messages. My dear friend Aisha Hauser came and gifted us with a sermon challenging us to lead with love and liberation. And Duncan Teague, who is something of a new friend, brought us a story from his life about a time when his imagination failed him and what he learned from that experience. In their own ways, each of them called us to imagine the liberating power of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. Each of them called us to imagine a Unitarian Universalism big enough for everyone, a Unitarian Universalism where we truly live into the vision of our religious ancestors: God loves everyone, no exceptions.

Their words painted pictures of what we might, following the historian Robin Kelley, call freedom dreams. These are, in his words, visions of “life as possibility” in which exist “endless meadows without boundaries, free of evil and violence, free of toxins and environmental hazards, free of poverty, racism, and sexism… just free.”

We dream freedom dreams when we are called, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., to trust in “a power that is able to make a way out of no way.” Freedom dreams are the paths–paths which often seem impossible–that lead us to a way when we are stuck in no way. We open ourselves to them when we realize that imagination is one of the most powerful forces on this Earth. Imagination enables us to bring things into being that do not exist. Every human creation that exists–microwaves, computers, violins, soccer balls, teacups, cutting boards, bundt cakes, brick sanctuaries, or well-tailored suits–began in someone’s imagination.

Imagination uncovers hidden paths when all the roads seem closed. Imagination lets us find a route through the forest when we reach the end of the trail. Imagination is trusting that there is a power which, no matter how difficult the day, how drear the hour, will help us to find more love somewhere, more hope somewhere, more peace, more joy. It might not be right here, we might not see it before us, it might not be present in the brutalities and disappointments of our daily lives, as we suffer, as so many of us do, from an exploitative and extractive economic system, but we can imagine that there is a power which, if we keep on keeping on, will enable us to find more love somewhere.

It is one of the purposes of this religious community to help each of us discover and uncover that power. It resides within each of us and surrounds all of us. It comes in many forms. We can call it by many names. Some of us might choose to label it God. Others might find that language limiting or oppressive and prefer to call it human creativity. For my part, I find this power runs beyond my human ability to describe or understand in its totality.

Sometimes we cry out and only encounter its absence. Not everyone is able to find a way out of no way. That is a reality that is heavy on my heart this morning. It is the last Sunday of Black History Month. Black History Month was conceived by the historian Carter G. Woodson as a time to celebrate the achievements of the African American community. A time to lift up: great abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass; great scientists including Neil deGrasse Tyson and Daniel Hale Williams–the first surgeon to perform an open heart surgery; great athletes such as Muhammed Ali and the Williams Sisters; great musicians like Nina Simone and Beyoncé; great writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin; great artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kara Walker; great spiritual leaders like Malcolm X and Fannie Lou Hamer…

The list could go on for hours. But there is a difficult truth behind it. We would not be celebrating Black History this month if it was not for the horror of the TransAtlantic slave trade. We only have Black History Month because one of the most brutal exercises in human history. Reflecting on a need to recognize this dynamic as part of Black History Month, writing in the New York Times, Erin Aubry Kaplan recently argued, “It’s time to acknowledge what black history really reveals — not individual heroism or the endurance of democratic ideals, but their opposites.” Black History Month, in other words, reveals not just the beauty and power of black people but the brutality and danger of white supremacy.

And so, as part of Black History Month, it is important to take a moment to honor all those who suffered as they were unwilling brought from Africa to the American continents. The Caribbean poet Edouard Glissant offers a challenging description of their pain:

“Imagine two hundred human beings crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them. Imagine vomit, naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead slumped, the dying crouched. Imagine, if you can, the swirling red of mounting to the deck, the ramp they climbed, the black sun on the horizon, vertigo, this dizzying sky plastered to the waves.”

It is terrifying to imagine that between 1502 when the first enslaved Africans arrived in the Caribbean and the 1880s, when the last ship landed with an illegal human cargo in Brazil, some ten to twelve million people–parents, children, friends, husbands, wives, mothers, lovers, elders, and babies–were forcibly moved across the ocean blue. Not all of them arrived. Not all of them made a way out of no way. Some died of illness. Some were thrown overboard by brutal captains who decided it was easier to collect insurance money for lost human cargo than to transport unwilling people from one continent to another. And some threw themselves into murky blue graves rather than endure a life of unfreedom.

The discouraging, disheartening, dismal truth is sometimes it is impossible to find the power that will help us make a way out of no way. But, then, I am not entirely certain that finding a way out of no way is something we are supposed to do on our own. Nor am I entirely certain that we are supposed to be finding a way out of no way for ourselves. I suspect that when we dream freedom dreams, we are often dreaming them for the people who will come after us.

There were people who dreamed freedom dreams in the bellies of those disgusting slave ships. Many of them dreamed those dreams for themselves–dreamed of returning to Africa. Many of them also dreamed dreams for their descendants, for the people who would come after them. They imagined that the world might not be better for them, but it could be better for future generations: there is more love somewhere.

