as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, December 7, 2025
It is a privilege, as always, to be with you. I do not tell you that enough. Nor do I sufficiently express the love and gratitude I have for this community.
I feel that love and gratitude particularly sharply this morning. We had our annual auction last night. It was lovely. If you did not make, we a disco theme. We summoned a bit of the spirit of Studio 54 and a smidge of the soul of Barry Gordy. I managed to drag out a vintage rayon shirt. Chelsea and Savannah even led a sing-along of “I Will Survive.” There was food–let’s hear it for the chocolate fountain–and ample opportunity to bid on excellent auction items. I think that are still some available if you missed out.
A good time was had by all, at least I hope it was. I certainly enjoyed myself. And we raised a significant amount of money to sustain our beloved community and widen love’s circle. So, before we go further I hope that you will join in extending some love and gratitude to everyone who made the auction possible–the auction team, the staff, the underwriters, the donors, and the bidders. If you were part of making the auction success please stand so that we can recognize you. Let us give them a round of applause.
The annual auction is a reminder of an important truth about the nature of our religious communion. Our life together is sustained by our voluntary contributions. Some Unitarian Universalist theologians go so far as to claim that the most significant thing about our congregations is that they are financially self-supporting.
Financial self-support is an expression of our insistence, as James Luther Adams put it, “that religion, in order to be a matter of choice, must be free from state control.” Freedom from state control, Cecilia Kingman observes, allows the religious community to be “the conscience of the people.”
The conscience of the people, throughout this program year we are exploring what it means to be a dissenting religious tradition. Religious dissent, I have claimed in the past, emerges whenever the separation between church and state breaks down. As soon as the government begins to dictate what we believe and how we worship dissenting religious communities come into being.
The origin of our Unitarian Universalist tradition lies, in part, with those who, in the opening decades of the Protestant Reformation, demanded the right to form communities free from the control of bishops or kings. They rejected the idea that religious belief could be codified for all time in creeds. They opposed the notion laws could be written that proclaim how or where the divine is to be discovered. They held instead, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put, that we each have an “original relation to the universe.”
An original relation to the universe, living in Greg Abbott’s Texas, living in Donald Trump’s America, our dissenting heritage has seemed particularly important as of late. We live in a state where the legislature is consistently attempting–and sometimes succeeding–in enshrining particular aspects of Christian Nationalism into law. The separation of church and state has fallen apart when adherents of one religious community are able to place their restrictive understandings of women’s reproductive health, their limiting visions of gender, and their willful mistranslations of scripture into legislation.
There are men, and I do mean men, who would see the walls between those who style themselves bishops and those who imagine themselves crumble. The Governor is targeting religious minorities. He has called the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a longstanding civil rights group, a terrorist organization. He has said that certain forms of religious practice are outlawed in Texas.
In these times, any religious community that rejects such bigotry, and upholds the separation of church and state, becomes a dissenting community. In these times, we Unitarian Universalists are called to lean into the legacy of our dissenting ancestors. In these times, we are challenged to learn from and align ourselves with other dissenters.
In these times, I have been acutely aware of the honor of serving a Unitarian Universalist congregation. That honor has been all the more palpable as I have watched the President and his allies attack free speech. They are afraid of honest discussions of this country’s history. And so, they have been mounting an assault on academic freedom. They are terrified of truth telling. So they have tried to silence the press. They have centered sycophants in the White House Press Corps. They denied access to the Pentagon to any reporter who refuses to simply regurgitate official military proclamations.
Those unwilling to vomit up the authorized presidential pablum frighten the resident of the White House. He appears particularly afraid that humor might reveal him to be what we all are, a mere mortal. So, he and has allies have gone after entertainers. They decry late night hosts who dare to describe the man in the Oval Office with phrases like “Sleepy Donazles” when he dozes during cabinet meetings or “Benito Whoops-olini” when he stumbles on the stairs.
People have lost their jobs for speaking out. Academics have been fired for teaching the truth or simply demanding that students engage with scientific literature, rather than misconstruals of scripture, when studying gender. Stephen Colbert had his show canceled. Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for a week.
Through it all, I have been reflecting on a key aspect of the Unitarian Universalist. It is that this congregation, and all other Unitarian Universalist congregations, hold the free pulpit to be sacred. Written into my contract with you is the clause, “The Church affirms the Senior Minister’s freedom of speech in the pulpit and in the community, and will not abridge it in any way.”
This clause does not require you to agree with, or even like, my sermons. The matter runs deeper. It is rooted in longstanding theological values that are connected to our origins as a dissenting tradition. William Ellery Channing, the nineteenth century Unitarian theologian for whom our fellowship hall is named, offered one of the most famous formulations of them. He told us, “true religion consists in proposing as our great end a growing likeness to the Supreme Being.” To this insight he added the claim, “[r]eligious instruction should aim chiefly to turn … [people’s] aspirations and efforts to the perfection of the soul which constitutes a bright image of God.”
