as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, September 22, 2024
It is an honor to have been nominated by your Search Committee to serve as this congregation’s next settled Senior Minister. Over the last six and a half years, it has been a real privilege to minister with you. We have done good work together. During my time as your interim Senior Minister and then as your Developmental Minister, we navigated a global pandemic, stabilized and modernized the congregation’s administration, held a successful capital campaign, and crafted a powerful vision for the future.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to continue our collaboration. We have before us the sacred labor of widening love’s circle. I know that in the coming years we will be able to build an even more spirit filled, powerful, and diverse religious community. I am also positive that our shared labor will be a testament to the strength of our covenantal commitments: to make love the spirit of this congregation; to take service as our prayer; to dwell together in peace; to seek truth in love; and to encourage one another.
In about a month, you will have a special congregational meeting to vote on calling me as your settled Senior Minister. Between now and then, you will be hearing from the Search Committee and other leaders in the congregation about the result of their congregational survey. I suspect that they will also share about why they believe we will continue to have a thriving ministry together.
I will have more to say about our ministry together as well. The day of the vote, I will offer a sermon casting our shared vision of widening love’s circle. I will invite you to imagine what we might accomplish together in the future.
The future, it is, of course, also the focus of our major sermon series this year, “Future Visions, Future Selves.” But before I turn to today’s subject, titled “The Dawn of Everything,” I want to pause and offer my gratitude to the Search Committee. They put in hundreds of hours of hard work. They read through and synthesized the results from numerous survey results. They organized cottage meetings. They held innumerable meetings. You put your faith in them. They listened to you.
First Unitarian Universalist is blessed to have such devoted and talented lay leaders. Please join me in giving them a rousing round of applause. I am sincerely grateful for their hard work. I hope that you are as well.
Celebrating the work of the Search Committee provides a bridge to the central message of today’s sermon. Here at First Unitarian Universalist, we say that we “seek the truth in love.” When we gather as part of our larger movement, we state that we “learn from one another in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
The concept of religious freedom is core to both of these statements. And today, as we consider the future, I want to lift up freedom as one of our central religious values.
One of my mentors, the Unitarian Universalist folksinger, political radical, and union organizer, U. Utah Philips, used to summarize his understanding of our tradition in a single sentence. “All we want,” he would say, “is to create voluntary combinations.”
All we want is to create voluntary combinations, our Unitarian Universalist congregations are voluntary associations. No one is forcing you to be here today. Ok, that statement might not be true for the under eighteen crowd. But, otherwise, you are free to cast about for the exits.
No one here is going to make you believe something. First Unitarian Universalists exists because of the will of its members. No outside entity compelled the congregation’s founders to bring it into being. And no group beyond the congregation’s membership sustains it across the generations.
As a voluntary association, you craft your own covenant, vision, and mission. Love is the spirit of this congregation, widening love’s circle are statements you came up with on your own. The Unitarian Universalist Association did not impose them upon you.
The Association also does not impose ministers on you. The Board has the power to hire and fire contract ministers. And it is only the congregation itself, that is all of you who are pledging members, who have the power to call settled ministers.
This commitment to religious freedom has a deep history. It is a history that many Unitarian Universalists recapitulate in their own life stories. It is a history that hinges on what the anthropologist David Graeber and the archeologist David Wengrow named the “three primordial freedoms.” These are “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relations.”
The freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relations, they describe these freedoms in their magisterial book, “The Dawn of Everything.” In it, they attempt to disrupt the standard account of human history. Rather than accepting the progressive narrative that places bands of hunter gatherers at one end and us enlightened modern city dwellers at the other, they want to suggest that history is filled with a diversity of “alternative possibilities.”
They understand history as a form of myth making. “Myth is the way in which human societies give structure and meaning to experience,” they write. In this they agree with Grace Lee Boggs, who we lifted up as part of our Lives of the Spirit series last spring. She observed, “History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past.”
History is the stories we tell about the past. Graeber and Wengrow do not offer a mythic narrative where human life before the dawn of civilization–that is cities–was, in the philosopher Thomas Hobbes infamous words, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This myth essentially portrays human existence as “a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else.” It has long been used to justify repressive regimes. Without the police, the military, courts, prisons, and the like, humanity will quickly descend into chaos, the logic goes. People need a boss, a cop, a priest, a king or a tyrant to tell them what to do, the claim runs. Without a rigid hierarchy to keep us in line, everyone just starts killing each other. At least, that is the central thrust of the Hobbesian myth.