Sometimes when I think about freedom dreams, I think about the last public words of Martin King, the words he left us right before he was brought down by a white supremacist bullet. He told us, God’s “allowed me to go the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.”

It is right there. In that passage. The truth about freedom dreams. It is not about your survival or my survival. It is about our survival. It is about us, collectively, together, as a human community, as a community of memory and witness, love and justice, figuring out how to find a way out of no way.

We can only survive together. It is important to remember this when we cry out for a way out of no way. Sometimes we cry out and hear nothing in response. But when our voices are met with silence, we might recall the words of denise levertov:

Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.

History teaches us that it is always possible to imagine a way out of no way. I might not be able to envision it. You might not be able to visualize it. But the collective we can find it.

This is one of the lessons of Black History Month. Beginning in the holds of those awful freighters, suffering humans began to dream freedom dreams. They imagined that their lives and the world could be different than it was. They imagined no slavery. They imagined freedom for themselves. And that imagination enabled some of them to find it. They found it onboard ships like the Amistad when they rose up and overthrew the slave traders. They found it when they organized and revolted–creating the nation of Haiti and enabling the Union to win the Civil War. And they found it when they ran away.

Carol told the children and youth a story about a maroon. Have any of you heard that word before? Maroon? The maroons were groups of people who escaped slavery and then, using their freedom dreams, built new communities where they could live free. Some of these communities became quite large. They numbered in the thousands and fought against Europeans who wanted to re-enslave.

In Maroon communities people often sought to live and worship as their ancestors did back in Africa. They attempted to recreate ways of life and love that had been disrupted by their forced migration. Some of these communities endured for years. In towns in Jamaica and on the island Barbuda there are communities that were founded by maroons hundreds of years ago and are still governed by their descendants today.

Maroon communities were sometimes multi-racial affairs–places where people imagined a continent organized around interracial cooperation not white supremacy. In such places black people, white people, indigenous people, the polyglot of people who lived in the Americas, came together and imagined and built new kind of communities where they could pursue their dreams of freedom. In such places, people held up and held out ways of being that were antithetical to the white supremacist economic and social order that told them they were less than human. In such places, there were ways of being that suggested it is possible to find more love, more hope, more joy, somewhere.

Freedom dreams, some people dreamed them in the holds of slave ships, some people rebelled, some people ran away and started maroons. Freedom dreams, the TransAtlantic Slave Trade ended with the abolition of slavery. Freedom dreams, the legal regime of Jim Crow was ended. Freedom dreams, black people survived and many thrived.

We are lifting up freedom dreams because this is the last Sunday of Black History Month. It is important to take time to center the experiences and theologies of people of color. It is important for at least two reasons. The first is simple: our congregation is on the cusp of meeting the definition of a multiracial religious communities. The vast majority of religious communities in the United States are racial and ethnic enclaves–where one group comprises 80% or more of participants. So, when a religious community is reaching a point where 20% or more of the people do not belong to a single ethnic or racial group it is considered a multiracial one.

At the beginning of the month, Alma and Tawanna reported our congregational data to the Unitarian Universalist Association. They had to tell the UUA how many members we have, the size of our annual budget, the number of people who attend worship and the like. One of the questions that the UUA asks is the percentage of people of color who are members of the church. And Alma and Tawana came up with at least 17%.

So, we are on the cusp of transitioning to a predominantly white church to one that fits that definition of a multiracial one. And experience teaches me that one way we make that transition is being intentional and inclusive about our theology and our community. It is why we have been using more Spanish in the service. And why I have been very intentional about inviting people of color and women to fill the pulpit when Scott and I are not in the pulpit.

And it is why I take time each year to give a sermon inspired specifically by black theology. I want us to live into the vision of our religious ancestors–the vision that said that God loves everyone, no exceptions, and be a community where all people can feel beloved. This is why next month I will also be offering a sermon on eco-feminist theology and another in the autumn on indigenous and Latinx theology.

Second: we are talking about the Black Radical Imagination this morning because I think it is an essential resource for all us–regardless of our racial identity–to find a way out of no way. I know this from personal experience.

I think that many of you know that I grew up in Michigan in the eighties and nineties. Detroit in those days was a musical hotbed. There was always something amazing something going on. It did not matter if you went to a tiny club, a street party, a county fair, or a big concert venue–there was always some funky music to be found. And if you tuned into your non-commercial radio station–college or public radio–you could catch a flash of audio inspiration.

One of my favorite groups to listen to was Parliament-Funkadelic. Have you ever heard of them? They are headed by the fantastic George Clinton, an incredibly talented musician known for his wild, often multi-color hair, flashy and imaginative costumes. The band itself is a large admixture of vocalists and instrumentalists–drummers, bass players, keyboardists, and horn players.

As the band’s name suggests, Parliament-Funkadelic is a funk band. They create hypnotic, psychedelic, kaleidoscopic soundscapes filled with ingenious Afro-centric fantastic and futuristic lyrics:

Well, all right, starchild
Citizens of the universe, recording angels
We have returned to claim the pyramids
Partying on the mothership

Those lyrics appear on their seminal 1975 album “Mothership Connection.” Earlier in the album listeners are informed that the P-Funk is coming from “Top of the Chocolate Milky Way.”

