as preached on September 14, 2025 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
If you pass by First Unitarian Universalist on weekday mornings then you are probably familiar with a sight. For the past five years, two members of our congregation have been keeping regular vigil near the corner of Fannin and Southmore. One of them bears sign that reads, “Stop the Zionist Genocide, Micah 2:1-3.” The other holds up signs with various messages: protesting the resurgence of racism or objecting to the President’s cruelty.
In keeping their vigil, these men, Craig and Thorpe, have been providing us and our city with examples of what it means to hold protest as a spiritual practice. Spiritual practices are those activities that we engage in over and over again to empower ourselves to connect more deeply with spirit. Spirit, I have shared in the past, comes from the Latin spiritus–the word for breath or breathing.
Spiritual practices, then, might be thought of as those activities we employ to connect with breath–our own breath which is always and forever intertwined with the breath of, the spirit of, life. Each time we breathe we renew our connection to the wider all of being.
I invite you to consider what happens when you inhale and exhale. Your lungs take in oxygen. The oxygen moves through your body, binds with your blood, and is eventually expelled as carbon dioxide. The oxygen was made in the core of a long dead star. The carbon formed there too. Each is part and parcel of the carbon cycle which your probably learned about in elementary school. Every breath connects us to events almost infinitely distant in time. All our inhales, all our exhales, are binding us to the respiration of the planet–the vast vegetation that makes the carbon cycle possible and the oxygen we intake available.
This insight, that the spirit of life and breath are one, is ancient to our Unitarian Universalist faith. More than four hundred and fifty years ago Michael Servetus was burned at the stake for refusing to recant his belief that Jesus was a human being. You might not know that Servetus, a medical doctor, was the first European to discover pulmonary circulation. He believed that the “divine spirit,” the spirit of life, “is produced in the lungs when the air inhaled is combined with the elaborated subtle blood that the right ventricle of the heart transmits to the left.”
Spiritual practice, the awareness of the infinitude that our breath connects us to, is an opportunity to reconnect with the reality, as the Unitarian Universalist theologian Forrest Church put it, that “the universe was pregnant with us when it was born.” Such activities contain within them the potential of helping us undergo what I sometimes call the resurrection of the living, the waking up to the world as it is.
Waking up to the world as it is, there is an element of this that those of you who are reading W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America with me will find familiar. Writing in 1934, Du Bois begins his majestical work with a then controversial claim. He states that he has composed his history with the assumption that African Americans “in America and in general … [are] average and ordinary human being[s], who … develop like other human beings.”
Undergoing the resurrection of the living, experiencing a spiritual awakening, includes the recognition of something so dear to our Unitarian Universalist tradition. “We declare,” our association reminds us, “that every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.”
Craig and Thorpe have been sharing that value with Houston commuters for years. They started during the protests following the murder of George Floyd. They have not stopped yet.
When I asked Thorpe why he is out in front of our campus at least once a week he told me, “It is a reflection of my Unitarian Universalist values.”
Craig gave me a longer response. He began by sharing that it was a way to keep “my frustration from overflowing” before reflecting on to the passage from Micah referred to on his sign. It reads:
Ah, those who plan iniquity
And design evil on their beds;
When morning dawns, they do it,
For they have the power.
They covet fields, and seize them;
Houses, and take them away.
They defraud men of their homes,
And people of their land.
Assuredly, thus said the Lord: I am planning such a misfortune against this clan that you will not be able to free your necks from it. You will not be able to walk erect; it will be such a time of disaster.
It is a powerful passage. We could probably spend another couple of sermons probing it. Its author is traditionally held to be a Hebrew prophet who lived almost three thousand years ago. He predicted that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed by one of the regional empires. The coming devastation, the prophet proclaimed, would be brought about by God because, as the great twentieth century rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel summarized his predecessor’s message, “rich men are full of violence, and … speak lies.”
Rich men are full of violence and speak lies, Craig is both a Unitarian Universalist and Jewish. He is greatly distressed by the war on Gaza. His invocation of Micah, and his protest, is a way for him to let the world know that even though there are no Jewish institutions in Houston that oppose the actions of Israel’s current government, “there is,” in his words, “a Jewish voice in Houston opposing the war.”
“The prophet is a lonely man,” wrote Heschel. Now, I am not going to embarrass Craig further by comparing him to his ancient co-religionist. But I would like to suggest that both he and Thorpe provide illustrations of what it means to live as religious dissenters.
