as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, April 6, 2025
“The yogurt is a veritable quagmire.”
Growing up in Michigan, my family belong to the East Lansing Food Cooperative. As the name suggests, it was a small cooperatively run grocery store. In exchange for a modest fee, members were entitled to a discount on produce, canned goods, spices, and the various other items the store sold.
If you volunteered to work a few hours a month or to serve on the Board you were entitled to a larger discount. So, my senior year of high school, probably fearing that I was at loose ends, my mother convinced me to volunteer.
I found myself laboring alongside the store’s regular employees. A cast of characters, they consisted of a number of the neighborhood’s more unconventional personalities. There was the former PhD student who had dropped out of the English department to consider the tomatoes. The aspiring folk musician, the devoted gardner with advice for every season, the inevitable marijuana enthusiast, they were all there.
The person I remember most clearly was a middle aged White guy named Tom. He had been working at the cooperative for as long as I could remember. He was an eccentric amongst eccentrics. He rarely gave a straight forward answer to questions. Ask where to find an item and he might reply, “Between the carrots and the cabbage, the broccoli!” Query after one of the coop’s many community events and he would say something like, “A gathering of guitars and their players on Wednesday there shall be.”
As a volunteer, Tom was my supervisor. Volunteers did not work the register or have regularly assigned duties. Instead, we helped out with whatever the waged workers did not have time for. This meant that at the start of my shift I would inevitably get instructions from Tom and these were … “The yogurt is a veritable quagmire.”
By this I was supposed to divine that the yogurt section of the dairy aisle was a mess. I was intended to understand that tidying it was going to be too time consuming for the ordinary employees to tend to. The phrase was his cryptic direction that I should walk to the back of the store and straighten it.
I think about Tom and the cooperative from time-to-time. The store was one of the places where I learned about what we might call common goods. The theologian Luke Bretherton offers a scholarly definition of their nature. They “are,” he writes, “irreducibly social … [and] can only be achieved and used in some of association. They have a moral end … their realization is not inherently dependent on the state.”
Social, moral, independent of the state, I will have more to say about the nature of common goods shortly. For now, it is perhaps enough to note that today is the launch of our annual stewardship campaign, “Creating Compassionate Community.” This morning, I am offering what we sometimes call the sermon on the amount. In it, I try to encourage to understand stewardship as a religious practice. It is how we build up and sustain the network of care and concern, the common good, we name the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. Each year, in my sermon, I attempt to inspire you to “give until it feels good,” as my predecessor Bob Schaibly used to say.
Give until it feels good, this year I have the pleasure of sharing that our campaign is off to a strong start. At the official launch of our effort, I can announce that thanks to the hard work of our Stewardship Team, we have already received more than $270,000 in pledges.
It is going to take all of us feeling inspired to reach our goal of $750,000. This is more than last year’s goal of $700,000. The ongoing reality of inflation makes the increase necessary to maintain our current level of operations.
The Stewardship Team has set a goal of 15 new pledges for this year’s campaign. Over the last couple of years, the number of you who participate in the life of our congregation has been steadily growing. I am hoping that some of you who have been regularly visiting with us will help us meet this goal. Our in-person Sunday morning attendance is up 11% from where it was last year. In the same time, our online participation has more than doubled. The last Sunday that I led the service we had over 450 households watch us online.
Our current membership consists of about 237 households. If only a fraction of you who watch us online pledge and a number of frequent visitors join you then we will completely blow past our stewardship goal. Total pledges of $750,000 will allow us to maintain our current level of programming. Imagine what we could do with an even larger pledge base! We say that our mission is widening love’s circle. I invite you to dream about all the ways we could widen it.
An increase in our pledge base would allow us to consider all sorts of new work together. We could seriously invest in outreach and share our message throughout the city. We could find ways to expand our Spanish language ministry. It is one of the only Unitarian Universalist ones in North America. We could grow our campus ministry. Artie Throop has done a great job establishing it working just five hours a week. We could increase our musical offerings. What about a children’s choir? We could deepen our social justice efforts. Last autumn, we registered almost 1,000 new voters, think about what we might be able to do with dedicated social justice staff.