P-Funk’s words offer a vision, in Robins Kelley’s words, of “modern ancients redefining freedom, imagining a communal future (and present) without exploitation; all-natural, African, barefoot, and funky.”

P-Funk made that vision available for everyone. Sure, it came from their experiences and their tradition as African Americans, but it was available to everyone who wanted to turn their dial to radio “station W-E-F-U-N-K” or attend their concerts.

And let me tell you, a P-Funk concert in Detroit was an amazing affair. George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic brought the whole family on stage in a way that I cannot imagine was possible anywhere else. The stage crafted mothership descended and out came Bootsy Collins with a bass guitar, star shaped sunglasses and fabulous high heels. And then George Clinton was inviting everyone he knew on to the stage. His granddaughter–a starchild of maybe the age of five–was telling everyone, “Make My Funk the P-Funk.” At one concert I went to I think Clinton even invited his accountant on stage. I am not sure my memory is exactly correct, but I do remember an older white man on stage who had no discernable musical talent and was wearing a button-up shirt. Clinton gave him a quick introduction that seemed to suggest the man helped him manage the business of the band.

Such experiences opened the world–opened the imagination to me–in a way that was not otherwise possible. I saw, live and enfleshed, a community that invited everyone to live their own truth, live into own self, a community where people were just free, “free of evil and violence,” in Robin Kelley’s words, “free of toxins and environmental hazards, free of poverty, racism, and sexism… just free.”

These visions are not limited to George Clinton and P-Funk. They are all around us. We can discover them inside ourselves. We can find them in so many voices. They are in music today, just as they were in music from Clinton’s generation. The Grammy Award winning artist Janelle Monae casts her own freedom dreams in songs like “Crazy, Classic, Life.” There she sings:

We don’t need another ruler
All of my friends are kings
I’m not America’s nightmare
I’m the American cool
Just let me live my life

Just let me live my life. As we move to the close of this sermon, I want to invite you to have space to dream your own freedom dreams. What would it mean if we were all able to truly live our own lives? The exercise I am about to offer you comes from Chris Crass, I have invited you to do it before I am inviting you to do it again now because there are precious few spaces in the world where we can come together and imagine a world organized around love and liberation.

I invite you to get comfortable. Close your eyes. Notice your body. Notice how it feels to sit in your pew. Notice how it feels to sit in this sanctuary filled with people inspired by our Unitarian Universalist tradition’s vision of love for humanity. Take a deep breath. Feel the air as it enters your lungs, bringing with it the force of life. As you exhale, feel your body releasing any stress and any negative emotions you have. Feel that negativity drain to the ground. Stay with your breath and focus on it as you inhale and exhale five times. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Now, give yourself permission to think creatively and expansively about: The world you are working to create. What is your vision for a just society? What is your freedom dream? There is so much violence that exists in the world. It exists in the government. It exists in our communities. Sometimes it exists in our homes. If you could imagine all of that shifting, all of that hate and fear disappearing, what would the world be like? If you left your home a week from now and discovered that white supremacy had been dismantled what would your neighborhood be like? If you went to the grocery store and learned that violence against women, sexism, and misogyny had been overcome, how would the world appear? If you went to work a month from now and found, we were no longer in the midst of a climate crisis what would humanity’s relationship to the planet be like? What can you imagine? What would it look like in family or your home? In your neighborhood? How would people relate to each other? How would people relate to resources and to the planet? In this new vision, what is valued, who is valued and how?

Imagine that the world you dream about has come to fruition. Imagine that the honest world, the fair world, has arrived. Imagine that you encounter it today, after you leave this worship service. When you depart from this sanctuary what do you find outside of the door? As you travel down the street what kind of institutions and resources do you discover? What do they look like? What sort of services are there? What values are the economy based on? As you return to your home, what does it look like? What is your neighborhood like? What kind of activities are going on? How are decisions being made? How is conflict dealt with? Can you think about the rest of the city of Houston? What are other neighborhoods like? What about other cities? What is Dallas like? Or other states or countries? What is California like? Or Ethiopia?

When you are ready, bring yourself back to what is happening in our sanctuary. Hold onto your freedom dreams. As you do, I invite you to recall the advice of our poet from this morning, Angelamaría Dávila. She wrote about being:

un animal que habla
para decirle a otro parecido su esperanza.

An animal that speaks
to tell another animal what it hopes for

Today, after you leave this service, I invite you to find someone you do not know already and share with them some part of your freedom dream. By speaking it aloud you may just bring it closer to being. By speaking it aloud you might just strengthen your own resolve to work towards creating it. By imagining together, we might be able to find a way out of no way. It might not be for us. It might be for those who come after us. But it is there, waiting, in our imaginations. It is waiting for us to envision it.

