as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, September 15, 2024
Have you ever played peek-a-boo with an infant? Hands over your eyes, move one hand, move the other, and then, “peek-a-boo!” Done right and there are sure to be peals of laughter. If you’re particularly lucky, you might even prompt early words like, “again!” “Peek-a-boo!”
Even before we speak, we humans play games.
This does not make us unique. All mammals play games. The cats in our house remind me of this regularly.
A few months ago, Sadé brought home a black-and-white tuxedo kitten. We named him Bagel. He is a companion to Biscuit, the tuxedo cat Asa and I brought with us from Massachusetts.
Biscuit and Bagel spend a lot of time playing. I have named some of their games. There is King of Mountain. This is when one cat gets on top of something–usually a cardboard box–and dares the other one to push him off.
There is Sumo. This takes place on the rug nearest our blue couch. It is a wrestling game. The winner is the one who succeeds in forcing the other one off the rug and under the couch.
Predator and Prey is a favorite team sport. It involves our dog, Afro. She is an unwitting player. The cats hide behind a couch, a corner, or someplace else they think she cannot see them.
When she walks by, they jump out. They take a swat. She marches on. I think that they imagine themselves to be lions. I suspect that they picture poor Afro as a gazelle. She ignores their game.
I do not speak cat, though I think I understand a bit of purr. I have no idea what Biscuit and Bagel call their games. Maybe they have complicated names and well thought out rules that are rigorously spelled in cat pheromones. Perhaps there is a detailed point system. A successful bop on the dog’s flank is worth ten points, a daring tap on her nose is worth twenty, and so forth. I do not know.
In my labelling of cat games, I have hinted at a central aspect of human playfulness: the imagination. “[People] are always dreaming, are always visioning things,” taught the writer Covington Hall. “[M]usic and poetry, sculpture and painting and architecture … was all but a dream once,” he continued.
People are always dreaming, always visioning things, this program year we have organized our major sermon series around the power of the imagination. It is titled, “Future Visions, Future Selves.” Once a month, between now and June, we are going to explore some aspect of the future.
This autumn, we will focus on the future of society. It is a presidential election year. We have fifty days until the votes start getting counted. During that time, the two major party candidates and their acolytes will be trying to get the rest of us to imagine what the country, and the world, will look like under their leadership. In this exercise, they will be joined by innumerable pundits, academics, community organizers, minor party candidates, and ordinary voters. Everyone is joined together in a game of imagination with enormous consequences for all of us.
A game of imagination, with that phrase I share one of the central theses of this sermon series. Society, I suggest, is nothing more than an extremely complicated game that we are all playing together. Almost everything in it “was all but a dream once.”
This congregation began in the collective imagination of its founders. Without their vision you would not be here, or watching online, this Sunday. The opportunity to sing a song together, to listen to Dr. Rocke and Chelsea, to hear me pontificate on peek-a-boo, cats, and the power of dreams, or to have some coffee and conversation after the service all require vision.
The United States is a political idea–or a contest over political ideas–not a natural geographic demarcation or human kin group. The same can be said of the state of Texas.
The Constitution can be thought of the foundational rules of the game that we call the United States. Congress is always modifying those rules. The Executive branch and judiciary are forever interpreting them.
If you have ever been in court, then I suspect that you have seen the game laid bare. One side, the plaintiff, contests with the other, the defendant. The judge interprets the law–the rules for play. The jury picks the winner.
The attorneys involved each try to convince the jurors that their imaginative interpretation of stories–they get called testimony–and objects–evidence–is the correct one. Guilty, one side played the game well. Not guilty, the other side did better.
It is easy to forget that the law and politics are both games. It is hard to remember that the Constitution, the United States, and the state of Texas all began as acts of the imagination. It is even harder to remember that we only sustain them through our collective imagination. If enough people stopped imagining that they lived in a country called the United States, then it would cease to exist.
History teaches us this. We sometimes hear of six flags over Texas. Many of the people who have lived on this land have imagined themselves to be part of six different nations: France, Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, the Confederacy, the United States again. Each change, a different set of rules, a different game.
And even this description represents a failure of imagination, a misnaming of the game being played. In recent years, many historians have come to argue that much of Texas was not part of Texas until after the Civil War. Up to that point, most European who lived in the Western parts of the state did not primarily pay taxes to either the state or the federal government. They paid taxes, though they called it tribute, to the Comanche.
