Dear Members and Friends of First Church:

It is with sadness that I announce that we will not be holding in-person services at neither our Museum District nor Thoreau campuses. The Unitarian Universalist Association has asked that all congregations suspend gatherings of more than 25 people — including worship and religious education — effective immediately. The rapid spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 indicates that proceeding at this time with an abundance of caution is the best response we can have to this global health emergency.

The staff, Board President and Vice President, and I all know that our religious community is a vital source of comfort, healing, sustenance and strength during these difficult and uncertain times. Effective this Sunday, we will be moving our services online so that we can continue our work of caring for each other, bringing more beauty and joy in the world, and providing solace and inspiration to all who wish to join with us. Rev. Scott will be providing the congregation an online sermon titled “Loving Compassion Into the World.” It will be available starting at 5:00 p.m. Sunday via our YouTube channel and website. Links to it will also be sent out via email and social media. Starting on Sunday, March 22nd, we will be offering online services at 10:30 a.m. At that time, we will be posting a video service complete with music from our award-winning, Music Director, Mark Vogel, readings by both our ministers, a visual meditation, and, of course, a sermon. I will be preaching next week’s service, “Once upon a time we had… time,” on how feminist theology can help us through this health crisis. Following the March 22nd service, and going forward, our Director of Religious Education, Carol Burrus, will hosting a virtual gathering for all ages at 11:45 a.m. via Zoom.

We all owe the staff many thanks for their rapid and professional response to this crisis. More information about our virtual gatherings will be available next week.

In the meantime, as of this writing, the Museum District building will remain open during normal hours of operation, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. And our FotoFest exhibition “Now is the Time,” will remain open from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. Small groups of less than twenty-five people will be allowed to meet during their regular scheduled times on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. This Sunday small groups will be allowed to meet during their regular times. Starting on March 22nd, the Museum District campus will be closed to everyone on Sundays. Small groups of less than twenty-five people can continue to meet at Thoreau at the discretion of the Campus Advisory Team. If there are further changes about the status of either building we will let people know immediately. Throughout this time, small groups are encouraged to consider meeting via Zoom.

We are in the process of developing plans to provide pastoral care online. Look for more information about online small group meetings and pastoral care in the coming days.

In advising us how best to proceed during this global health emergency, Unitarian Universalist President, the Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, has told the leaders of member congregations:

Remember that, as we have to adapt quickly and try new things, perfection is never the goal. The goal is to care for one another and live compassionately. Know that your care and intention really makes a difference to your community and to your own well-being. I am enormously grateful for all of you and the leadership you provide our congregations. I love you and I am proud of the way that Unitarian Universalists are taking the situation seriously and responding out of deep care.

Susan’s words are a wise balm for all of us. We need to love each other, live with compassion, and proceed with as much care and caution as we can. You are all on my heart and if you have any concerns or pastoral needs at this time do not hesitate to contact me. I will see you online soon and will live with the hope that I will see you in-person as soon as it safe for us to gather again.

love,

Colin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I keep a running list of the books that I read all the way through–as opposed to read selectively in, which is how I approach most works of academic history, critical theory, and theology. For a few years I posted this list to my blog with commentary on some of the books. I fell away from that for awhile but am now getting back to it. I will be posting a list of all of the books I read over the last decade in the next week or so as well.

In 2019 I a read a bit in French because I was in France for awhile. I hope to read a bit of Spanish and French for pleasure in 2020 as well–though a month into the year I haven’t really gotten to either of them. My French reading level isn’t great and while I read a good portion of Pascale Tournier’s book “Le vieux monde est de retour, Enquête sur les nouveaux conservateurs,” I didn’t complete it. I did read several volumes of the delightful early French readers series Quelle Historie. They’re almost exactly at the level of French I can read without a dictionary.

In terms of books in English, the best novel I read was a translation of Soseki Natsume’s “I Am A Cat.” It is an early twentieth-century classic about the life of a cat who lives in the house of a somewhat eccentric minor Japanese scholar. The cat is witty and absurd and various passages find him doing such things as “worshipping my honored Great Tail Gracious Deity” and meditating on the ways cats “trod the clouds” because “[c]at’s paws are as if they do not exist.

Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” is an important work about the rise of dictator in the 1930s United States and the eventually successful efforts to overturn his rule. It isn’t great literature but its heroes are a Unitarian and a Universalist and it has some useful insights into the possibilities and limitations of liberal religious resistance to fascism.

Like Lewis’s book, much of what I read was for my Minns lectures. Daniel Walker Howe’s “The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861” and Juan Floyd-Thomas’s “The Origins of Black Humanism in America: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Harlem Unitarian Church” deserve special mention for their important work on Unitarian intellectual history. If you have heard me preach in the last twelve months these two works have been lurking somewhere in the background.

I didn’t read anything particularly bad in the 2019 but, as I discuss at length in my third Minns lecture, I was pretty disturbed by Timothy Synder’s complete elision of the US’s history of white supremacy in his “On Tyranny” and his attacks on anarchists and antifascists in “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.” For indigenous nations and many people of color the United States has been a totalitarian society since its inception. To pretend otherwise, as Synder does in his widely read “On Tyranny,” is exceptionally dangerous at a moment when some white people are waking up to the reality that they may soon be living in a totalitarian society. If we–and the we I am writing as here are what I might call white people of good hearts–are going to resist the rise of totalitarianism then we had better make allies with indigenous nations and people of color. They have, in many cases, successfully resisted this country’s totalitarianism for generations. We will be more powerful together and we–again writing for the plural white people of good heart–have much to learn from other resistance movements.

Synder’s scorn for antifascism and anarchism is ahistorical nonsense–his passages drawing equivalences between anarchism and fascism are particularly problematic. Here’s what I said on the subject in my Minns lectures:

Such equivalences marginalize the rich critical resources these traditions offer—[Hannah] Arendt herself was enamored with the anarchist celebration of “the council system” and critique of bureaucracy as a form “tyranny without a tyrant.” And they forget, as events in Charlottesville should remind us, anarchists and other antifascists have have played crucial, though often overlooked, roles in trying to contain various forms of totalitarianism. It was the anarchists in Spain who initiated the fight against the fascist coup to overthrow the Republican government. It was a Spanish anarchist tank division, serving the French Foreign Legion, which first entered Paris to liberate it from the Nazis. And today, anarchists in Rojava, the historically Kurdish area of Syria, have played a critical role in the defeat of the Islamic State.

That aside, when Synder isn’t attacking anarchists or fetishizing the state (as he does in a number of passages in both books) his work offers insight into the nature of totalitarianism, the machinery of death, and how both might be resisted. I certainly learned a great deal about the Holocaust from him and the parallels he draws between 1930s Germany and our present moment are important. However, Hannah Arendt remains by far the most useful critic of totalitarianism and fascism. And if you really want to understand the antecedents to our historical moment I suggest you read her “The Origins of Totalitarianism” instead (reading it alongside W. E. B. DuBois’s “The Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880” and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s “The Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” will really give you a complete sense of how the United States has gotten to the point it has).

So, after all of that, here’s my list for 2019:

Books Read in 2019

It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami
An Illustrated Guide to Japanese Cooking and Annual Events, Hattori Yukio
How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Neil Gaiman
The Professor’s Daughter, Joann Sfar
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, Neil Gaiman
Paper Girls Deluxe Edition Volume 1, Brian Vaughan
Hope without Optimism, Terry Eagleton
I Am A Cat, Soseki Natsume
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Anxious Church, Anxious People: How to Lead Change in an Age of Anxiety, Jack Shitama
Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World, Otis Moss III
The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861, Daniel Walker Howe
The Origins of Black Humanism in America: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Harlem Unitarian Church, Juan Floyd-Thomas
Proverbs
The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, Benjamin Moffit
Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History, Mark Harris
Catstronauts: Mission Moon, Drew Brockington
The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians, Anthony Wallace
English Traits, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511-1553, Roland Bainton
Power in the Pulpit: How America’s Most Effective Black Preachers Prepare Their Sermons, ed. Cleophus LaRue
John Calhoun and the Price of Union, John Niven
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Margaret Fuller
Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, Hannah Arendt
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder
The Complete K Chronicles, Keith Knight
On Tyranny, Timothy Synder
F Minus, Tony Carrillo
Assembly, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
The Stainless Steel Rat for President, Harry Harrison
Job
The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie
Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin
Quelle Historie: Angela Davis
Quelle Historie: Voltaire
No Name in the Street, James Baldwin
Quelle Historie: Histoire de France
Quelle Historie: La Socrellerie
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, Naomi Klein
Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies, ed. Quincy Saul
Ruth
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, George R. R. Martin
More Power in the Pulpit, ed. Cleophus LaRue
Lamentations
Quelle Historie: Anne de Bretagne
Deathworld I, Harry Harrison
Ecclesiastes
Esther
The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, updated edition, Martha Nussbaum
Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, trans. Steven Carter
The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava, Thomas Schmidinger
Daniel
The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas
The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Linda Gordon
Soft Science, Franny Choi
Deathworld II, Harry Harrison
Ezra
The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich
Disoriental, Negar Djavadi
Black Rights/White Wrongs, Charles Mills
American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals & Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice, Albert Raboteau
Nehemiah
Fall or Dodge in Hell, Neal Stephenson
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, February 2, 2020

Today we launch our annual stewardship campaign. It is the season in congregational life when you decide how much money you will pledge to support First Houston in the coming fiscal year. In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, churches are owned and governed by their members. Making an annual financial commitment is an affirmation of membership that signals that you have made a personal, spiritual, and monetary commitment to be part of this congregation, build the beloved community, and uplift Unitarian Universalist values.

The theme of our stewardship campaign is “Loving the Hell Out of the World.” The phrase comes from Joanna Fontaine Crawford. Some of you might know her. She was on First Houston’s ministerial staff for a couple of years in the early part of the last decade. She moved on to serve a congregation in Austin. She drew inspiration for the phrase from the theology of our Universalist religious ancestors.

You might remember that Universalism was founded on a simple theological proposition: God loves people too much to condemn anyone to an eternity of torment in Hell. My friend Mark Morrison-Reed quotes the late Gordon McKeeman to describe this doctrine. He once heard McKeeman “say, ‘Universalism came to be called ‘The Gospel of God’s Success,’ the gospel of the larger hope. Picturesquely spoken, the image was that of the last, unrepentant sinner being dragged screaming and kicking into heaven, unable… to resist the power and love of the Almighty.’”

Mark continues, “What a graphic, prosaic picture—a divine kidnapping. The last sinner being dragged, by his collar I imagined, into heaven. What kind of a God was this? … This was a religion of radical and overpowering love. Universal salvation insists that no matter what we do, God so loves us that she will not, and cannot, consign even a single human individual to eternal damnation. Universal salvation–the reality that we share a common destiny–is the inescapable consequence of Universal love.”

One of the earliest and most important advocates of this doctrine was Hosea Ballou. In the early nineteenth-century, he was a circuit rider who traveled widely spreading the message of God’s universal, unconditional, love. Ballou is reputed to have had a quick wit. There are a number of stories that have been preserved about his encounters with orthodox Christians who rejected the idea that God loved everyone without exception. One such story was collected by Linda Stowell.

It seems that once when Ballou was out circuit riding, he stopped for the night at a New England farmhouse. Over dinner Ballou learned that the family’s son was something of a ne’er-do-well. He rarely helped out with chores or did work on the farm. He stole money from his parents. He spent it late at night carousing at the local tavern. The family was afraid that their son was going to go to Hell.

“Alright,” Ballou told them, “I have a plan. We will find a spot on the road where your son walks home drunk at night. We will build a big bonfire. And when he passes by, we will grab him and throw him into the fire.”

The young man’s parents were aghast. “That’s our son and we love him,” they said to Ballou. Ballou responded, “If you, human and imperfect parents, love your son so much that you would not throw him into the fire, then how can you possibly believe that God, the perfect parent, would do so!”

It is a pretty fun story. It exemplifies the logic of universalist theology. God loves everyone, no exceptions. So, we should love everyone no exceptions. But as I have been thinking about the story I have come to recognize that it is not without its flaws.

