as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, February 15, 2025
“[T]he axe is laid unto the root of the tree: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.” The words are from the Christian New Testament. They can be found in the Gospel of Matthew. They are attributed to John the Baptist.
In the Christian scripture, John is depicted as Jesus’s forerunner. He is able to imagine the unimaginable, a person who, in the text, he describes as “mightier than I am, whose sandals I am not worthy to remove.”
Mightier than I am, whose sandals I am not worthy to remove, the axe is laid unto the root of the tree, this morning, in honor of Black History month, we lift up the radical imagination. It is the power of far seeing that the historian Robin Kelley names freedom dreaming. Freedom dreaming is the ability to, in his words, “see life as possibility … to [uncover] the poetic and the prophetic in the richness of our daily lives … [to recognize] that the map to a new world is in the imagination.” “We are creating a world we have never seen,” that is how the writer and organizer adrienne maree brown puts it.
We are creating a world we have never seen, I lift up the radical imagination as a way to recognize the difficulty of the hour. It has been almost a month since I was last with you. Somehow, it seems much longer than that. The news has been relentless. Each week, each day, each hour, brings what feels like a dramatic shift.
As a religious community, it is one of our shared tasks to make some sense out of the confusion of the world. That aspect of our life together is one reason why I return, again and again, to the injunction, attributed to the theologian Karl Barth, that the preacher is to enter the pulpit with “the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”
Humanistically inclined Unitarian Universalist that I am, I do not take Barth’s, probably apocryphal, advice literally. Instead, I view it as a helpful invocation of our collective work. We strive, together, to make our way through life’s muck and mire while using the light of our tradition to reveal something of the road ahead.
Metaphorically, we speak of traveling together. In somewhat old-fashioned language, the Unitarian Universalist historian Conrad Wright advised us that the purpose of our covenants is to remind each other “that character … not the subscription to creeds” is the authentic expression of the religious life. We can, he tells us, “respect and … love our companions despite theological disagreements.”
My role, as preacher, in all of this, is no different than yours. It is, to lift up Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice, to share something of my “life passed through the fire of thought.” I do so in the hopes that my struggles to find my way towards a life informed by, connected to, centered on love and what I might call the divine, will be helpful to you in your own efforts.
But recently, I must admit, I have found myself less and less confident in my ability to point the way and more and more contemplating the opening lines to Dante Alighieri’s magnificent poem “Inferno.” You might know them. They run:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
I am sure, in part, that the appeal of Dante’s words lies in the reality that I have reached the midway of my own life’s journey. I will be fifty this year. After two decades of daily parenting, there are no teenagers living in my home. It is natural at such a time to feel more than a little disoriented.
But I find Dante’s words compelling for another reason. I am not sure about you, but I feel like we, as a human society, are, at present, lost.
We are lost. Your opinion might be different, but I find it hard to think otherwise when confronted with almost any headline. Just this week, to offer a singular example, the President announced a new policy for the Environmental Protection Agency that is willfully destructive, will cause untold harm to future generations, and is in complete opposition to the global scientific consensus. His captive Environmental Protection Agency announced that it is jettisoning the well established finding that climate change endangers both human health and the environment.
The executive head of the world’s largest economy is intentionally committing the country he leads to a policy of ecocide at a time when the number of people displaced by extreme weather is constantly growing. There were about 24 million of them last year. By 2050 there will be perhaps as many as 250 million of them. Living in Houston, a city with inadequate infrastructure that is regularly battered by climate crisis induced storms, that number will probably include some of us.
Now, I recognize that some of my disorientation, the feeling of flailing amid the barrage of brutal headlines is partially induced by the habit of the media to orient itself around the adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The Steward of my college at Oxford stocks the Senior Common Room–essentially the faculty lounge–with the magazine Positive News in an effort to counter balance this.