We are going to follow the sermon with a rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It is a wonderful piece rooted in the African American tradition that calls us to remember the possibility that we can dream freedom dreams and move together into a better future—move together like the saints.

That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.

Sermon: When Enemies Become Friends

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, January 12, 2020

I am thrilled to be in the pulpit with you this morning. I am excited to be staying on as your developmental minister for the next five and a half years. And I am deeply appreciative of all of the enthusiastic notes of support that the Board and I have received via email and through Facebook. I am also aware that there are a few of you who are not keen about the news that I will be staying. I also know that a few of you are concerned or unclear about the process that the Board used to reach its decision to hire me. If you do feel that way, I hope that you will attend this afternoon’s congregational town hall or come and share your concerns with me. I am your minister and this your religious community. And while I am here, whether you are excited about me staying or not, I will do the best I can to meet your spiritual needs and to serve all the members of First Unitarian Universalist. And the Board will do its best to democratically govern the church.

I believe our time together will be an opportunity to develop a powerful shared ministry that is devoted to building a compassion filled beloved community and confronting the urgent tasks of the era. These, I have suggested, are dismantling white supremacy, revitalizing democracy, and addressing the climate crisis.

The next several years will be some of the most crucial in human history. They will determine whether or not we, as a human species, address the causes of global warming. We will choose our collective legacy. It will either provide our children a vibrant and sustainable future or calamitous one.

The fate of Unitarian Universalism in the next years will be determined by whether or not we live up to our commitment to be a relevant religion. We will thrive if religious communities like First Unitarian Universalist equip people with the spiritual tools to confront society’s challenges and adjust to its changes. We will fade into irrelevance if we do not.

While we answer the question of whether or not we are a relevant religion on a grand scale, we will also have to continue answering this question individually, on a personal scale. No matter what happens, in the midst of all the world’s changes, some things will remain constant. The cycle of life and death, birth and aging, will continue. The Earth will orbit the sun as it always has. The Moon will bring tides to the water. And people will need to find meaning in the rich mess of our lives. They will ask questions about the meaning of life and the power of love.

First Unitarian Universalist’s challenge over the next few years will be this: Can we be a religious community that is relevant to the great crises of the hour while at the same time providing a spiritual home for people throughout all the days of their lives? I think we can. And so, I also think that the brightest days for both Unitarian Universalism and the congregation are in the future. I look forward to seeing how it all unfolds. And because I believe this, I am incredibly excited to serve as your senior minister as we continue together in the work of collective liberation and the task of building the beloved community.

One of the central missions of such a community is the cultivation of friendships and the deepening of connections. This month in worship we are exploring friendship as a spiritual practice. Ralph Emerson argued, “Friendship demands a religious treatment.” All this month we are attempting to give it one. This morning, I want us to consider one of the most difficult kinds of friendships: friendships between enemies.

The friendship between Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt was one of these. It must have been one of the strangest of the twentieth century. Taubes was a rabbi and philosopher. He taught for many years at the Free University of Berlin. And Schmitt, well, Schmitt was a Nazi. And he was not just any member of the Third Reich. Schmitt was one of the regime’s chief legal theorists. After World War II, he remained an unrepentant fascist and bigot. He lectured in Fascist Spain and refused de-nazification.

Taubes knew all of this. He and Schmitt met after World War II. Taubes survived the Holocaust because his family moved to Switzerland. Studying at the University of Zurich while the world around him burned, in the early 1940s Taubes came across Schmitt’s work for the first time. It inspired him to take a new line of argument in his own scholarship. One that was controversial enough that it earned Taubes a rebuke from the professor with whom he was studying. Taubes was taken to task for reading the work of an “evil man” and told that his own argument was “monstrous and unidimensional.” His professor’s response caused Taubes to question his own place within the academy.

Following the war, Taubes found himself in Jerusalem on a research fellowship at the Hebrew University. He encountered Schmitt’s work when he discovered that the Israeli’s minister of justice had taken an interest in it. This was immediately after the founding of the state of Israel. Much of Jerusalem was under the supervision of the United Nations. For reasons that are unclear to me, the library of Hebrew University was “locked up on Mount Scopus,” outside of the city limits under armed guards. These guards changed every two weeks. Taubes recalls, “Contrary to the terms of the official true, which said that nothing could be taken from Mount Scopus, and nothing from the city to Mount Scopus, the decree was circumvented with the help of members of the guard who, when they came back to the city, filled their trousers and bags with books that the university library had labeled ‘urgent.’”

The minister of justice, it turned out, had urgently needed one of Schmitt’s books. He wanted to consult it in his efforts to write a Constitution for the state of Israel–a document, which, incidentally, still does not exist. Taubes was much surprised to learn this story from the chief librarian. He took out the book when the minister returned it, re-familiarized himself with Schmitt, and again began to consider the connection between Schmitt’s thought and his own. He wrote a letter to a friend of his, a man named Armin Mohler who Taubes had known back in Zurich when he was a student. The two held different political positions. “You could say that he was on the extreme right and I was on the extreme left. Les extrêmes se touchent–at any rate, we had the same views about the middle,” Taubes recalled about Mohler.