Politics is a game where we imagine the future. In it we ask: What is my place in this society? What are society’s obligations to me? What are mine to it? What even is society? Who is part of it and who is not? Who sets the rules of the game? How are they enforced?
When I ask these questions, can you unleash your wildest political imagination? If the game of politics was to begin again, would you create it with different rules? With different outcomes? Let us pause here for a moment so that you can imagine.
“Be realistic, demand the impossible,” the old slogan goes. This autumn, we plan to invite you to develop something of your vision for the future. We will be extending this invitation during some of our services. We will be inviting you to play with it during our climate revival at the end of the month. In response to the devastation so eloquently described in Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me,” in response to the gathering climate crisis, in response to the despair that so many of us feel–“Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas / Fish full of mercury”–we will encourage you to draw a positive picture of the world in 2050.
Then in early October we will take part in Texas Impact’s Vidas Robadas–Stolen Lives–project. We will be decorating our campus with t-shirts bearing the names of people who have lost their lives due to gun violence here in Harris County. You can help make one after the service. Through the project, we will ask, can we dream of a world–or a city–where not one more person loses their life at the barrel of a gun?
Throughout all that time we will be encouraging to vote in the presidential election. The last day to register is October 7th.
This year, we have set the goal of 100% participation from the members and friends of First Unitarian Universalist who are eligible to vote. Can you help us make that goal? In the last presidential election only 80% of our eligible members voted. In the 2024 primary election it was only 60%. I challenge us to do better. (Where is my Amen corner for that?)
If you want to be part of the effort, you can join our Voting Justice Team. You heard a bit from them earlier in the service. They will be in Channing Hall every Sunday. There will be opportunities to block walk as we try to motivate our neighbors to vote. And you can make their job easier by having a voting plan and going to the polls. Can we have 100% of our members and friends vote? I am going to be realistic and demand the impossible because I know we can! (Let’s have another Amen for that!)
Organizing alone is insufficient to sustain us. As we pound the pavement, register voters, increase turnout, and work to end gun violence, we still have to find time for stillness.
The stillness, the light within, reminds us that we are all are somebody. We are each nestled in, connected to, the all of being.
Let nothing trouble you,
let nothing scare you,
all is fleeting,
God alone is unchanging.
Patience
everything obtains.
Who possesses God
nothing wants.
God alone suffices.
Teresa of Avila’s prayer is beautiful. It is centering. It is calming. Such quietism, found in so many of the world’s traditions, has a place in our sanctuary and in Unitarian Universalism. It is one reason why we have silence in every service. And I promise that we will be making space for such contemplation throughout the program year.
But as we do, this autumn, I hope that you will join with me, the Voting Justice Team, and others in the congregation, in a different kind of religious act. Religion, I have said in the past, is what binds us together.
The game of politics also binds us together. It is like the civil rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer told us, “baby, what we eat is politic[s].” This autumn I will be encouraging us to follow her lead and the lead of those like Senator Raphael Warnock who understand political engagement as a religious act. He is likes to tell us, “a vote is a kind of prayer for the kind of world we desire for ourselves and our children.”
“[O]ur prayers are stronger when we pray together,” he often continues. This autumn we will be doing a lot of praying together. But as the days grow short, we will make a shift from visions for the future, to contemplating the future of our selves.
Religion has long been tilted towards this task. It is as the Unitarian Universalist theology Forrest Church wrote, “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. When we discover we must die, we question what life means.”
That search for meaning, that acknowledgement that we are finite creatures in a seemingly infinite universe, will be our particular focus over the winter. Meaning making is, of course, always central to what we do.
Christine Robinson, another Unitarian Universalist minister, is helpful on this point. She reminds us that people come here “to quench a thirst, find meaningfulness, to connect with mystery … to deepen their souls.”
We will pursue that deepening in December, January, and February, with services focused on those most difficult of subjects: religious trauma and death. These can be heavy. They trouble our imaginations. They are necessary for meaning making.
It is like Mary Oliver’s challenge to us:
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is your plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
What is your plan for your one wild and precious life? I know from my conversations with many of you, that this question brings you to Unitarian Universalism.