There is good news out there. Violent crime in the United States, and throughout much of the world. has been falling steadily. Despite proclamations from the President, in 2024 it has reached the lowest point in my lifetime and probably the country’s history. There has been significant progress in stopping deforestation in Colombia. Clean energy use is growing rapidly.
The good news is out there. French prosecutors are investigating Elon Musk. The former Prime Minister of Norway was just charged with corruption for his ties to the President’s onetime best friend Jeffery Epstein. But even with the good news, it does increasingly feel like we humans have lost the “straightforward pathway.”
More and more, the truthful members of the political class are admitting this reality. On Friday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned at the Munich Security Conference that we are on the verge of entering into an “age of authoritarianism.” It appears that the thugs who currently control the governments of China, Russia, and the United States want to divide up the globe between them.
In recognition of this difficulty, last month Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave one of the most important political addresses of this century. Speaking at Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum, he recognized the remarkable nature of our moment. He told that gathering that he intended to “talk about the rupture in the world order, the end of a nice story and the beginning of a brutal reality.” The “rule-based order is fading,” he said, speaking of our President’s seeming intention to dismantle the set of treaties and international agreements that have governed much of global society for the last eighty years.
Then, representing, one of the “middle powers like Canada” and observing the willful effort to destroy the legal foundations for such niceties as human rights, predictable trading regimes, national sovereignty, and scientific consensus, he made an important statement. The “power of the less powerful begins with honesty,” he asserted.
The power of the less powerful begins with honesty, all of this might seem like odd sermon fodder–especially for a sermon in which I intend to lift up one of the great abolitionist voices from our tradition, the nineteenth century British-Jamaican Unitarian minister Robert Wedderburn.
But there is something important to recognize in them, for me, for you, for our religious community, for this country, and, truthfully, for humanity. The something that we must recognize is simply this: we, collectively, have come to an ending. As Carney observed, the “predictability”–the so called rule of law–that has ordered many of our lives has broken down. The “straightforward pathway,” to again invoke Dante, has “been lost.”
We must be honest that such things as due process are disappearing before our eyes. We must be honest that for many people, especially people of color and those living in lands targeted for occupation like Palestine, such things never fully existed. But even the pretense that they do is now vanishing.
The power of the less powerful begins with honesty, we turn now from the newspaper portion of the sermon to the biblical part–which is to say the portion rooted less in the Bible and more in our living tradition. The Unitarian minister Robert Wedderburn loved the scriptural verse, “the axe is laid unto the root of the tree: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.”
Now, if you have been coming here for awhile, you might know that recovering Wedderburn for Unitarian Universalist history and theology is one of my scholarly projects. He preached anti-trinitarian abolitionism in London for almost thirty years. He led what were arguably some of the very first multiracial working-class congregations in our movement’s history. Until very recently, his regular preaching to sailors, tailors, prostitutes, revolutionaries, escaped slaves, the down and out, the despised and lowly, was entirely absent from the stories we tell about who we are as Unitarian Universalists.
The axe is laid unto the root of the tree; I am not going to rehash Wedderburn’s full biography. You can come to the senior minister’s book group on Thursday is you want that. Instead, I will just share a few details. Wedderburn parents were an enslaved woman named Rosanna and a Scottish sugar planter who was a sort of Jeffery Epstein before Jeffery Epstein. Born free due to complicated legal wrangling, he left Jamaica as a young adult and devoted his life to the abolition of slavery and opposition to imperial power. He was imprisoned by the British crown for blasphemy. He linked denial of the divinity of Jesus to the denial of the divine right of kings.
While not all of his life was laudatory, he was unafraid to call for the axe to be laid to the root of trees that bared the fruit of injustice. He charged “all potentates, governors, and governments of every description with felony” for “wickedly” violating human rights. He demanded “in the name of God, in the name of natural justice, and in the name of humanity, that all slaves be set free.”