Making a pledge and joining a Unitarian Universalist congregation, any Unitarian Universalist congregation, but particularly this one, is about making a decision to build a common good. It is stating that you will take on the sacred responsibility of helping to maintain an institution devoted to nurturing what binds us together. That is how I often define religion, it is what binds us together.
When you become a member you are deciding to be bound by our covenant. This means taking love as the spirit of your life. It signifies devoting yourself to the collective of building up, rather than tearing down, the world. It symbolizes a commitment to seeking truth wherever you might find it and following it wherever it might lead you. And it is a promise to encourage the other members of our religious community in the pursuit of these things.
There are few other communities in the city of Houston that invite you into such an opportunity. The Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams spent much of his career studying what happens when we take such opportunities seriously. He was interested in how European countries transformed from feudal societies, controlled by a few nobles and monarchs, to democratic ones concerned not with the rights and wealth of the few but rather the needs of the many.
He concluded that religious communities which refused to be incorporated into the apparatus of the state religion had “made a decisive contribution to the achievement of freedom of association and … to the development of modern democracy.” The technical terms for these communities are either nonconforming or dissenting. Like my friend Tom from the grocery cooperative, they refused to conform to the prevailing social and, in their case, religious norms. Like many of us today they dissented from the teachings of the state religion.
For make no mistake, in Texas we have a state religion. If you doubt me just consider our legislature’s retrograde decision to limit women’s reproductive healthcare and outlaw abortion. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has said that his motivation for wanting to do so was based on “being a Christian.” He has said, “I listen to God on this issue” and legislated from the belief that his God is the God of all of us.
From this, we dissent. We dissent because it violates the separation of church and state. We dissent because it undermines the freedom of religion and the freedom of conscience. We dissent because it has turned our state into a theocracy where women are ruled by people who believe in a particular kind of God. I do not want to be ruled by Dan Patrick’s God. I do not want to be governed by a God who blesses a politician who openly peddles white supremacist conspiracy theories on Fox News. I do not want politicians turned priests to be directed by a God who seeks to control women and suppress the LGBTQ+ community. I suspect that you do not want to be governed by such deities and such people either. We dissent.
Adams linked such dissent to the building up of “political democracy.” He noted that in our religious communities–because in England our congregation were very much Nonconforming and Dissenting ones–people learned about the power “of local autonomy, of universal suffrage and the protection of the minority.” They learned these things, they practiced them in their religious community, and then they began to demand that they be present in the rest of society.
We find ourselves making similar demands today. We are living in a time when we have a President who would be a king. We are in a moment where an unelected Afrikaner is, in the words of journalist Meagan Day, “deliberating sabotaging federal agencies to make way for privatization.” We are in an era when those in power are working hard to make the rest of us poorer. For make no mistake, the President’s $6 trillion in tariffs are a regressive tax. We will bear them every time we go to the grocery and whenever we buy a car, an appliance, or make a major purpose. They will be used to justify tax cuts for the rich and fund a repressive government devoted to being cruel to immigrants, dismantling civil rights, despoiling the environment and furthering the climate crisis, and rebuilding and expanding white supremacy.
From this, I am pretty sure that we dissent. I know that I do. And I believe that many of you do as well. Yesterday, I was present at the largest protest I have witnessed in Houston–with the exception of the George Floyd protests–since I moved here. Some 6,000 people turned out at City Hall to declare “Hands Off” our government to the looter-in-chief.
A lot of you were there. Such mobilizations are a good thing. They can make us feel less alone, more connected. They can demonstrate to the powers and principalities of the hour that they do not have the support of the majority of people. But if there is anything we have learned in the last years it is that such mobilizations are not enough. They are never enough. They need to be followed by organization. They have to be accompanied by the creation of common goods.
Common goods, I said earlier, are social, moral, and independent of the state. They are social because we create them and sustain them together. First Unitarian Universalist only exists because of its members and the generations of devoted congregants who came before us. It is only because of the hard work and generosity of our members that we have this religious community, devoted as it is to widening love’s circle.
The same was true of the grocery store cooperative. It only existed because its members.