It presents Ballou as a sort of lone hero–traipsing about and spreading the gospel of universalism. This portrayal elides a larger truth. Ballou did not spread universalism alone. He was but one of many early preachers who discovered the doctrine, a doctrine that is found in the Christian New Testament and in the theological works of early Christian theologians.

Someone like Ballou read a verse such as “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive,” to mean literally what it said. Ballou and others interpreted this verse from First Corinthians to hinge upon the word “all,” which appears twice. All were condemned to mortality by Adam’s disobedience to the divine in the Garden of Eden. All will be given immortality through Christ. Not some. Not only the believers. Not just the righteous. But all. Every last sinner dragged screaming and kicking into heaven.

Ballou was not the first one to discover universalism in verses like First Corinthians 15:22. Origen of Alexandria was an ancient Christian theologian who lived in North Africa. Almost eighteen hundred years ago he taught that all would eventually be united with God. Taking a slightly different position than Ballou, he wrote “and there is punishment, but not everlasting… For all wicked men, and for daemons, too, punishment has an end.”

Ballou and Origen lived close to two thousand years apart. Their similar theological perspectives suggest one reason why Ballou and other circuit riders like him were so successful in spreading the Gospel of God’s Success. Lots of people believe that God is love and that a loving God does not punish. However, since this belief is held to be heretical by orthodox Christianity many people think that they are alone in their belief. Encountering someone like Ballou in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century did not convince them of universalism. It gave them permission to profess universalism. It helped them to recognize that they were not isolated in their beliefs.

I suspect Ballou’s circuit riding was a bit like the contemporary phenomenon of discovering people who are Unitarian Universalist without knowing it. Have you had this experience? It is a somewhat common one for Unitarian Universalist ministers. And I think it is a relatively common one for Unitarian Universalist lay folk as well. It runs something like this: You go out to coffee with a relatively new acquaintance. You chat about your friends and your families. Maybe you tell them about the foibles of your cat. Perhaps they share with you gardening tips. At some point, the conversation turns serious. You might not know how you got on the subject but suddenly you are discussing your core beliefs. You tell them you are a Unitarian Universalist. They say, “I have never heard of that.”

You explain. You might tell them that Unitarian Universalism is religious tradition that celebrates the possibility of goodness within each human heart, the transformative power of love, and the clarifying force of reason. You perhaps share that we offer to be a religious home for all wish to join us: welcoming the GLBT community, declaring that love has no borders, proclaiming that black lives matter, toiling to address the climate crisis, and struggling for democracy. It could be that you quote Unitarian Universalist author Laila Ibrahim:

It’s a blessing you were born
It matters what you do with your life.
What you know about god is a piece of the truth.
You do not have to do it alone.

Or perhaps it is that you cite Marta Valetin. She reminds us our world contains the good and the holy when she writes:

The golden present ever reaches for you
and wonders if you’ll come
to unwrap its gifts.

Whatever the case, your friend says to you, “Hey! That’s what I believe. I guess I was a Unitarian Universalist without knowing it.”

Now, what comes next? Do you invite your friend to come with you to First Houston?

I wonder what happened next in Ballou’s story. Did the farm family start a universalist church? Did they gather their friends together and form a small community of people who proclaimed, “God loves everyone, no exceptions?”

We do not know. But what we do know is that belief is not enough. We are called not just to believe in the power of God’s love. We are called to love the Hell out of the world. And if we serious about heeding that calling, we are called to build and sustain institutions like First Houston that empower us in our efforts to love the Hell out of the world. We cannot love the Hell out of the world by ourselves. We need others to do it with us.

I will return to the subject of the importance of building and sustaining institutions like First Houston at the end of the sermon. But, first, let us be honest, there is a lot of Hell in the world right now. For many of us, the current political situation seems bleak. The last several years have witnessed a steady erosion of democratic norms. And, as I have told you before, I fear the country to be sliding towards totalitarianism. Totalitarian states are organized around the personality of a charismatic leader who personifies the state’s power and projects a totalizing view of society. Totalitarian leaders might gloat, as the current President does, of leading a country with “unmatched power, strength, and glory” and boast to their enemies “if conflict comes—we will dominate the battlefield, and we will, win, win, win.” They might propose, as the President has in reference to immigration courts, “we should get rid of judges.”

