as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, January 11, 2026
Today, Unitarian Universalist pulpits across the country are almost unanimously united in expounding on the same subject: the death of Renee Nicole Good. Most are likely describing her extrajudicial killing on the streets of Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent as murder.
That is not how the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Homeland Security or their sycophantic media are depicting the event. All have offered accounts of it that are directly at odds with bystanders’ videos. They claim that the federal agent who killed Good was acting in self-defense and that her demise was mere justifiable homicide.
While the video that I have seen makes it appear that Good was murdered, it is probable that there will never be a definitive legal answer to what happened. Federal officials have taken control of the investigation into her death. They have seized the relevant evidence held by local law enforcement.
The popular idiom has long been it takes a thief to catch a thief. In this instance, I fear it is going to be a case of, it takes a federal official to spuriously exonerate a federal official.
Unitarian Universalists across the country are outraged at both Good’s death and the federal government’s despicable response. On Friday the President of our religious association, the Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt, issued a statement decrying both Good’s loss of life and the shooting of two people in Portland, Oregon, by a Border Patrol agent. After denouncing these “acts of state violence” and reminding us that they “are not isolated incidents, but the result of policies that criminalize immigration and enforce borders through fear, surveillance, and force,” Betancourt then challenged us to remember the best parts of our tradition. She wrote, “we are called by love to tell the truth about this violence … and to keep organizing toward fulfilling the promise … to make safety, belonging, and freedom real for all.”
To make safety, belonging, and freedom real for all, there is something about our situation and Betancourt’s words that remind me of a saying invoked by the philosopher and political organizer Angela Davis shortly after the murder of Trayvon Martin. She said, “freedom is a constant struggle.”
Before the awful news of the week–a statement that it seems applies to almost every week in Donald Trump’s America–I had planned a service devoted to the constancy of that struggle. I intended to offer you a sermon focusing on summoning forth the spirit of our religious ancestor, the Massachusetts Senator, abolitionist, and Unitarian, Charles Sumner.
W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps the greatest philosopher the United States has yet to produce, named Sumner a “seer of democracy” and called him a “magnificent figure.” He held Sumner to be the principle proponent of “abolition-democracy.”
Du Bois coined the term to distinguish the authentic democracy of the abolitionists from the false democracy of white supremacist slave holders. Abolition-democracy, Du Bois, held, was “based on freedom, intelligence, and power for all.”
Freedom, intelligence, and power for all, abolition democrats Sumner demanded full human rights for the formerly enslaved. They also demanded what we might now call reparations for slavery. They recognized that political freedom is essentially meaningless without economic autonomy. When your entire livelihood is dependent upon some landlord or employer it can seem impossible to vote and act for your own interests.
Alongside political freedom and economic independence, abolition democrats worked for a third thing: universal free public education. We will be reflecting upon that next week when we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and I share with you some of what I have learned about Mike Miles’s–which is to say Governor Abbott’s–effort to destroy the Houston Independent School District.
In the meantime, I will only note that abolition democrats like Charles Sumner understood that in order for democracy to function community members had to be educated enough to identify and advocate for their own interests. They had to be able to distinguish truth from falsehood, knowledge from propaganda. They needed to, no let me rephrase that, we need to be able to be wise enough to understand that when someone like the Secretary of Homeland Security spreads what appears to be a falsehood she is doing so for political reasons.
Her apparent perfidious pronouncement, that Renee Nicole Good was engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism” by trying to run over federal agents when one of them shot her, is an effort to stifle dissent. It turns a woman of good conscience into, in the Vice President’s words, a “deranged leftist.” It casts someone who desired to protect other members of society from the brutality of the federal government as an irrational individual with a mental disorder. In doing so, it suggests that anyone, you, me, Good, the president of our religious association, late night host Jimmy Kimmel, all those who objected to the comparison between a crass peddler of white supremacy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., everyone who speaks from love and demands human rights for all, is, at the very least, not quite right in the head and more probably a traitor.
The true traitors have always been the ones who advocate for the false democracy of white supremacy. Their perspective can be summarized by a phrase from Thucydides that has been used to invoke the President’s dangerous approach to, and tenuous grasp on, foreign policy. The ancient Greek, recounting how his fellow Athenians brutalized the citizens of the island Melos, stated, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
False advocates of democracy sometimes attempt to dress their base impulses up in the language of constitutional government, self-determination, or freedom. In Charles Sumner’s day White men like Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney made the absurd claim that African Americans “are not included … under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” He did so despite the fact that free born African Americans had likely voted to ratify the founding document in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina. He did so despite the fact that the authors of the Constitution had explicitly rejected the idea that citizenship should only be limited to White people in the Articles of Confederation, intentionally choosing the language of “free inhabitants” over “free white inhabitants.”