To dissent is to disagree with an established authority. Unitarian Universalists are religious dissenters by definition. We disagree with the belief that religious values and theological perspectives can be fixed for all time in creeds or contained exclusively in scriptures. Instead, we affirm that the nature of truth shifts with the situation and that, for each of us, there is nothing higher than the conscience.
We might recognize with Micah that when it comes to the violence of the powerful, “they do it, / For they have the power.” We probably also agree with the ancient prophet on another point. The reality that the powerful are doing something does not necessarily make it right.
If you are in our sanctuary this morning, or you are joining us online, I anticipate that you agree with me there, I suspect too that you have dissented from something in the past. You might be dissenting right now. Maybe you are here with us because you grew up in another religious tradition and came to dissent, to disagree with, certain of its teachings. Maybe you are here because you were raised Unitarian Universalist, or with no religion whatsoever, and you dissent from what friend of the congregation Omowale Luthuli-Allen names the existential absurdity of Donald Trump’s America, Greg Abbott’s Texas, John Whitmire’s Houston, or Mike Miles’ school district. The absurdity being, of course, that many of those in power seek to govern as if, to harken back to Du Bois, not everyone is “ordinary human being, who develop[s] like other human beings.” The act as if some people are inherently better than others.
The powers and principalities of the hour are seeking to firmly reestablish racial and economic hierarchies that rest upon the lie that there are different races and different kinds of human beings. There is only one race, the human race. Children dyring in Gaza, the migrants ICE is deporting to what unknown fates as I preach this sermon, each and every person on this planet is equally a human being. From the belief that one race–race being a human creation–is better than another or that the wealthy–wealth being a human creation–inherently deserves more than everyone else–or the idea that one ethnic group, one linguistic group, one religious group–ethnicity, language, religion all being human creations–should have exclusive dominion over this land or that land we, or at the very least I, for Unitarian Universalists there is no authority higher than the conscience, dissent.
We dissent, to be a religious dissenter is to understand that protest is itself a form of spiritual practice. It is to recognize that transformative figures in our society have often been motivated by three interconnected theological insights. They can be found in the words of one of the most important practitioners of protest as spiritual practice this country has produced, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
He taught that “the moral law”–the affirmation we are equally ordinary human beings–is higher than human made law. Reflecting on this while in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, he wrote, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
When confronted with the disjunction between moral law and human law, injustice, it is our obligation, if we want to live a spiritual life, King thought, to protest. Invoking the theologian Augustine, he observed “An unjust law is no law at all.”
Finally, King believed that anyone could engage in a meaningful act of protest. Shortly before he died, he observed “that everybody can be great. Because everybody can serve.” His notion of service included dissenting from, protesting against, any form of injustice that sought to subvert the ability of ordinary human beings–which is to say all of us–of fully developing our potential.
So far, I have been reflecting on protest as a form of spiritual practice. I am going to invoke Ella Baker now and take a turn to touch upon how it is also a religious practice. I make a distinction between the two in that spiritual practices connect us to the all of being. Religious practices are more specific. They connect us to a specific community.
Put differently, religion, I sometimes share, can be understood as what binds us together. Religious practices are those activities that–as we say during offering collect–weave a tapestry of love and action. They are the activities that unite us together in community. For the friends and members of First Unitarian Universalist, our religious practices include things like gathering together, in-person or virtually, on Sunday mornings for worship, sharing fellowship in Channing Hall, or making offerings–whether of monetary donations or as volunteers–to sustain our life together.
Baker understood that the spiritual and religious practices of protest have to be conducted together if they had any chance of being successful. Baker’s name is not as common as King’s. But like him, she was a foundational figure of the civil rights generation. Unlike him, she was skeptical of the centrality of charismatic figures in the work of social change. Instead, she lifted up the importance of the grassroots, ordinary human beings.
In one of her speeches she observed, “that hitting back … was not enough.” That is, the individual work of protest as spiritual practice is insufficient. Instead, she told her audience, “It takes organization. It takes dedication.” Or to cast things in my own terms, we also need to hold protest as a religious practice if we are to have any chance of making a contribution to what she named “the struggle for human dignity and freedom.”