Rather than respecting the rule of law, totalitarians concentrate power in the head of state–often following the maxim of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In efforts to consolidate power, pit the populace against itself, and stoke a climate of fear, totalitarian leaders identify a racial or minority group who are cast as representing an existential threat to the social order. They claim this group must be purged from the body politic for the health of the country.

Such logic has been present in the current administration’s Muslim ban and immigration policies. This past week the federal government extended it to seven new countries as part of the President’s policy of, in his words, creating “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He has portrayed Muslims as purveyors of terror who threaten the safety of country and who must be excluded to ensure its security.

He has further brutalized this country’s policy towards migrants launching what he has called a “zero tolerance” approach. This has been manifested in a family separation policy that has removed least 5,400 children from their parents–babies, toddlers, and adolescents all torn from their parents’ embracing arms. It has also been manifested in the expansion of what many scholars of totalitarianism have disturbingly named the concentration camps along the border. Concentration camps are not necessarily extermination camps, where people are sent to be killed, they are places where, in the words of philosopher Hannah Arendt, “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody.” They are locations where migrants are put out of sight so that their suffering will remain out of mind. And suffer they do, with more than thirty of them dying in governmental custody since the President took office.

At the same time, white supremacist terrorism has dramatically increased and there have been numerous mass shootings. The situation is a stark reminder that in a totalitarian regime no one is ever secure. People who live in a totalitarian society never know when or where violence will erupt. They only know that it is always possible for them to meet a terrible end at the hands of agents of the state, paramilitaries, or, today, supposedly lone actors whose violence is fueled by a shared white supremacist ideology. Arendt describes the phenomenon this way: in a totalitarian regime, “Terror strikes without any preliminary provocation… its victims… objectively innocent… chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.” In such a society, “nobody… can ever be free of fear.” It is hard to find better words to describe the epidemic of gun violence. In 2018 firearm deaths reached a fifty-year high, costing almost forty thousand lives. Meanwhile, as mosque shootings, synagogue massacres, temple invasions, and other hate crimes have shown, white supremacist violence has reached historic levels.

All of this has formed the background for what can only be described as an assault on democratic norms. Foreign actors have been invited to interfere with federal elections by the President himself. Ample evidence–including accounts by some of his former advisors–exists that he pressured the Ukrainian government to influence the upcoming election by investigating one of his political opponents. This evidence led to the House passing two articles of impeachment. A Senate trial has now taken place–a trial without evidence or witnesses, a trial whose results appear to be foreordained, a trial in which the President’s acquittal seems to be guaranteed.

The situation could be described as one of permanent emergency. This permanent emergency is a struggle over who shall rule. The coming years may well witness the further undermining of liberal democratic norms, the continuing erosion of the Voting Rights Act, an increase in gerrymandering, the appointment of two more reactionary Supreme Court justices, and the complete the normalization of white supremacist anti-human immigration policies. They might even pose an existential threat to humanity in the form of an administration that is committed to a denial of the climate emergency as the brief window to address it closes. The historical moment is evocative of George Orwell, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

The temptation in such a situation is to prepare, as more than one partisan has suggested, to go “all in” on the upcoming election. Now, I do not want dissuade anyone from mobilizing or participating in voter turnout and registration efforts. In fact, in the coming months I will be urging First Houston to participate in the campaign for the 2020 election that the Unitarian Universalist Association has named UU the Vote. But I also want to remind you that “going ‘all in’ is a gambling term” where, as activist Andrew Sernatinger warns, “you either win big or leave with nothing.”

Whatever happens in the upcoming election, and whatever side of the partisan divide you might fall on, we should not leave 2020 with nothing. Whoever wins the presidential contest the forces of love and justice should complete the year stronger than before.