Taubes poised his old school friend a question, “It remains a problem for that… [Carl Schmitt] welcomed the National Socialist [as the Nazis called themselves] ‘revolution’ and went along with it and it remains a problem for me that I cannot just dismiss by using such catchwords such as vile, swinish…. What was so ‘seductive’ about National Socialism?”

So, here we have a point of unexpected engagement. Taubes, a self-described “arch-Jew,” approaching his friend the goyish, which is to say non-Jewish, arch-conservative with a query of interest about a lethal enemy. He wanted to know the answer to a question that perplexes so many of us today: How is it that intelligent, even brillant, people can devote themselves to ideologies and political movements that are obviously evil? I suspect that many of you have asked such questions of scholars, intellectuals, politicians, business executives, clergy, friends, family members, and neighbors that you respect.

I know I have. More than once in my life I have found myself struggling to understand how someone who was obviously intelligent, who was educated, could subscribe to odious ideologies. I often find myself wondering this about climate change deniers–especially now when Australia burns, when we are experiencing some of the warmest, weirdest, weather on record, and when there is a scientific consensus that the changing climate is driven by the human consumption of fossil fuel.

Back in September many of us participated in the global climate strike. We turned out about seventy-five people from the congregation for the event organized by local youth and 350.org in solidarity with the movement inspired by Greta Thunberg. Some of you might remember, that in support of the climate strike I published an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle. You probably do not know that the next day the office got a call from someone named Dr. Neil Frank who wanted to urgently talk with me. He wanted to clarify some things for me about climate change.

Now, I am relatively new to Houston. I had no idea who Dr. Neil Frank is. So, I asked Jon Naylor, who is one of my sources of knowledge for all things Houstonian. Neil Frank, Jon Naylor told me, is the much beloved retired weatherman from the local CBS affiliate KHOU. He is also the former director of the National Hurricane Center. I asked Jon to set-up a meeting for us. And so, Dr. Frank came by my office one afternoon and tried to convince me that the changes in the climate we are now experiencing are driven by something other than human action.

It was a fascinating conversation. Dr. Frank has PhD in meteorology. His goal, it became clear, was to convince me that everything I knew about the scientific consensus on the climate crisis was false. He admitted that the planet is warming. This, however, he told me was a result of natural climate cycles. High CO2 levels, he also wanted me to know, was good for plant life and was, ultimately, nothing to worry about.

We had a long discussion about the role of peer-review in research. He told me that critics of the thesis that climate change is human caused had been locked off academic journals by something he called “the global warming industry.” This industry has, through some unspecified means, taken control of the peer review process. It is part of a conspiracy by, in his words, “some very wealthy people” to create one world government. This one world government would be birthed when people became convinced that they could only address the climate crisis by forming it. The one world government would start with treaties like the Paris Agreement which would both undermine national sovereignty and redistribute the world’s wealth. Inequality, he told me, is the great creator of prosperity and creating a more economically equal society would be disastrous to human progress.

A shadowy group of unspecified individuals conspiring to create one world government, undermine national sovereignty, and redistribute wealth… As someone who has spent many years studying white supremacist movements I have to admit that I was a bit taken back. It is classic antisemitic claim that there is a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. I am not saying that Dr. Frank is an antisemite. But his argument against taking action on the climate crisis certainly reminded me of one of antisemitism’s root mythologies.

We can learn, surprising, sometimes distressing, things when we try to reach out in friendship with those who we disagree. I am not sure that I would describe Dr. Frank as my enemy. And we did not end our session together as friends. However, we stand on the opposite side of two vital issues–Dr. Frank is also an evangelical Christian–and I learned important things from our conversation. We can expand our ways of understanding the world when we engage across difference. At the very least, we can gain clarity into what motivates people with whom we disagree. And that clarity is valuable in and itself.

Such clarity was what Jacob Taubes sought in his letter to his friend Armin Mohler. This was in the pre-internet days but the written word, in whatever form, has long had a capacity to move beyond its original audience. Mohler showed the letter to a friend. Who showed it to a friend. Who showed it Schmitt himself. This prompted Schmitt to write Mohler and ask him for Taubes’s address. Thus began what was for many years a one-sided correspondence. Schmitt would send Taubes inscribed copies of his books and the texts of articles. Taubes would not answer them.

Taubes’s refusal to respond to Schmitt did not prevent the rumors from circulating that the two men were friends. One evening at Harvard, after Taubes made a presentation, a young scholar came up to him and said, “Oh, I am so pleased to meet a friend of Carl Schmitt!”

Taubes responded, “Me? Friend of Carl Schmitt? Never seen him and don’t even want to meet him.”

The young scholar replied, “But I know of your letter to Carl Schmitt!”

“Me? A letter to Schmitt? Never wrote one, don’t even know where he lives,” was Taubes’s retort.

“But I have read it!,” the young scholar insisted.

