as preached October 12, 2025 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
Earlier this week, in our sanctuary, we witnessed a collision between the politics of care and the politics of cruelty. If you attended the listening session on teacher experiences under the state takeover of our school district you probably know what I am talking about. Alternatively, you might have read about it in Thursday’s Chronicle.
Either way, here is what happened. The Commission on the State Takeover of HISD, which I co-chair, created a space for students, parents, and teachers to share about what our public schools are like under Superintendent Mike Miles–which is to say under Governor Greg Abbott. We are gathering data so that we can understand why both students and teachers are fleeing the district. The superintendent might claim that test and school accountability scores are up but something is amiss under his leadership. Teacher departures have risen by 48% since he took over. In the same time period, enrollment is down around 15,000 students. People are voting with their feet.
To understand why, we took testimony for an hour and a half. Some sixteen people shared about their experiences. A teacher who specializes in working with non-native English speakers–many of whom lack foundational English–has been instructed by the district to use the same materials in his classroom that native speakers use. He is not being offered textbooks that he can adapt to the needs of migrants from Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh as they learn the words for colors and numbers. Instead, he is being told to click through district distributed slides with excerpts from novels and Greek mythology, hardly appropriate texts for children still learning basic phrases.
A parent shared about the impact of high teacher turnover. It was not just effecting his children. It was harming the entire school. “The school’s culture is being destroyed,” he said as he choked up. His children are losing their enthusiasm for education.
Even more troubling illustrations of the impact of the district’s treatment of teachers on education came directly from students. A few shared about how they had witnessed administrators berate, even yell at, teachers in front of their classes. One recounted how, after undergoing such mistreatment, their teacher gathered up her belongings and walked out. She did not return. A replacement was not found all semester.
The most powerful moment came when one of the students spoke about how the constant teacher turnover had impacted her and her friends. She attends one of the city’s magnet schools. Her classmates consist of both the privileged and the marginalized. In one class she sits between a diplomat’s child and a friend who receives free lunch.
Prior to the takeover, she experienced her school as a leveling field. It was a place where both had the opportunity to excel. That is no longer the case. Teacher consistency was key to equalizing opportunity. Students could rely on teachers that they met freshman or sophomore year to help them navigate the college application process. But, she told us, since Miles came on, the majority of her teachers have been bullied out of the school by his administration. It was obvious that it was going to impact her friend who receives free lunch’s future. It was just as clear that the diplomat’s child was going to be fine. She started sobbing. I doubt there was a dry eye in the sanctuary.
Imagine if that had been your educational experience. Inadequate educational materials, constant faculty turnover, students witnessing adults bullying other adults, I have not even talked about buildings without adequate air conditioning, teaching to the test, or any of the other distressing things that are going on in HISD right now. Consider how you would have been impacted by such an educational environment. Would you have achieved all that you have achieved in your life?
I am in awe of the people, including some of you, who have overcome such educational adversities. I doubt I would have. I spent my schooldays in one of the better Michigan school districts. I had consistency. Teachers rarely left. My younger brother had most of the same ones that I did. We read whole books. We got lots of individual attention. There were special services for students who needed them.
Severely dyslexic, I am lucky to have had access to such services. I did not learn to read until I was eight. Decoding text only came to me because my elementary school had a special reading teacher. She worked with me one-on-one once week for years.
I am exactly the type of person whose needs are now being ignored under Miles. I tremble. I tremble when I imagine how I would have fared in a school district that appears to being systematically dismantled. I suspect that more than a few of you tremble with me.
State Representative Lauren Simmons, one of the other Commission co-chairs named what is going on perfectly. “[I]t’s torture. It’s trauma,” she said.
It appears to be systematic child abuse. I am not exaggerating. We keep hearing about how kids are receiving AI generated materials in their classrooms. Such materials, we are told, are full of errors, which teachers are expected to correct. No one knows what the long-term learning outcomes are for students who are expected to learn from algorithmically generated worksheets. It is an experiment. Under Miles, which is to say under Abbott, the district is experimenting with children’s education, which to say experimenting on children, without parental consent—systematic child abuse.