There are two things in his abolitionist insistence that the axe be laid to the root that might guide us in this time when the “straightforward pathway … [has] been lost.” The first is honest speaking about our situation. The second is the practice of freedom dreaming. We can do both of these as a religious community instance of what Carney named a middle power. For as an institution, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston numbers ourselves neither amongst the most powerful nor the least powerful entities in the city. What we do has the potential to make a difference.
Last month, our association reminded us of this when hundreds of Unitarian Universalist clergy and laypeople went to Minneapolis to protest the brutal actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They were there to speak the honest truth that the federal government is out of control. Last month, our association’s President, Sofía Betancourt was arrested while taking the abolitionist position. “We must defund ICE,” she said.
As the religious leaders who went to Minneapolis, as our association’s President, reminded us, we can name the honest truth. We can call for an end to a brutal and unaccountable agency that does nothing to make the people of this country, or people anywhere, safer.
In Houston part of the honest truth that must be named is that ICE makes it no longer safe to hold a public meeting. The Commission on the State Takeover of HISD, on which I serve, recently had to cancel a hearing for Spanish language speakers. We were advised that such a public hearing, even one led by elected officials, was an ideal target for ICE. The taking of public testimony, we were told, might lead to the deportations of those who come to speak with us.
The abolitionist tradition which Wedderburn represents calls for another way. In taking the axe to the root of the tree–in abolishing slavery in his day or ICE in ours–he urged for the dreaming of a different world into being. Once the “chains of oppression” were burst he imagined that radical freedom might come into being. He called for the redistribution of land, an end to “land monopoly” by the rich, so that all might have access to the good things in life. He believed that no one should be not dependent on a boss or a landlord. He thought that everyone should have the freedom of self-sustenance. He pushed not only for the destruction of trees bearing bad fruit but the planting of ones that would bring a better harvest.
A better harvest, what we can of dream of in a world without ICE? A better harvest, what should I, or you, or any of us, dream of when the “straightforward pathway … [has] been lost?” In these times, adrienne maree brown invites into radical freedom dreaming. She tells us:
… there will be a future without police and prisons. Yes.
There will be a future without rape. Without harassment, and constant fear, and childhood sexual assault.
A future without war, hunger, violence. With abundance.
Where gender is a joyful spectrum. … Where each of our bodies is treated like sacred ground…
There will be a future, the straightforward pathway may be lost but, in this community, as a congregation, we have the power to imagine where next we might go. More than two hundred years ago Robert Wedderburn could say that there will be a world in which “all slaves [shall] be set free.” Today, we can proclaim that the age of authoritarianism will not begin. We can imagine a different way.
I know that it can be hard to do so. If you, like me, are “[m]idway upon the journey of our life,” then it can be tempting to succumb to the “if it bleeds, it leads,” mentality and forget that freedom dreaming is all around us. Here, in Houston, for inspiration, we need look no further than to the hundreds of high school students who walked out of their classes at the beginning of the month to protest ICE’s presence in their schools.
Thursday night I went to the HISD School Board meeting and listened to some of them. The governor has called for their bravery to be punished. Speaking the honest truth to his unelected representatives, they demanded that student political speech be respected, that HISD be returned to local control, that ICE be barred from their schools, and that democratic practice remain a part of our society.
There will be a future, in those students’ honest speeches, in their calls for the abolition of Mike Miles’s reign, they dreamed a little something of freedom into being. They were not just calling for the axe to be laid to the root. They were planting. In their demand that public education remain public, that fear of deportation not govern classrooms, that free speech remain free, they were planting a tree that will bear better fruit.
This is what we are called to do: speak honestly, dream boldly, and prepare for the planting. The students, Sofía Betancourt, adrienne maree brown, Robert Wedderburn, all offer us some guidance to find the pathway that has been lost. We can say, “axe is laid unto the root of the tree,” and name our situation. But we have covenanted to do more than that. We covenant is not just to state the truth forcefully. We covenant to encourage each other to dream and to plant.
To speak the truth, to dream, to plant, that is an expression of love. That is how we widen love’s circle. In the hopes that my words have helped it to be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