It turned out that the letter Taubes had sent to his friend had become, through the grapevine, a letter directly to Schmitt.

Taubes still refused to meet with the unrepentant Nazi for many years. His friends throughout the academy kept pushing him to do so. Yet, even when he was in Schmitt’s neighborhood Taubes would not drop him so much as a card.

One famous philosopher finally wrote Taubes taking him to task for his insistence that he would not meet with Schmitt: “Put a stop once and for all to this ‘how did he say that’?–as if everything were a tribunal–you… and Schmitt, you are all the same, what’s the point?”

Taubes finally concluded, “Listen, Jacob, you are not the judge, as a Jew especially you are not the judge… I know about the Nazi period. … You are not the judge, because as a Jew you were not party to the temptation.” He decided that because there was no possibility of him ever becoming a Nazi, a possibility foreclosed to Jews, he could only attempt to understand Schmitt’s decision to become an antisemite by engaging with him directly.

And so, Taubes finally went to visit Schmitt. The two men had, in Taubes’s words, “the most violent discussion that I have ever had in the German language.” And Schmitt showed Taubes “documents that made my hair stand on end–documents that he still defended.” Years later, Taubes wrote, “I really cannot bear to think about it.”

Schmitt, Taubes realized, was primarily motivated from a fear that society around him would collapse and that dangerous change would come. Schmitt was a lawyer and he feared more than anything disorder. Schmitt came to understand that law, however, was not based on some set of abstract principles. It came, he believed, from a strong state and a strong ruler. Without such a structure to support it the law, Schmitt thought, would become meaningless. His support for the Nazi regime had come because, he believed, in a time of chaos liberals were unable to ensure that the law endured.

During the course of their conversation Taubes came to understand Schmitt and in doing so came to understand something about why people can come to defend the indefensible. Taubes even decided that he was willing to call Schmitt his friend. This was not an insignificant statement on two levels. First, and foremost, the friendship between a Jew and Nazi is not one without a little controversy. I suspect that a few of you might even be disturbed by the concept of it. For, after all, Taubes and Schmitt were, in Taubes’s words, “opponents to the death.”

Second, one of Schmitt’s primary contributions to philosophy is the claim that politics begins with the distinction of friends and enemies. In politics, he argued, we struggle with our friends, with whom we share a common interest or identity, against those who are enemies, individuals that oppose our interest or identity. Politics, he believed, was primarily about making this distinction. By naming Schmitt as his friend, Taubes was in some sense undermining Schmitt’s political project. He was calling into question the kind of politics practiced by Schmitt.

The political projects of people like Schmitt requires that we divide the world into enemies and friends. In such a world, politics is not necessarily a domain separate from the rest of our lives. It occurs anytime we decide that we must divide ourselves into opposing groups and then struggle for dominance, one group over the other.

Certainly, this is what is happening today. We live at a moment of sharp political division. For many of us, political identity has divided the country into friends and enemies. Politicians seek to block legislation not on the basis of policy implications but rather from the fear that they will allow political enemies to score points with the electorate. Democrats do not trust Republicans. Republicans do not trust Democrats.

Perhaps the first step out of such an impasse is to attempt to understand what motivates each other. We might find ourselves surprised or disturbed. It might be that we discover that our motivations are irreconcilable–I am not going to become a climate crisis denier based on the idea that there is a global warming institution conspiring to create one world government. But it might be that we discover surprising basis for connection.

Carl Schmitt found that Jacob Taubes shared with him a common devotion to scholarship and that the two men understood each other. Maybe it was not enough to heal the world of political division. But it disrupted it. Today, Dr. Frank and I did not end our conversation as friends but I gained greater clarity into a crucial issue. And we spoke to each other, despite our differences–just as Taubes and Schmitt finally did.

In her poem “Who Said It was Simple,” Audre Lorde reminds us that in the world of politics nothing is simple. Those who proclaim themselves to be our friends are sometimes not entirely on our side. Her poem was written in response to the civil rights movement, which Lorde supported, and the complexities of the alliances between people who struggle on the same side of an issue. She asks, “which me will survive / all these liberations” to raise the question of who really is her friend. Are the women at the lunch counter actually on her side? Or are they serving some of other interest, one which she fears will ultimately destroy her?

Lorde’s question prompted her to consider the power of difference in the struggle for social justice. Like Taubes, she ultimately rejected the friend enemy distinction, instead coming to see that it is our differences that make us who we are. In the face of those who divide the poor, the marginalized, or any of those who struggle for a better world into different groups with competing interests, Lorde challenged people to “take our differences and make them strengths.” She warned, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

The philosopher Hannah Arendt urged us to converse across difference. She said, “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.” Taubes learned something of Schmitt’s humanity through their discourse. In some way, he overcame Schmitt’s most deeply held bigotry, his antisemitism, by his conversation with Taubes. He decided that Taubes, his supposed arch-enemy, understood him more fully than anyone else.