I was reminded of this on Wednesday when I participated in the first listening session of the Commission on the HISD Takeover. I serve as co-chair of the Commission alongside State Senator Molly Cook and State Representative Lauren Ashely Simmons. The rest of the Commission is made up of nationally recognized education scholars and local community leaders. It includes a student and a parent representative as well.
We gathered to hear stories about how the state takeover has impacted students. You can read something about our first meeting in last Thursday’s Chronicle–the next meeting will be here on October 8th and will focus on teacher experiences–but what we heard was bone chilling. There were stories that students told being about placed inappropriate classes and teachers shared around being to told to break state special education law by district officials. We heard about libraries being ripped out of schools and librarians being fired, bathrooms without enough toilet paper, and students serving as translators for other students because the district is not providing non-native English speakers with appropriate support. The school superintendent has apparently banned the teaching of full novels in classrooms in favor of the kind of short passages that appear in standardized tests–and here I want to go off on the issue of literacy in Texas, our state ranks 46th in the country and many a supposedly developing country, like I do not know, Kyrgyzstan has a higher literacy rate–but I will save that digression for another Sunday.
The general point is that the testimonies we heard were awful. Taken together any of them could be thought of an instance of protest as spiritual practice. They were attestations from parents and in some cases students bearing witness to their own consciences, their rejection of immoral state law.
Collectively, they became an instance of protest as religious practice. The most powerful moment of the evening came when a six-year-old, with her mother’s permission and loving supporting presence, decided to share how the takeover has impacted her school. Listening to such testimony knit us together. For an evening, members of the Houston community who are outraged at the way the state takeover is destroying our city came together. It is my prayer that it will be a small contribution to the great work of creating an education system that empowers all human beings in our city to develop their full potential.
Protest as spiritual practice, protest as religious practice, I would like to leave things there and then return, briefly, to Craig and Thorpe at the close. We will get back to their vigil momentarily, but before we do it seems incumbent to me to comment on last week’s horrific event.
Death is always tragic. It lessens the human community. “[S]end not to know / For whom the bell tolls, / It tolls for thee,” observed John Donne. The death of a public figure deprives the world of a perspective, an instance of someone trying to share their understanding of conscience, and diminishes public discourse. The use of political violence, especially in a democratic society, to silence someone–to remove their testament from our collective discourse–is always wrong.
Free speech is the bedrock of democratic practice. And those who have launched a concerted campaign to cancel and dox anyone insensitive enough to make an inappropriate comment about Charlie Kirk’s death are undermining it. Free speech only functions if we can apply it to people whose views we find reprehensible, even ignorant or hateful. “Once … [we] start making exceptions to this rule for this view or [that] comment … the whole foundation of the idea collapses in on itself,” observes journalist Branko Marcetic. “It turns out,” he continues, “that everyone has their own opinion about what is acceptable and what is beyond the pale.”
It would be an understatement to say that I disagree with the late Charlie Kirk on almost everything politically. I am certain that we had radically different understandings of the moral law–what can be found by searching the conscience. And I think commentators like Ezra Klein who claim that “Kirk was practicing politics the right way” are way off base. But I recognize in him someone who was engaging protest as a form of both spiritual and religious practice–he was profoundly motivated by his faith. And even if I object to how he practiced I think that his right to do so, to speak freely, is foundational to a democratic society. I pray that those of his allies who are now using his death as an opportunity to try and silence their political adversaries will come to understand this well.
Free speech as spiritual practice, here we return to Craig and Thorpe. Week after week, in the heat, next to the traffic, feeling the rattle of the train, through the gentle miracles of their hands–to invoke the poet Martin Espada’s understanding of the picket sign–they have shared messages from their hearts, testaments to importance of the courage of conscience. They remind us that protest is not merely a political act, it is a spiritual one and a religious one. It breaths justice into the world.
Religious dissenters, they encourage all of us to engage in our own vigils. These might not be on the corner of Fannin and Southmore or at a public meeting. They might instead be the words we speak when we assert the right to free speech or the kindnesses we share when we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all. Each breath we take, each act of conscience, can connect us to the all of being and bind us together.
So, I leave you with this, practice protest, on the city corners, in your workplaces, in your classrooms, at city council, in Austin, at the schoolboard. Practice protest, it is a spiritual thing. Practice protest, it is a religious thing. It is one way that as religious dissenters we live into the legacy of our faith and claim the enduring power of conscience and provide a living testament to love–that ever radical belief that we all ordinary human beings together.
That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