Given the lack of credentials of district leadership, Miles has exactly zero degrees related to educational administration, policy, or teaching, this experimentation is perhaps not surprising. I am certain it would not pass the institutional review board of any university with which I have been affiliated. Yet it seems to be implemented on thousands of children with who knows what long-term consequences.
It is an awful example of the politics of cruelty. An element of such politics is worth naming. It is the inability or the refusal to recognize a value that we Unitarian Universalists hold central. We assert “that every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.”
The politics of cruelty are based on an inability to acknowledge the truth of this claim of radical human equality. We do not say that this person is inherently worthy and that person is not. We say that each is inherently worthy.
The politics of cruelty, in contrast, rest upon a failure to recognize that we are all just, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, “ordinary human beings.” An opposition to such a position has long haunted this country’s politics–particularly here in what once was the Confederate and now is the neo-Confederate South.
In such a place, Du Bois observed, “opposition among property holding whites” to quality public education for all has long been widespread. Such an approach to education, he noted, makes “exploitation more difficult.” It allows for the connection of “knowledge with power.” It provides the basis for democracy. It creates an electorate empowered with the ability to discern the self-interests of its members.
Many of the most affluent–those most tied to the powers and principalities of the hour–are afraid that the rest of us might come to recognize that vast concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few are not in our interests. The President’s favorite Afrikaner, Elon Musk, is currently worth around $500 billion. Larry Ellison, another of the President’s allies, has assets close to $350 billion. One estimate is that it would only take $67 billion a year to eliminate extreme poverty throughout the world. An electorate aware of our self-interests might think about taking the majority of Musk and Ellison’s combined holdings and redirecting them to the abolition of poverty. If they were left with $1 billion each–more money than I am certain anyone needs–we could theoretically get rid of extreme poverty for the next dozen years. What a blessing, what an act of love that would be.
Of course, economics is more complicated, but I hope my basic point is obvious. If we had an educational system that empowered us to understand our self-interests, one based on a claim “that every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion,” then I am certain more of us would be saying no more billionaires.
No more billionaires, in the face of the politics of cruelty, our faith challenges us to create a politics of care. Just as a politics of cruelty is based upon a failure to recognize everyone as inherently worthy, a politics of care upholds in each person’s inherent worth. In the words of Sofia Betancourt, president of our religious association, it takes “[l]ove … as our highest values,” and pushes us to consider, as she observes, “what … [love] require[s] of us.”
What does love require of us? It is a difficult question to answer. We live in an age of rising authoritarianism and white supremacy. The president has created a twenty-first century version of the Gestapo to target migrants. The governor seems to be devoted in the re-establishment of a racialized regime. They both, it appears, are interested in recreating an updated, sanitized, somewhat less blatant version of Jim Crow. Such a project certainly might behind the state’s takeover of our school district.
What does love require of us in such a time? Our religious tradition points the way. We can consider how in words that came from another testimony that was offered in our sanctuary this week. It was a teacher who, fearful of the potential impact of sharing her experiences, said that she was comfortable coming to testify because “this is a safe place. I know because I have been to a few services here.”
She knew this was a safe place to share about her experiences–to dissent from the district’s narrative–because she has been to a few services here. Such a statement offers a clear attestation as to one thing requires of us in these times. It is to ensure that our congregation is a place that supports dissenters from the politics of cruelty.
The struggle to be such a place is central to our heritage as religious dissenters. We are exploring that heritage, asking each other what does love require of us in these times, together over the course of the program year. One way we are doing that is by looking to our history.
That history, the Unitarian Universalist theologian Rebecca Parker and her friend Rita Nakashima Brock remind us, does not hold that paradise–the place where love is realized–is located in “a future end point, a transcendent realm, or a zone after death.” It comes when we recognize “that we already live on holy ground, in the presence of God”–or whatever you would name the most high– “surrounded by the communion of saints. Our spiritual challenge,” they continue, “is to embrace this reality.”