One of the best ways we can do this is to live into the vision of our Universalist religious ancestors and commit ourselves to loving the Hell out of the world. It is to devote ourselves to building a beloved community that offers a foretaste of the world we dream about, a world where all are accepted and love is the organizing principle of the hour. Love has the power to create communities where isolation is vanquished. Love creates empathic bonds and inspires ideals that prove totalitarian narratives false. Loving bonds and loving communities, along with the loving truth that, to cite William Ellery Channing, we are each a “member of the great family of all souls,” are targeted by the totalitarians’ narratives of fears. But never yet, not in all of human history, have they been fully successful in completely breaking the traditions that foster love.

Khia’s moving testimonial of being welcomed by this congregation as a queer woman of color is a testament to the possibility of First Houston to live out a theology of love. Such a theology of love is why I am asking you to participate in this year’s stewardship campaign and support First Houston. As I said at the beginning of my sermon, in the Unitarian Universalist tradition churches are owned and governed by their members. Your financial gifts account for more than 75% of our annual income. This year we are hoping to raise $550,000 in pledges at the Museum District campus–a 10% increase from last year–so that we can continue to grow the congregation and our collective capacity to love the Hell out of the world. Committing to sustain and grow First Houston is one way that you can help ensure that no matter who wins the 2020 Presidential contest, no matter if the country as a whole continues its slide towards totalitarianism, there will continue to be religious communities where we teach that love is more powerful than hate. Where people can dream what historian Robin Kelley calls freedom dreams, 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.”

Just free… the theme of worship this month is imagination. It is imagination that reminds us that however imprisoned we might feel by the historical moment there is always the possibility of casting a larger vision where we might, in the words of our choral anthem, dream of “[s]oaring and spinning and touching the sky” like the “boy who picked up his feet to fly.”

It is the imagination that helps us envision what our congregation and Unitarian Universalism can become: a place where, in the words of Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism, we can go “when the task feels too great, when life is too much, and it’s all too heavy, we can stop, breathe and lean into each other.”

Imagination is tied to stewardship because it inspire us to envision how we can transform and sustain our religious community across time into a place devoted to loving the Hell out of the world, inspiring collective liberation, and dismantling white supremacy. Where we can come together and constitute here, in the city of Houston, a different sort of vision for the world than the one pedaled by hate mongers and white supremacists, a community where all are loved and welcomed be they migrant, Muslim, transgendered, cis-gendered, white, black, Latinx, indigenous, or any other member of the human family. In such a place we can embody a kind of democracy that inspires the rest of society. Such a vision is not absurd. The Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams observed our religious ancestors “considered their free church to be a model for a democratic” society. We might foster such an ideal again and love the Hell out of the world.

Is such a vision foolishness or unwarranted? Perhaps the boot that Orwell predicted will soon come grinding down. Perhaps we will prove incapable of imagining our community thus and living as the beloved community. I cannot answer that question. I can only assert that amongst the purposes of religious community is the gifting of hope. And it is my hope that somehow, somewhere, maybe even now, maybe even here, as we consider our annual stewardship drive, a new vision for this country and our world will arise among us. It may grow from the smallest of seeds and in the most unlikely of places: the streets where we mass to protest, the neighborhoods we live in, or in religious communities like ours.

In that spirit, I close with a parable about that old metaphor for the beloved community, for creating a space for loving the Hell out of the world, the Kingdom of God, as attributed to Jesus: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered… Other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

Whoever has ears, let them love the Hell out of the world.

Let the congregation to say Amen.

I am a bit late in posting this but here are the ten most popular blog posts from my blog in 2019:

1. “Letter to Demetrias” and “On the Possibility of Not Sinning,” Pelagius
2. Some Thoughts on Ministerial Tenure
3. In the Interim, May 2019
4. Statement from the University of Rojava
5. Minns Lecture Announcement
6. Black Humanism
7. Disrupting White Supremacy
8. Easter 2019
9. Collective Memory (Tree of Life sermon)
10. The Right Hand of Fellowship at the Ordination of Sarah Prickett

And, in case anyone is interested, here are the most popular blog posts of all time:

1. “Letter to Demetrias” and “On the Possibility of Not Sinning,” Pelagius
2. Minns Lecture Announcement
3. Starting as the Interim Senior Minister, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Greater Houston, Texas
4. Collective Memory (Tree of Life sermon)
5. Some Thoughts on Ministerial Tenure
6. The River May Not Be Turned Aside
7. A Tribute to the Rev. Kay Jorgensen
8. Abolition Democracy (Unity Temple)
9. President Trump’s Klan-like Rhetoric
10. Acknowledgements

Finally, my list from 2018 is available by clicking here.

