as preached Sunday, March 1, 2026, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
If I am killed too, I want to write that I was neither a martyr of the regime nor a supporter of Israel and America. I just wanted to live. I did not want to be killed for anything.
I just wanted to live; I did not want to be killed for anything. The words were posted on the Instagram account iranrevolution.info. Describing itself as “autonomous, intersectional, anti-fascist,” it collects, and translates from Persian, the testimonies and videos of those struggling against the Iranian regime. Today and yesterday, it broadcast a simple message, freedom “cannot be bombed into existence.”
Freedom cannot be bombed into existence, this morning I awoke to the news that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was definitely dead. A brutal man, responsible for ordering the deaths of tens of thousands, stifling democracy, subjugating women, it is difficult to mourn his passing.
But the end of his life is unlikely to bring either peace or democracy. Foreign acts of intervention rarely leave the countries better off. The United States efforts at regime change in Iraq left perhaps 600,000 dead and perhaps 2 million as refugees. The twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan saw around 200,000 killed, another 2 million refugees, and ended with the Taliban back in power.
The United States has been meddling in Iranian politics since the middle of the last century. In 1953, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom joined forces to oust the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. He had dared to nationalize the Iranian oil industry so that its profits could be used to build up the country’s infrastructure and social services. In place the United States and its allies left the Shah. The country’s titular monarch he soon became a brutal authoritarian and savagely crushed dissent. He was overthrown in 1979 in a revolution that eventually brought the now dead Khamenei to power. It now seems that many of the same forces that supported the Shah are not hoping for democracy. They are aspiring to install his son as the ruler of Iran, a new Shah.
The future is unwritten. I have no idea what will happen. My prayers for democracy and peace. I aspire to live in a world where the brave people who have been protesting the Iranian regime are the ones who come to power. How I, or you, or we, can support them is an open question. The most we can probably do in this moment is to try and amplify their voices and listen to what they say.
Listening to their liberation movements, I hear words such as, “Liberation is built from within–by those who bear the consequences long after foreign states move on.” And statements like, “no foreign power or exiled figure has any role to play in the future of … [our] country. History does not reset because a dictator falls.”
Most political scientists would agree. They would point to the truth that since the end of World War II most liberation movements that have brought about more democratic, more peaceful, and more prosperous societies have been homegrown efforts–not entities aligned with great powers pursuing their own economic and political interests.
Scholars would tell us another thing, one which possibly strikes closer to home. They would inform us that foreign military adventures increase repression at home. “War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion … irresistible forces for uniformity … [and coercion] into obedience [of] the minority groups” who demand peace, is how Randolph Bourne put it more than a century ago. The tactics, and in many instances the weaponry, that federal agents have deployed against peaceful protestors in Minneapolis and elsewhere were partially developed as so-called counterinsurgency measures overseas.
“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest … of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.” “We are all bound up together,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s words speak something of the dynamic between foreign adventures and domestic oppression. “We are all bound up together,” Harper was a nineteenth-century abolitionist, novelist, suffragist, and Unitarian. “We are all bound up together,” she could not have imagined the kind of bombing campaign that has been unleashed against Iran. But Harper did understand something fundamental about the nature of humanity. We are all profoundly interconnected.
A conductor on the Underground Railroad, perhaps the first author of a novel by an African American woman, the most popular Black writer from the United States for much of the nineteenth-century, it is Harper’s name we lift up today in celebration of Women’s History month.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, we call her name out of the great cloud of witness today. We call out her name as we return again to our ongoing exploration of what it means to be a dissenting tradition. Religious dissent, I have shared before, is found whenever the separation between church and state breaks down. As soon as the government starts to stipulate what we believe and how we worship dissenting religious communities emerge.
There are religious dissenters in Iran today. Many of them probably oppose both the regime and the bombing campaign. Here, in Texas, there can be little question that we Unitarian Universalists are religious dissenters. From illegal wars, waged without congressional authorization and outside of the strictures of international law, we dissent. From Christian Nationalists who outlaw women’s reproductive health, we dissent. From religious white supremacists who legislatively target Islamic communities, we dissent. From evangelicals of intolerance who demand that our schools post their biblically illiterate translations of the Ten Commandments, we dissent. From those who claim to speak in the name of the divine and make laws to define gender as binary but fail to understand that the divine himself, herself, themself, is beyond human categories and human reckoning, we dissent.
We dissent. Or, at least, I dissent. I suspect that you might too. But, in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, the preacher’s voice is neither the first nor the last in the chorus. It is merely another crackle in the great tempestuous cloud of witnesses of which we are all a part. Our Unitarian Universalist value of pluralism reminds us of this when it calls us “to learn from one another in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
It is possible that from my list of dissent, well, you dissent. One of the strengths of our covenant is that it calls us together across difference. It is a strength that comes, as our Unitarian Universalist values state, from putting love at the center. It is a strength at which we arrive from our commitment, as a congregation, to widen love’s circle. It is a strength that we uncover when we understand that in the phrase “all bound up together” all has to truly mean all.