A bright image of God, the language is somewhat dated. It can be recast, and distilled, into three points. First, there is the belief that each individual has the potential to give the world some sort of unique gift. Second, there is the claim that the role of the religious community to empower us to nurture those gifts. And third, there is an understanding of the importance of free speech so that we might both share and guide each other in uncovering those gifts.
Our association names this truth in its statement of values with the phrase, “We declare that every person is inherently worthy.” The renegade Catholic theologian–and now Episcopal priest–Matthew Fox has put the matter somewhat more poetically. He has said, “we burst into the world as ‘original blessings.’” He invokes the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart on this matter. Eckhard held “that hidden in all of us is ‘something like the original outbreak of all goodness, something like a brilliant light that glows incessantly and something like a burning fire which burns incessantly.”
The original outbreak of all goodness, that is quite something to be carrying around in our beings. Nurturing that goodness, the Czech dissident and later President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, claimed was “living within the truth.”
Oppressive societies seek to prevent us from living within the truth, sharing the goodness that resides within. Liberating societies empower us to live within the truth.
Havel wrote of living within the truth during the 1970s. His country was in the thrall of a stifling Communist regime. It was a regime that guaranteed citizens a certain level of material security–housing, a job, and healthcare. But that security came at a high price. The regime stifled freedom of thought and freedom of expression. Obedience was demanded at all levels.
To illustrate the corrosive effects of such demands for obedience, Havel shared an experience he had while working in a brewery. His “immediate superior” was someone “well-versed in the art of making beer.” This person was “proud of his profession and … wanted our brewery to make good beer. He spent almost all his time at work, continually thinking up improvements.” For this brewer, living in the truth meant making the best beer possible.
The managers of the brewery were uninterested in the brewer’s version of the truth. They could not have cared less about making good beer. Instead, they simply wanted to impress their superiors with their obedience–meet their quotas for production and live comfortably. The beer the brewery made was terrible.
The brewer persistently provided suggestions on how to improve it. The manager, Havel observed, “was politically powerful but otherwise ignorant of beer.” This meant that while the brewery produced a lot of beer, no one drank it. When the brewer dared to suggest to the manager’s superiors that it might be possible to make beer that people would actually enjoy drinking the manager had him “labelled ‘a political saboteur.’ He was thrown out of the brewery and shifted to … a job requiring no skill.” He was prevented from living in the truth. The truth was that he was an exceptional brewer. He was forced to live a lie, that he had no skills, no gifts, to offer the world.
The society he lived in prevented him from uncovering the original outbreak of goodness that lay within. So, he became a dissident. Reflecting on the situation, Havel wrote, “you do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility.”
Personal responsibility, it is a core principle valued by our tradition. Kinsey shared one of the most famous stories about Unitarian Universalist perspectives on personal responsibility with the children earlier today. In it she recounted how a bear called Henry–who is really a stand-in for our religious ancestor Henry David Thoreau–spent the night in jail rather than pay taxes to support war and slavery. Afterwards, Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience. In that text, he taught that we all have a personal responsibility to resist tyranny. It is a profoundly important reflection that has inspired generations of those who would live into the truth and seek justice rather than succumb to the lies of injustice. The conflict Thoreau was objecting to, incidentally, was the Mexican-American War. And the slavery he was opposing was the establishment of Texas a slave holding state. But reflections on that aspect of Thoreau’s legacy is for another time.
Instead, I turn to the second principle so valued by our tradition. It is that the purpose of our religious communion is to help each other discover our unique gifts. In our covenant we say that we commit “to encourage one another.” We understand that by coming together we can learn to nurture our unique gifts–those inner flames–so that they might shine all the more brightly.
The importance of community for empowering us to live into the truth is attested in both the lives of Václav Havel and Henry David Thoreau. Havel was part of a community of dissidents. He called it the “parallel polis” or alternative state. It included artists, independent thinkers, and brewers who sought to live the truth and let their own lights shine.
Thoreau was surrounded by and inspired by the Unitarian community Concord where he lived and the Transcendentalist movement of which he was part. Without Unitarian preachers like William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, failing the inspiration of Unitarian writers like Margaret Fuller and Lydia Maria Child, there would be no Thoreau. In the story that Kinsey told, one of Henry’s friends pays his taxes. He gets out of jail with the help of others.
Since we are probably more familiar with Thoreau’s story than Havel’s I want to spend a moment lingering on the Czech dissident’s understanding of the alternative polis before moving onto our third principle. You might not know it, but we hosted one of the most famous documentations of Havel’s alternative polis in our sanctuary a few years ago during FotoFest.
You might recall that back in 2022 we held an exhibition of the Czech dissident photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková’s work. It consisted of a series of images that she made of the T-Club during the oppressive Communist regime. The club was a space where people from the LGBTQ community could come together and live their truths. It was very difficult for non-gender conforming, same sex loving, or queer people to live openly in Prague in the 1980s. While sex between people of the same gender was technically legal, discrimination was also legal. Yet Libuše’s work depicts, you might recall, far more joy than fear, much more love than hate. It is a reminder that whatever the reactionary members of a society might try to teach, the LGBTQ community has always been around and its members have always found to have places to love and celebrate each other.