The vast scope of the human past–the roughly two hundred thousand years of humanity’s existence–is more complicated. Sifting through the available evidence–archeological remains, anthropological records–Graeber and Wengrow argue that Hobbesian accounts “simply aren’t true.” To bolster this claim, they marshal texts like The Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled. It was published by the French aristocrat and explorer Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce de Lahontan in 1703. In this narrative of his travels through what is now called Minnesota and Wisconsin, he recounts his conversations with the Wendat leader and philosopher Kandiaronk.
Kandiaronk is not a name I suspect you have encountered before. I certainly did not know it before I picked up Graeber and Wengrow massive volume. And, in some sense, that is part of the point of their work. “Most of human history,” they write, “is irreparably lost to us.”
But, what we can recover, they want us to know, is a lot more varied and interesting than we typically imagine. It is not a story that features savage hunter gatherers on one end and enlightened European civilizations on the other. It is not a history of escaping the free brutality of early, wild, human life for the peaceful chains of our present domesticated existence. It is more interesting and varied than that. It is filled with people like Kandiaronk.
He was a key strategist in trying to build what Graeber and Wengrow describe as “a comprehensive indigenous alliance to hold off the settler advance.” He is widely regarded as having been a great warrior, a brilliant orator, and a skillful diplomat. He despised Christianity. He thought it was absurd. If Jesus was really the son God, he claimed, and these are words attributed to him, “He would have gone from nation to nation performing mighty miracles, thus giving everyone the same laws. Then we would all have exactly the same religion … Instead, there are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, of which” the Christians claim that theirs “alone, is any good.”
There are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, Kandiaronk’s words illustrate that human society and human belief have been incredibly varied across time. There have been some societies like the French one which Kandiaronk’s interlocutor, Lahontan, came from. These have believed, in his words, “the wicked need to be punished, and the good need to be rewarded. Otherwise, murder, robbery, and defamation would spread everywhere.” And there have been those which rejected the idea that we humans, as Kandiaronk put it, must “be forced to do good.” Such societies have existed without judges, without laws, and without money.
They have not been perfect. They not been utopias. They have been complicated settings in which the full drama of human life–birth, death, and all that comes between–have taken place. They have been settings where people have often had, sometimes lost, and sometimes struggled for, the three primordial freedoms: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create or transform social relations.
These three freedoms have long been central to our Unitarian Universalist tradition. The same can be said about the effort to reimagine or reinterpret the past as a source of freedom, not as a justification for tyranny. I suspect that you might be familiar with both of these dynamics in your own experience of Unitarian Universalism. I anticipate that this is especially true if you came to our tradition, as so many people do, from another religious community.
The freedom to disobey, I invite you to think about this freedom as it relates to your own spiritual journey. Often, during our Inquirers Series or when I meet with a new member of the congregation I ask them a question that runs something like, “What brought you to First Unitarian Universalist?” What is your answer to this question?
A common response, when I ask it, runs something like this, “I grew up Catholic, or Southern Baptist, or in an orthodox religious household,” you might say. And then, you might continue, “I became a teenager. And I had a question about Hell. I asked my Sunday School teacher what happened to people who are not Christian. Did they all go to Hell? I wanted to know. And my teacher replied, yes. And I thought that was wrong. So I decided that I did not believe the teachings–the creeds–of that religious community.”
Your stories differ greatly in the details. But they often hinge upon the freedom to disobey. You disagreed with creedal statements. Rather than obey the hierarchies that it contained you exercised the second primordial freedom, the freedom to move.
In other words, you left the earlier religious community to which you belonged. Some of you spent a long time wandering–exercising your freedom of movement–as you explored your spirituality. It is not uncommon for new members tell me about how they tried Methodism, Episcopalianism, Buddhism, or Reform Judaism before they entered our sanctuary.
But whatever you disobeyed, wherever you wandered, we told you that you are welcome here, welcome to join with us in the work of widening love’s circle. And when you stayed, it was likely because you were attracted to our community’s commitment to the third primordial freedom: the freedom to make our own voluntary combinations.
The freedom to make voluntary combinations, Graeber and Wengrow observe that the “freedom to make promises is … [its] most basic and minimal element.” We Unitarian Universalists place that element of freedom at the heart of our life together. For that is what a covenant is, it is a promise that we make to each other about how we will be as a community.