Key amongst the master’s tools that Lorde knew would not save us was the division of the world into friend and enemy. The simple act of seeking to converse across differences can help us to subvert this division. It is not easy. Sometimes, in the heat of conflict, it is impossible. And, yet, breaking down divisions between friends and enemies might be the only thing that can ultimately save us, the human species, from the destruction we are wrecking upon this planet and upon each other. The truth that climate crisis teaches is that we are all–whether friends or enemies–in this together.

And so, my challenge to us this morning is this: Let us seek out dialogue across difference. Not seeking, as is so often the case, to argue with our enemies but to understand them as we might try to understand our friends. For it is only, ultimately, by understanding what divides us that we might learn to come together as we must–a human family living at a crucial hour.

That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.

Sermon: Leading with Love and Liberation (Guest Blog Post)

On February 9, 2020, Aisha Hauser was the guest preacher at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus. Her sermon was very well received and, with her permission, I have posted the text of it as a guest blog post:

I want to thank Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen for inviting me to return to preach today.

What does it mean to lead with love while centering liberation?

Dr. Cornel West, scholar and public intellectual often says that “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

If we can work toward and create a more just and equitable world, we will be demonstrating how love manifest itself to all.

When I am talking about love in this context today, I don’t mean the flowery words of greeting cards or shallow platitudes of niceness. When I invoke love in this case, I am talking about what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King referred to as “agape.”

To quote Dr. King:


Agape means understanding, redeeming good will for all people. It is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object…Agape is disinterested love. It is a love in which the individual seeks not their own good, but the good of their neighbor. Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. It is an entirely “neighbor-regarding concern for others,

To be clear, Dr. King in this context was preaching nonviolence. Influenced heavily by Mahatma Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau, he hoped to inspire African Americans and their allies in the fight for justice and freedom to hold fast to non-violent protests as a way to dismantle the oppressive systems in place.

I invoke the spirit of “agape love” here in the hopes of offering a framework for how we affirm each other in our speech and how we can center liberation, through our language and ultimately in our actions.

I want to share a story of my own learning process about how powerful turning to love when centering liberation can be.

In 2016, General Assembly, the annual gathering of UUs from across the globe was held in Columbus, Ohio. During the Service of the Living Tradition, the service that celebrates religious professionals entering ministry, ordained clergy, religious educators and musicians are included in this celebration. That year was especially memorable, not only because former President of the UUA Rev. Dr. Bill Sinkford was preaching, but because of an awareness that was lifted during his sermon. A few of the fellowshipped clergy sitting on the stage held up signs saying “OUCH,” every time ableist language was referenced.

When the word “stand” was said, the signs were lifted, if the word, “see” or “hear” was said, the signs were lifted. The organizer of this awareness campaign was the Rev. Theresa Ines Soto.

Rev. Soto is now one of my dearest friends. At the time, we had only met socially, and I found myself wondering why they would be so offended by metaphors. Sure, Rev. Soto has had accessibility issues since they were born. I knew they were a teacher and attorney, surely metaphors were something that could be allowed in a religious setting.

I found myself wanting to defend the use of metaphors and to want to explain to those holding signs that we can’t just give up on beautiful language.

Before I engaged in any of these discussions, I returned home and started reading the ways that ableist language excludes so many.

I started to ask myself, “What is it that I am holding on to by arguing and fighting to continue “saying” what I “want.”

Considering being informed that what I “want” excludes and is painful.

I then thought about the sayings I no longer use because of their origins.

For example, I don’t use the expression, “rule of thumb” because it harkens back to an old English law that allowed a woman to be beaten by her husband as long as the stick was not larger than his thumb. Hence “the rule of thumb.”

Once I learned that history, I simply never used it again. If I learn that my use of the word “stand” to mean affirm was hurtful and exclusionary, why hold on?

I realized that one of the ways I want to show up in the world as a person of faith, is to listen and respond in ways that are loving. I found that love, rooted in liberation, in this case was to learn ways to minimize my use of ableist language. The UU musician and songwriter, Jason Shelton changed the title and lyric of the song “Standing on the Side of Love” to “Answering the Call of Love” I like that even better. We are moved to answer the call of love rooted in liberation for all.

Another way to answer the call of love rooted in liberation, is using the pronouns a person asks you to. Don’t argue about singular or plural, for the record, Webster’s dictionary now recognizes “they” as singular. We do not have any reason not to show respect and love by listening and responding to what is asked of all of us. Studies indicate that using a trans/non binary person’s correct pronoun and name, lowers their rates of suicide and depression. You are engaging in love speech when you listen and affirm, rather than argue about the “correct grammar.”

Now, at this point I’m going to guess that at least one person in this sanctuary is thinking of “politically correct speech.” I want to name that I find the whole notion of “PC” speech as nonsense and even the term is absurd. There is nothing correct about our politics. Our politics are not the place to look for inspiration or ways to treat each other.

What we are talking about is our humanity and the humanity of all those around us who are naming pain.

We continue to work at the great human experiment that is the United States. A place where, I would guess, that every country on earth is represented.