Any time abolitionist democrats hear the false advocates of democracy use the language of the constitution, self-determination, or freedom we can be relatively certain that they are getting ready to brutalize people. As a friend of mine once told me, whenever the false advocates of democracy “start talking about freedom I start looking around for the exits.”
Much of the history of this country is the history of a contest between the proponents of abolition-democracy and the false advocates of democracy. Freedom, as Angela Davis said, is a constant struggle. What abolition democrats gain in one generation, the false advocates of democracy–who maybe I should just call white supremacists–try to take away in the next.
Freedom is a constant struggle, our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that if we are to place love at the center then we must ever challenge the false advocates of democracy. It tells us that when we invoke phrases like side with love or widening love’s circle we should be aware of the kind of love we are summoning. You may have heard me cite the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky before on this point. He wrote, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
“Love in action is a hard and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams,” now I do not know all of the details surrounding Renee Nicole Good’s death. Information about who she was and about what she was doing on the streets of Minneapolis is still emerging. But I am certain that she provide us with a terrifying example of love in action.
We know she was a legal observer who was out in the snow and cold to document, and stop, ICE’s brutalization of immigrants. We know that she was heartbroken by that families are being separated. We know she was devastated by the deportation, sometimes to their deaths, of mothers, fathers, sisters, daughters, sons, husbands, wives, children, and babies. We know she was outraged that in 2025 at least 32 people died in ICE custody–the highest number since the agency’s founding.
We are going to say their names: Genry Ruiz Guillén, Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, Maksym Chernyak, Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez, Brayan Garzón-Rayo, Nhon Ngoc Nguyen, Marie Ange Blaise, Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado, Jesus Molina-Veya, Johnny Noviello, Isidro Pérez, Tien Xuan Phan, Chaofeng Ge, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Oscar Rascon Duarte, Santos Banegas Reyes, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, Norlan Guzman-Fuentes, Miguel Ángel García Medina, Huabing Xie, Leo Cruz-Silva, Hasan Ali Moh’D Saleh, Josué Castro Rivera, Gabriel Garcia Aviles, Kai Yin Wong, Francisco Gaspar-Andrés, Pete Sumalo Montejo, Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani, Jean Wilson Brutus, Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, and Nenko Stanev Gantchev.
We say their names. We say their names and include Keith Porter, who was killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve. We say their names and add Renee Nicole Good’s name to the litany. We say all their names because it was system that killed Good, a system that deprecates the lives of people of color even while it centers the lives of rich White men. We say their names because we cannot let our outrage rest on the death of a White woman. Instead, we say with our Unitarian Universalist Association, that “every person is inherently worthy.”
Every person is inherently worthy, Renee Nicole Good died demanding that the life of the ICE agent who shot her and the life of the person that agent was planning to deport be held as equally worthy. Making that demand in the face of the false advocates of democracy, that is a form of love in action. As we grieve Good, as we mourn the thirty two people who died in ICE’s custody last year–and how many more have simply disappeared–we are all forced to wrestle with the question, what we will risk for love?
What we will risk for love, the poet Amanda Gorman, penned a tribute to Good upon learning of her death. She wrote:
Change is only possible,
& all the greater,
When the labour
& bitter anger of our neighbors
Is moved by the love
& better angels of our nature.
Change is only possible when we are moved by love and the better angels of our nature. That last phrase comes from Abraham Lincoln. He offered them as the nation careened towards Civil War. Seven states, including our own state of Texas, had already voted to secede. Not satisfied with Chief Justice Taney’s disingenuous interpretation of the Constitution, they made declarations of intent about the Confederacy they wanted to form. “This Union was formed by white men, and for the protection and happiness of their race,” proclaimed one father of new Southern nation.
Charles Sumner wanted no part in such a country. He believed that a nation that limited citizenship to White men should not exist. Animated by the Unitarian Universalist value that everyone is inherently worthy, which he found articulated in the great promissory note of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” he dreamed of a country in which human rights would extend to all.
Sumner’s name should be known in every household. Since it is not, I want to give you the barest sketch of his significance. Born on January 6, 1811, he was a lifelong member of King’s Chapel, one of the oldest Unitarian churches in Boston. Motivated, in part, by the Unitarian theology of the day, which the historian Henry Adams once summarized as the belief that leading “a virtuous, useful, unselfish life”–in other words placing love at the center–was the key to “salvation,” he was a seminal civil rights lawyer, politician, and master moral rhetorician.
He coined the phrase, “equality before the law.” In 1849 he mounted a legal argument against the segregation of Boston public schools that was so powerful that Thurgood Marshall would later invoke it in his successful brief in Brown v. Board of Education. He named the false advocates of democracy the “slave oligarchy”–a reminder that this country has long suffered under oligarchs–and inspired Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The role he played in the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution was instrumental. Civil rights legislation he authored in the mid-1870s was so far seeing that it later became the basis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
More than anything he placed love and truth at the center all of things. “Every clause and every line and every word of the Constitution,” he declared, “is to be interpreted uniformly for human rights.” I know we like to lift up Theodore Parker–he who sheltered people running away from slavery, organized assaults on jails holding the enslaved, armed John Brown for his raid on Harper’s Ferry, inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.’s phrase “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice,” and invited us to pray, “Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere”–I know we like to celebrate Parker as our great abolitionist religious ancestor but I think we need to celebrate Sumner too.