Love is the spirit of our congregation, a promise to place love at the center of communal life. Service is our prayer, a promise to live out our faith in deeds, rather than relegate it to creeds. To dwell together in peace, a promise to treat each other with respect and kindness. To seek truth in love, a promise to place the value of freedom of conscience forever in conversation with our commitments to care for each other. To encourage one another, a promise to build our communal life from the bricks of compassion, anti-racism, equity, and diversity. These are the promises of our covenant, they come from the freedom we treasure, the freedom to make our own voluntary combinations.
The freedom to make our own voluntary combinations, the freedom to disobey, the freedom to move, we Unitarian Universalists came to incorporate these freedoms into our religious life because our religious ancestors were brave enough to reimagine the past. In the early sixteenth century, the printing press came into being. Literacy started to be more widespread. Some folks began to read the Bible for themselves.
When they did, they found they had a lot of questions. The text did not contain the things that they were told it did. Umm… excuse me, these religious ancestors of ours, said to the church authorities of their day. We have read the Bible. We want to know where it says that there is a Trinity. We cannot find that in the text. Pardon us, but we are a bit confused. Where is the Pope in the Bible? And Hell, and everlasting damnation, that seems like a bit of stretch from what these words say. Some of them even went further. They asked really annoying questions. They said things like, we have read the Christian New Testament, and it seems like there used to be a lot of female leaders in the church. Paul is always going on about folks like Phoebe, Prisca, and Mary. Some of them appear to have been clergy. So, what happened to all the female priests? Or, yeah, uh, it seems like Jesus was opposed to violence and the Roman Empire. We read that he said things like, “All who use swords will be killed with swords.” And he was executed by the state. Can you remind us again where it is that he tells us we should join the army and kill people on behalf of the king.
From all of this, we dissent, they said. We disobey all of these teachings, they said. They are not in the Bible. And so, in many cases, our earliest religious ancestors literally ran away. That is, of course, how Unitarianism came to the Western Hemisphere. The people who brought Unitarian theology to places like Massachussets, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina–the locations of our earliest congregations–were often actually on the run from the religious authorities back in Europe. They disobeyed, they ran away, and they made their own combinations. The earliest covenants in our tradition, the promises that our religious ancestors made to each other, date to the arrival of those early Europeans to places that are now called Boston or Plymouth.
In lifting up the inspiration they got from interpreting the past, the dawn of Christianity, to disobey, runaway, and make their own combinations, I do not want to give the appearance that I am celebrating settler colonialism. There is a reckoning that we Unitarian Universalists have to do with the foundational horrors of this country. The promises that many of our religious ancestors initially made did not include indigenous people or non-Europeans.
But that is not the sum of our history. And just as human history is more complicated and varied than the Hobbesian account–it was not primarily poor, nasty, brutish, and short, Unitarian Universalist history has not entirely been the history of Europeans. The earliest Unitarian community in India dates to the late eighteenth century. It was not founded by Europeans. There are Unitarian Universalists in the Philippines, Africa, and Latin America. Many of them formed their communities the same way that European Unitarians did: they disobeyed, they moved, and they made their own combinations.
Even the history of our tradition in Europe is not tied exclusively to White people. Through my research, I have uncovered a Black Unitarian minister in London who was active from 1802 to 1828. Robert Wedderburn was building multiracial, working class, congregations in England at the same time that William Ellery Channing was preaching Unitarianism in Boston. Restoring Wedderburn to our constellation of religious ancestors helps us further explore how our religious forbearers have both lived into and failed to live into their covenants.
In this congregation, if we are serious about widening love’s circle, then we are going to have to do exactly what our religious ancestors did. We are going to need to look to the past to reimagine the future. The past–be it the past of our tradition or the past of humanity–was more varied and complicated than we often acknowledge. There is not one human story. There are many. There is not one Unitarian Universalist history–pointing inevitably to primarily White congregations–there are many.
There are many stories, what can we imagine together? What sort of community can we craft when we exercise our freedom to create our own combinations? Future visions, future selves, these are questions we will pursue together this year, and am I excited to say, I hope in the years to come. And so, in the hope, nay the trust, that the community we imagine together will be a strong, spirit filled, promise, devoted to widening love’s circle, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