Imagination is the theme for worship in February. February is Black History Month and the month we kick off First Houston’s annual stewardship drive. Imagination is central to both.

First Houston’s initial founding minister was the Universalist circuit rider Quillen Hamilton Shinn. He inspired the people who started First Houston to create a congregation that preached that God loved everyone without exception. It was a bold vision in the 1890s and it remains a bold one today. It provided the spark that started this congregation, a congregation that has done so much to bring Unitarian Universalism to Houston and Fort Bend County. What might our imaginations and our generosity bring in the future?

It is not an easy question to answer. And it is not a question that we can answer by ourselves. Unitarian Universalist congregations provide us with a space to collectively struggle with the question and imagine how we might best answer it. They are unique places where we can both imagine a different world, encounter the spiritual resources necessary to create one, and then come together to work to build one. And that brings me directly to stewardship.

Stewardship is the act of sustaining the community across the generations. We give money and time–sometimes reframed as our talents and treasure–to First Houston because we know that it gives our lives more spiritual depth and increases our collective capacity to love the Hell out of the world. We give money and time to First Houston because we want to see it continue into the future. We have the congregation because previous generations sustained it so that it might be here for us. Which is to say, they imagined that the congregation would have a future and then they set about creating that future through their generosity.

The theme of our stewardship campaign is “Loving the Hell Out of the World.” The phrase comes from the Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford who was inspired by the theology of our Universalist ancestors. In the words of the Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, “Our Universalists ancestors didn’t believe in hell, except for the ones we create here in this life. What would it mean to show up in the places where hell, where suffering and violence, persecution and inhumanity, prevail and to bring an active, powerful form of love that affirms dignity, liberation, and peace?” What would it mean, in other words, if we devoted ourselves to loving the Hell out of the world?

This brings me to the black radical imagination. Writing about the history of African American social movements, the historian Robin Kelley places what he calls the black radical imagination at the center of Black History. Over the course of last several hundred years, as people of color have resisted white supremacy, the black radical imagination has provided, in Kelley’s words, visions of “spaces where the energies of love and imagination are understood and respected as powerful social forces.” Such visions have been a crucial resource for building communities that are different in character and composition than the predominantly white and capitalist society that sustains white supremacy, is fueling the climate crisis and the global assault on democracy. Such visions are necessary if we are to devote ourselves to the great task of collective liberation.

Visions from the black radical imagination are one of the resources I look to when I attempt to imagine a future in which Hell has been loved out of the world. In Kelley’s words, it offers visions “of new social relationships, new ways of living and interacting, new attitudes toward work and leisure and community.” That is exactly what the world needs now and exactly what First Houston, at its very best, can offer. So, I hope you’ll join us throughout the month as we explore the imagination and begin our stewardship campaign.

Aiding us in our efforts this month are outstanding guest preachers. On February 9th Aisha Hauser will be returning to First Houston to preach “Leading with Love and Liberation.” And on February 16th we will be welcoming the Rev. Duncan Teague. He will be preaching on “‘Houston, We Have a Problem,’ When My Imagination Failed Me.”

During her time with us, Ms. Hauser will be leading two important workshops on February 8th. The morning’s workship will be on microagressions and the afternoon’s will be on bystander training. More information about both can be found on our website. I hope you can join us for both!

Sun Ra is a musician whose interstellar free form jazz invites listeners to imagine a universe where the destructive rules that govern our society have been overturned and hell has been loved out of the world. I offer a few of his words as my closing poem:

Imagination is a Magic carpet
Upon which we may soar
To distant lands and climes
And even go beyond the moon
To any in the sky
If we came from
nowhere here
Why can’t we go somewhere there?

love,

Colin