Often, the arcs of your journeys share similar trajectories. You come here because you found the answers offered elsewhere to be disquieting. The story you learned about the divine, the story you were told about death, the meaning you were given, did not make sense. You will were filled with doubt, troubled by the great cloud of unknowing. And so, one Sunday, you found yourself in our sanctuary thirsting for… thirsting for… well thirsting for something.
Our prayers are stronger when we pray together. I suspect you came here looking to quench that spiritual thirst in search of a community where you could seek the life of the spirit free from religious dogma.
Quenching that thirst sometimes requires acknowledging what happened earlier. Before your cup can run over, sometimes you have to understand why it was empty in the first place.
So, in December we will tend to a subject so central to the spiritual lives of so many–religious trauma. There are many people in our community who have been hurt by religion. Maybe they have been told that there is something wrong with them for loving who they love. Perhaps that have been shamed for being who they are. It might be that they have been discouraged from casting questions into the deep.
Here we offer a different message. Here we widen love’s circle by saying whomever you are, whomever you love, you are welcome here. Bring your questions. Imagine a religion where you can bring the fullness of yourself, the breadth of your curiosity, and the depth of your dreams. Can you imagine such a religion?
Can we imagine such a religion together? Religious community is another game we play together. An exploration of religious trauma will help uncover some of the hidden rules that we each bring to our collective game.
The hidden rules that we each bring… Sometimes when we play a sport, I call Name the Divine the hidden rules we each have are palpable. God is a symbol for that which is greater than all and yet resides within each. God cannot be described. God might not even be. But humans have been trying to name the unnamable for as long as there has been a record of human thought. What is one image of God you find oppressive?
Tending to religious trauma can help us to describe the hidden rules that are stifling our spiritual journeys. Once we know those rules, we can let them go. Recall that image of God you find oppressive. I invite you to cast it out. Try it, I cast out…
When we cast out hidden rules from religious trauma, we are, as the Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell has said, “threatened with resurrection.” We discover that we might just experience what I call the resurrection of the living and wake up to the beauty of the world as it is. We might open ourselves “to,” in her words, “break through into a new way, a new direction.”
A new way, a new direction, as spring comes, the days lengthen, and light returns to the world, we will leave the wintery world of death and trauma behind. In celebration of the coming bright of summer, we will finish our sermon series “Future Visions, Future Selves,” with an invitation to play some of the most enjoyable games–imagining the future of humanity.
And here, religion orients us again. Every religion encourages us to imagine the future. Some encourage us to imagine ourselves escaping history. In such narratives, God, or a constellation of deities, ends the earthly all that is–ends human history–and brings about an enduring reign of peace.
Other religions encourage us to imagine ourselves changing the future. A vote is a prayer, we have the collective power, the collective agency, the collective imagination, to dream new ways of being into existence.
A third set of religions imagine that there will be no change in the future. The world is as it is. It is up to us to accept it, to find our place within it.
With these religious frameworks before us, we will explore how humanity is changing and might change. Does humanity have a future amongst the stars? Is humanity alone in the universe? Are there aliens? How is artificial intelligence challenging what it means to be human? All of these questions have the potential to profoundly shift what it means to be religious. They each might open new paths for spirituality.
Religion is another game we play together. How do you imagine the future of our society? How do you imagine your future life? How do you imagine the future of humanity? This program year we will explore such questions as we play together the spirited filled, loving, imaginative game, we call the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. If you are a visitor, I hope you will join us in our beautiful game. If you are a member or a longtime friend, I hope you will find it uplifting, deepening, and motivating, please get out and vote!
But before we close, return, for a moment, to the subject of my cats. Because, let us face it, you always knew it was going to come back to them. The wonderful thing about watching them–King of the Mountain, Sumo, Predator and Prey–is that they remind us that to be alive is to play. And to build community is to play together.
One of Unitarian Universalism’s strengths is we put those truths at the center of our religious experience. We say that we are non-creedal religious community. We do not take the rules of the game as fixed. Every person, every generation, in every hour, in every day, has the opportunity to imagine them anew. One, two, three, “peek-a-boo!” Try it, one, two, three, “peek-a-boo!” When you close your eyes what do you see? When you open them, what is before you?
Shall we join in a game of imagining, of dreaming, of building, of creating together?
“Future Visions, Future Selves,” in the hopes that we shall imagine, dream, build, create together, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