Our spiritual challenge is to embrace this reality, some of Brock and Parker’s most significant theological work has been to uncover how the early Christian church was devoted to empowering people to recognizing that they already live in paradise. The first Christians, they observe, taught “that God blessed the earth with the breath of Spirit.” The planet is infused with divine inspiration–for inspiration was originally understood as the act of breathing into. The plants, the animals, the vast greenery of the carbon cycle, the divine, God, metaphorically blew the breath of life, inhaling, exhaling, the Spirit, into it all in Genesis. It is a blessing we are caught up in for the balance of our lives–and even afterwards as our bodies return to whence they came.
I sometimes name opening ourselves to the reality that we already live in paradise–live in a world blessed by the spirit of life–as undergoing the resurrection of the living. Such a resurrection is an awakening to the world as it is, caught up in conflicts between the politics of care and cruelty, yes, but also a world in which, after the rains we can say, with the ancient text:
The blossoms have appeared in the land,
The time of pruning has come;
The song of the turtledove
Is heard in our land.
The green figs form on the fig tree,
The vines in blossom give off fragrance.
We are surrounded, that long gone religious teacher wanted us to know, by beauty. Our task as a religious community, when we consider what love demands of us, is to nurture that beauty in our hearts and in our world.
This is what Christianity taught in the religion’s first centuries. Eventually, though, the story changed. Through historical events like the Council of Nicaea and the crusades, Christian theology ceased to proclaim, as Jesus did, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Christian theologians stopped claiming that our task is to expand the beauty of the world. They started to argue that beauty is to be found in the next world. “The world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through / My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue,” is how one hymn summarizes this perspective.
Our Unitarian Universalist tradition has its origins in part from dissenting from such a celestial vision of paradise and trying to return to a terrestrial one. That was one reason why I was delighted when someone shared that she felt safe testifying here. It suggested that this is a place where, at least on our best days, love is present.
That presence of love, that feeling of paradise, was present here yesterday during Remington Alessi’s celebration of life. Perhaps, if you joined us for that, you felt it. For a few hours our sanctuary and fellowship hall were filled with people–punk rockers, anarchists, activists, radical lawyers, Pan-Africanists, modern rebels onto Caesar–who were devoted to countering the politics of cruelty and building a more beautiful world.
The vast majority of them do not regularly attend First Unitarian Universalist. Too often, our congregation has treated the paradise–the place of love realized–that we offer as related to “the Old Iranian term for ‘walled enclosure.’” The word paradise, writer Natalie Rose Richardson warns, contains “an ideology of barriers.”
We adopted the Eighth Principle, which commits our congregation to “build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions” in the hopes to dismantle some of those barriers. In my last conversation with him, Remington told me that what he wanted for our congregation to do the work of removing those barriers. He wanted us to live into the possibility of becoming a true multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual community. His vision of love included inviting into our communion his rich collection of friends and comrades.
What does such a vision of love require of us? If we are serious about nurturing paradise in this world–creating more beauty amongst us–it is a question that we must take seriously. Richardson challenges us to remember that most “conceptions of paradise exclude particular immoral or unworthy people: pariahs, the marginalized, the evil, the tainted.” How must we change ourselves to widen love’s circle and cultivate a paradise for all?
One way we do so is to continue to offer our sanctuary as a space where the politics of care confront the politics of cruelty. Another is through the hard work of removing the barriers to our communion. I will not pretend to know how to fully do so. But the wonderful thing about serving as your settled minister is that no sermon is a final statement. Each text I offer is but a part of the great, ongoing, conversation of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. In the coming months and years I have faith that we will work together to name and remove the barriers that sometimes prevent this congregation from being what Quillen Shinn, our first preacher, envisioned it might be, “a Paradise, a pleasant, happy place for all.”
So that we might all do what we can to lean into the politics of care and lean away from the politics of cruelty, restore our school district, and transform our communion, to wake up to and treasure the paradise in which we already live and which we are called to nurture, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