Libuše’s photographs remind me of Ada Limón’s poem “A Good Story.” In it, Limón affirms the basic truth of life, “The body is so body.” And then she tells of her stepfather’s subtle acts of resistance in a society that prevented him from living his truth–sleeping “under a grill at a fast-food restaurant.” In that tale of “overcoming” she finds inspiration to search for “a story about human kindness.” In her search she recalls the love of her stepfather, when she “couldn’t stop crying because … [she] was fifteen and heartbroken.” He “made me eat a small pizza … until the tears stopped” and she could say, “[m]aybe I was just hungry.”
Human kindness, an essential aspect of encouraging one another is the proclamation of holding love at the center of our faith. It is as our association’s president, Sofía Betancourt, writes, “[w]e hold a love greater than we know between and among us.” That love inspires us to proclaim, she continues, the possibility of “human goodness and capacity for love, even when we feel furthest” from the hope of living in a justice filled society.
At First Unitarian Universalist we call this proclamation a commitment to widening love’s circle. The word proclamation brings me to a third principle of our dissenting tradition–one that I referred to earlier–the free pulpit. Historically, when the church has collapsed into the state, maintaining a free pulpit has allowed us to insist on the transformative possibility of love even when the politics of cruelty have ruled the land. In these times, when those who would marry their church with the state are in power, maintaining the freedom of the pulpit allows us to collectively maintain a space where we can seek, together, the truth in love.
The freedom of the pulpit is not primarily about the preacher’s right to speak freely. It is an insistence that all members of the community have a right to do so–in conversations, in small group ministries, and in congregational meetings. By insisting that the preachers does their best to live into the truth you are asking that your religious teachers–for that is one aspect of what a preacher is–help you figure out how best to live into your own truths.
Historically, this aspect of the free pulpit has terrified authoritarian regimes. It ever serves as a reminder of the possibility of the right of conscience and the chance that we might each experience the original outbreak of all goodness that lies within.
There is a story about Shmarya Yehuda-Leib Medalia on this point. Medalia was the chief rabbi of Moscow during the worst years of Stalin’s bloody terror. Living in a society where the secret police ran rampant, where people were routinely snatched off the street, taken to secret prisons and often murdered, he knew that every word he uttered from the pulpit was carefully monitored.
One year Stalin declared Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, to be a working day. This essentially prevented hundreds of thousands of Jews from going to worship. Some, still, near the end of the day, managed to make it to the synagogue where Rabbi Medalia served.
There he gave a sermon that consisted of a story of two Jews who lived in a small village. The village had but one central road. The two Jews each claimed ownership over the same live chicken. So, they went to the rabbi to resolve their dispute. He told them to put the chicken in the middle of the road, unite its legs, and see which way the chicken choose.
That was the whole of Rabbi’s Medalia’s sermon. Not long afterwards Stalin had him shot.
The dangerous message in the sermon, it might be apparent, was that freedom consisted of choice. Everyone, Rabbi Medalia thought, even in Stalin’s Russia, was on some level free to choose whether they would live into the truth or live a lie.
Living his truth cost Rabbi Medalia his life. But he still managed to proclaim it. I would like to say that we are lucky to live in a society where living our truths might not cost us our lives. But that would be a lie. The reality is that in these times, as I.C.E. snatch people from the streets and hustle them into secretive detention, as the life expectancies of transgender women of color is decades less than those of cis-gendered White men like me, as more than a dozen people die in Harris County Jail each year, as hundreds die at the hands of the police, as people lose their livelihoods for living the truth or even accurately grading papers … well I would be lying if I said that living the truth was not potentially fraught with danger.
When we say that we commit to encouraging one another we mean, in part, that we will work together to lessen that danger. We will figure out, against the odds, how to live into our truths–to uncover that original outbreak of all goodness.
Havel thought that we could do so under whatever regime we lived. He closed his magnificent reflection on the nature of dissent The Power of the Powerless with these words:
… the real question is whether the ‘brighter future’ is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own … weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?
Havel’s words remind me more than anything of that passage in the Gospel of Luke, in the Christian New Testament, where Jesus is asked, “When will the kingdom of God come?” He answers, “You cannot tell by observation when the kingdom of God comes. You cannot say, ‘Look, here it is’ or ‘There it is!’ For the kingdom of God is within you!’”
The Kingdom of God is within you, the message here, the message of all these great teachers, and mine, is that we always have the possibility of choosing to live in truth and bring more love into the world. Indeed, it is the only way that we can, in these times and in all the times to come, get free together. So, I invite you to ask, what is my truth? What is my original outbreak of all goodness? How can I nurture it? How can I nurture in others, in this community and in the wider world? What can I do to speak more love in being?
In those hopes that we may we each answer these questions wisely, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