We are all bound up together. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this reality when he told, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” It is a difficult statement, especially in this era of climate crisis and rising white supremacy when it has become impossible to escape the truth that all being is interrelated. It is a challenging sentiment, especially when you remember that he told us, during another questionable war, the “bombs in Vietnam explode at home–they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America.” It is like he wanted us to know, “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. … I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”
I can never be what I ought to be, we are all bound up together. We Unitarian Universalists do not dissent for mere contrarian pleasure–the devil’s advocate is, after all, in the devil’s employ. We oppose those things that we understand stifle human life and prevent each from growing into what William Ellery Channing called “the likeness to God,” the highest potential we are each born with. “We wrestle … against principalities and powers,” is how James Luther Adams put it.
We wrestle against powers and principalities; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s name did not used to be spoken among us as much as it should be. A Black woman, she was relegated to what Mark Morrison-Reed once called “the black hole in the white Unitarian Universalist psyche.”
That black hole is the inability that some White Unitarian Universalists have historically had to understand that our faith tradition has been multiracial since its inception. Origen of Alexandria, that early advocate of universalism, Arius, that ancient proponent of antitrinitarianism, both North African men. Gloster Dalton, a Black freeman, back in 1779 he was a founding member of the first Universalist congregation in the United States. Robert Wedderburn, over in London, some seventeen years before Channing delivered his sermon in Baltimore preaching “Unitarian Christianity,” the Unitarian minister Robert Wedderburn, born of an enslaved mother, was declaring the Trinity to be a doctrinal, extra biblical, error–a statement we can equally apply to today’s peddlers of religious inflected gender essentialism and anti-LGBTQIA hate.
Origen, Arius, Dalton, Wedderburn, in a sermon before she was our association’s president, Sofía Betancourt preached that such figures represented “a missing remnant in the fabric of our collective future.” Building her text off Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s words, “we are all bound up together in our great bundle of humanity,” Betancourt taught that our future dreamings are shaped by our past imaginings. When we make the mistake of thinking of the our theological forebearers as all White, as has often been the case; when we conceive of our congregations as incapable of becoming multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual; or, as is the danger with Iran now, when we forget to seek out and uplift the dissenting voices at the margins, we end up with a far lesser religious tradition. Something of the vibrancy and potential of life gets lost. It becomes harder to imagine the way out of our predicament, easier to succumb to despair, and more difficult to understand that liberation must be collective. We will only ever truly get free together.
We will only ever truly get free together. The black hole at the center of the White Unitarian Universalist psyche has been challenged for a long time. Harper sought to eliminate it when she brought Unitarian theology into her four novels. Her works were circulated widely in African American communities, serialized in newspapers and responded to in pulpits. In them she offered a theological perspective that blended Channing’s Unitarian Christianity with the abolitionist concerns of a brilliant woman targeted by white supremacy.
In one, she placed White male sexual violence against women at the center of white supremacist power structures. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, as we witness constant revelations from the files of the President’s former best friend Jeffrey Epstein, such an observation seems nothing short of prophetic.
In another, she argued–some forty years before the great W.E.B. Du Bois–that during the Civil War enslaved people largely freed themselves. She demonstrated in her historical fiction how Black soldiers played the essential role in the defeat of the Confederacy.
Throughout, she uplifted the fundamentally Unitarian perspective, that “there are no solvents as potent as love and justice.” In doing so, she called for “a religion replete with life and glowing with love.” These are words that could well have come from this pulpit or could be found in one of Sofía Betancourt’s sermons.
Harper embodied them in her community organizing. Almost a hundred years before Rosa Parks, she refused to give up her seat on a streetcar in Philadelphia to a White person. While her action did not result in desegregation of public transportation, it should remind us that the work of dissent is a multigenerational affair. What we dream in one generation might be realized in the next. Those powers and principalities that we dissent from today might be overcome tomorrow.
We dissent, we dream, the need to center voices like Harper’s in our tradition, and to listen to the voices of dissidents in Iran, is one reason why our congregation voted a few years ago to adopt the proposed Eighth Principle. While the principle has now largely been absorbed into the new statement of values that our religious association adopted a couple of years ago, it is still a statement of our congregation’s aspirations. It reads, in part, that we “covenant to affirm and promote: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.”
The Board is in the process of establishing a committee that will empower our community to dig deeply into that transformative work. This morning, I have been suggesting one aspect of that effort: uncovering and centering dissenting voices that have been pushed to the margins. There are many others. But the centering of dissenting voices is particularly important today, not only as we honor our religious ancestor Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, but as the United States and Israel bomb Iran in the name of regime change. We are called to ask what do grassroots movements for liberation in Iran–people who share our value of placing love at the center–want? How can we find their voices? What can we do to amplify them? We are challenged to ask these questions even as we ask another one, how does our understanding of who we are as Unitarian Universalists change when we recognize that voices like that of Harper, Origen, Arius, Dalton, and Wedderburn are at the center of religious dissent, not the periphery?
How does our understanding of who we are change when we recognize that Harper was at the center of our tradition of religious dissent? I do not end there. Instead, I close with a challenge and a refrain. The challenge, as the bombing of Iran continues, as an illegal war proceeds, is to seek out dissenting voices. The Instagram site iranrevolution.info is one. The news program Democracy Now! will point you to others.
The refrain, another voice from Iran:
If something happens and I do not survive the war, I was only a victim–not a martyr of the war against global imperialism and Zionism, not a defender of the homeland. I was not a gift to the homeland nor anything else. I was only a victim–a victim.
May we hear such words and do what we can to create a more peaceful, more beautiful world. It is possible to build such a world. Let the congregation say, Amen.