Where we live together in a way that we attempt to form an identity that is both common and yet unique.

In order to accomplish this herculean task, we must be intentional and be willing to decenter our own narrative and our own point of view. This is especially true if your identity is part of the dominant culture.

Unitarian Universalism can be a reflection of the United States culture. I say, can be and not is a reflection, because while we do have ethnic and racial diversity within UUism, the majority of our brick and mortar spaces, remain predominantly Eurocentric.

This is not a good or bad thing; it is simply limiting.

There are those who believe that Unitarian Universalism is not broken and is fine just the way it is. Those voices have named feeling marginalized and silenced as a result of the events of the spring of our enlightenment, in 2017.

The folks that I would say want to make Unitarian Universalism “great again,” decry the “limits” put on their speech. After all, what about the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

Doesn’t that mean we can say whatever we want?

The answer is yes, you can “say” whatever you want. That has always been true.
AND what has always been true is that there are consequences to all kinds of speech.

When engaging in speech claiming to defend the rights of the already powerful and the rights of the dominant culture, the consequences are that oppressive systems are maintained and voices of the marginalized are silenced.

When our speech is unkind and hurtful, we cause harm.

When engaging in speech that centers love rooted in liberation, the consequences can be positive and life affirming.

Because unkind speech gone unchecked- turns into hate full policies and laws, as the history of our country and current events today demonstrate.

The hateful speech and disturbing rhetoric that is rampant on social media and from the current occupant of the White House is having devastating effects on the lives of Black and Brown people. It is hate speech turned into action in the most dehumanizing ways.

As Unitarian Universalists, we are called on to affirm the humanity of every person.

Not only the ones deemed worthy. Who is worthy and who is worth–less and who gets to decide?

In July there were demonstrations all over the nation protesting the inhumane and unconscionable concentration camps that are being maintained FOR PROFIT on our southern border. Thousands of people of all ages, including infants and toddlers, youth, adults of all ages are being held in detention centers for the supposed “crime” of not waiting in some imaginary line.

The fact is that it is not a crime to seek asylum.

However, the speeches and rhetoric that this administration chooses to name is an inaccurate one that deems human beings “illegal.”

Words matter. No human being is illegal.

These centers are overcrowded, and the people in them are being treated worse than any animal is allowed by law to be treated.

What is happening to us and what have we become?

We Unitarian Universalists love our words, and our intellectual discussions. Let’s take a moment to talk about the word, “theology.”

The word “theology” means “the study of the nature of God and religious belief.” For Unitarian Universalists this understanding and study of the “nature of God and our beliefs” are rooted in how we relate to each other and the world around us. As a covenantal faith, we enter into agreements of how we will love, honor and affirm each other and all living beings and our living earth. In my frame of reference and how I understand and live my UU faith, there is no separation between our theology and social justice.

I grew up in a strict Muslim home. One of the mandates that my mother passed on to me is that God will judge us by how we treat the poor. My mother made no secret of her disdain of the Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirate Governments who, with their vast wealth, have not had a hand in solving the problem of hunger and poverty in the world.

To me, there has never been a separation between theological grounding and social justice. The two go hand in hand.

We are invited to turn to Love Speech rooted in liberation, Agape Love to affirm the humanity of anyone crossing thresholds, “borders” seeking a better, safer life for themselves, for their families for their children. Working for social justice and equity is an integral part of our theological mandate and it is part of turning Love into loving action. It is integral to our understanding the nature of all that is Holy and what is larger than any one of us individually. We cannot know or understand our theology without knowing and understanding that we are mandated to use our privilege to fight for equity and justice.

The Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen, the Interim Senior Minister at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, wrote a blog chronicling his recent trip to Europe this past July. While there, the news of what is happening here in the United States weighed heavy on him. He posted on July 12th:

In the midst of the global crises, I think that the for challenge someone like me is partly about holding onto my own humanity. In the end, privilege contains within it the possibility of shedding one’s humanity. I believe that there is only one human family and that we are all, ultimately, part of the same earthly community. Privilege is based on separation. The ability to… [step] away from the experiences that most people have. And, well, in a world filled with refugees, economic exploitation, and many other kinds of discrimination and systematic violence, I feel quite privileged–which is to say separate and insulated–here in the South of France.

We do not have to endure the continued chipping away of our humanity.
We have it in us to prioritize and affirm the humanity of those with target identities.
We always have the choice to remain engaged and informed in ways that help us to form coalitions and move in solidarity with those who are working to dismantle oppressive systems.
We always have the choice to center love rooted in liberation.

I will leave you with these words from San Francisco area artist Sandra Bass she declares:

Now is the time to unleash our collective imaginations to till the soil, nourish the seeds of change with our aspirations, and bolster fledgling shoots promising new possibilities with ageless wisdoms, compassion, and courage. Not because we’re certain that our labors will bear a harvest, but because we know that it is only through daily acts of loving and serving with and for each other that we live into our boundless, sacred humanity. Constant gardeners we must be, ever preparing the earth for full and abundant life.