Sumner had an answer to the question, what we will risk for love? His answer was everything, everything. For him, love demanded speaking the truth. In his time, that truth meant insisting that the promissory note in the Declaration of Independence be deemed true, that slavery be abolished, and that everyone be held to be equal. The true greatness of the nation, he believed, came when we recognized that “Equality in rights is the first of rights.”
Just as importantly, the truth that love demanded called for him to name the slave oligarchs for what they were, false advocates of democracy who pretended to uphold the Constitution even while they subverted it. If Sumner was alive today, he would be calling ICE what it is, a militia unanswerable to no one but the President and devoted to terrorizing the populace–not just immigrants but anyone who might oppose the brutality of the party in power.
In his day, he spoke the truth so forcefully that white supremacist Senators feared his voice on the floor of the Senate. At the beginning of 1856 he gave a speech so powerful that their supporters conspired to silence him. That speech was “The Crime Against Kansas.” In it, Sumner objected to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which opened the possibility that slavery would be legalized in Kansas.
The speech placed love at the center and called slavery “an arrogant denial of Human Rights”–we might use the same words to describe the actions of ICE today. It demanded that liberty, justice, and happiness be extended to all. It held that slavery could not be extended to Kansas because there was, in Sumner’s words, “absolutely nothing in the constitution out of which Slavery can be derived”–just as there is absolutely nothing in the constitution out of which the powers that the current President is centralizing in himself can be derived.
The speech was a forceful constitutional argument. In it Sumner also claimed that Senators from the South were consciously conspiring against the nation’s founding document. He had, as they say, the receipts for that claim but because the speech was five hours long and we are running short on time I will move on to what made the speech truly dangerous to the false advocates of democracy. In it he named, for the first time on the floor of the United States Senate, slavery for what it was, a brutal system based in sexual exploitation. In a sort of Epstein files before the Epstein files, Sumner labeled Andrew Butler, a Senator from South Carolina and slave holder, as a systematic perpetrator of sexual violence. The man’s wife had died, and he kept an enslaved mistress, with whom he had fathered two enslaved children. Calling Senator Butler, “polluted in the sight of the world,” Sumner argued that a central wish of the slave oligarchs of the nineteenth century was, just as it appears to be a central wish of the oligarchs of the twenty first century, to have license for sexual assault.
It is difficult to speak such things in church. Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing. In Sumner’s time it demanded that he call the slave oligarchs what they were. In our time it calls us to name our own oligarchs as the misogynist exploiters that they appear to be.
Sumner’s speech outraged the slave oligarchs. Butler’s cousin, Representative Preston Brooks and his friends conspired to have their revenge upon Sumner for daring to place love at the center and speak the truth. Claiming that the code of Southern honor, the idea that gentlemen should protect their reputations against those who spoke ill of them, had to be upheld, Brooks went onto the floor of the Senate with a sturdy cane. Calling Sumner’s speech a “libel,” despite it being full of truth, Brooks brutally attacked the Senator from Massachusetts. He struck Sumner before he had a chance to defend himself.
It took Sumner two years to recover from his injuries. The horror experienced galvanized the abolitionist movement. It helped inspire them to organize a new antislavery political party, one that would soon see Abraham Lincoln elected President and eventually see chattel slavery abolished.
Sumner was left permanently maimed. He suffered from what we would now call PTSD for the rest of his life. He never regained all his physical strength. The assault probably helped hasten Sumner’s death at the age of 64. But even if it did it did not stop him from authoring and inspiring some of the most consequential legislation in this country’s history, legislation that placed love at the center and represents some of the true greatness of the nation—the vision of equal rights for all.
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing; Charles Sumner he risked everything for love—he sought to realize the true greatness of the nature and ensure equal rights for all. Renee Nicole Good, she risked everything for love—she wanted a country in which everyone (undocumented immigrant, legal residence, citizen, everyone) can experience safety, belonging, and real freedom.
Of him, a poet sang:
Oh friend beloved, with longing, tear-filled eyes
We look up, up to the unclouded blue,
And seek in vain some answering sign from thee.
Look down upon us, guide and cheer us still
Of her, a poet sang:
You could believe departed to be the dawn
When the blank night has so long stood.
But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone,
When they forever are so fiercely Good.
Of us, in these times, when false advocates of democracy, when oligarchs seek to consolidate power and ICE roams the streets, what shall the poets sing? What will we risk for love?
That we might answer the question wisely, I invite the congregation to say, Amen.