But common goods like Unitarian Universalist congregations and cooperatives are social in another way. They provide us a way to live out a common life. They provide us places where we can more fully develop our humanity than we might be able to in other contexts. Here at First Unitarian Universalist that means not just encouraging democratic practice or the pursuit of religious truth. It means welcoming each other in the fullness of our shared humanity–no matter our gender, race, economic class, sexual orientation, age, or abilities. At the cooperative it meant creating a community open to anyone interested in affordable food and organic produce. Alternative forms of communication were even supported, “The yogurt is a veritable quagmire.”
Common goods are also moral. They are devoted to a vision of how the world should be, rather than the way that it is. Often, they are created when what we might call public goods have been distorted or destroyed. Dissenting congregations emerged in England because the Anglican Church of the seventeenth century would not make room for the freedom of conscience or religious belief. Its leaders demanded that clergy sign an oath to the Anglican vision of theology. When our religious ancestors refused they were ejected or kicked out of the Anglican Church. So, they formed new, dissenting communities where freedom of belief was treasured rather than targeted.
Likewise, the grocery cooperative was started in the 1970s when the rise of big grocery stores and large agricultural combines made it harder and harder to find food that was not laden with chemicals. The lack of easily available quality vegetables prompted people to come together to establish their own store that contained a moral vision of good groceries that working people could afford.
The moral visions contained within common goods can be a great treasury at a time like ours when the larger public goods are being destroyed. As the Afrikaner, the President, and their allies attempt to unravel democracy we can recommit to practicing it. The historian E. P. Thompson noted that dissenting religious communities “preserved in the imagery of sermons and tracts and in democratic forms of organization” democratic practice in England after the restoration of the monarchy sought to undermine it.
The poet Tu Fu wrote about his own efforts to create and maintain some form of a moral vision through the common good of his garden. He lived when China was in chaos and the government had largely fallen apart. Still, he knew that there was almost always at least a modest gesture of a common good he could offer. He wrote:
When someone calls at my thatched hut
My son brings me my straw hat
And I go out to gather
A handful of fresh vegetables.
It isn’t must to offer.
But is given in friendship.
Given in friendship, Tu Fu’s gesture is a reminder that common goods are independent of the state. They do not come from the government. We create them amongst ourselves. At a time when the current administration is doing all it can to dismantle higher education–a good partially dependent upon the state–we should remember this. It is a reminder of the power and potential of our common good, the First Universalist Church of Houston. In a time when free speech is under a vicious attack we can collectively maintain the freedom of our pulpit and the freedom of our shared discourse. Few other institutions might be fully able to do so.
This independence from the state means that common goods like Unitarian Universalist congregations and grocery cooperatives are fragile things. They rely upon their membership to sustain them. And when that does not happen, well, unfortunately, my childhood grocery cooperative offers a cautionary tale. About a decade ago it was driven out of business by the careful placement of a Whole Foods next door. In the face of a new, fancy, spot to shop not enough of its members maintained a devotion to its larger moral vision.
First Unitarian Universalist is nowhere near such a state. But like almost any other religious community we are not blessed with infinite resources. Every year it is a challenge to balance the budget and continue to provide all of our vital programs. Last year we came close to having to layoff a member of the staff. It is only because of your generosity we able to avoid that.
That statement is about as fire-and-brimstone as I get during tese sermons on the amount. I do not get up here like Marvin Sapp and close the doors of the sanctuary until everyone turns in their pledge cards. Nor do I hold forth like the Rev. Ed Cash–Cash Money–and the Rev. Dr. Carl Pathos from the old Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans sketch. In their skit they tell a congregation they are going to keep talking “about tithing” until they “get it right.” And when the congregation does not get it right … well, Carrey and Wayans tell them, “we tried to do it the Lord’s way, now we’re gonna do it the good old 125th Street and Seventh Avenue way.” Brandishing guns they say, “Give us the money! Pay the Lord!”
Instead, I think I will just thank all of you who have made a commitment to support our congregation. And leave you with a few of Tom’s cryptic words, that you might interpret in the light of the rest of the sermon, “The yogurt is a veritable quagmire.” Or maybe better, because I think that this is what he actually meant, it is you the members of the cooperative that make this place strong, not us the staff. Just as it is the members of this congregation that make it the wonderful common good that it is. It is only with your support that we can widen love’s circle. The staff cannot do it alone. The yogurt is a veritable quagmire indeed!
