The Next Revolution

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as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, October 13, 2024

Next Sunday, you will be holding a special meeting to call me as First Unitarian Universalist’s settled Senior Minister. If the vote goes ahead as I hope it will, I will be the eighth person in the congregation’s history to hold that role.

This morning and next, I want to spend our time together reflecting on our shared vision. Today, we do so as part of this year’s major program series, “Future Visions, Future Selves.” Through it, we are inviting you into imaginative explorations of the future. This spring we will see if we can visualize our human and planetary future. We will be exploring such topics as the religious dimensions of extraterrestrials and artificial intelligence. We will continue to grapple with the existential crisis that lies before all of us: the climate catastrophe.

Before that, we will be tending to an inescapable subject: death. It has been a central religious concern for as long as there have been humans. It is the future of all of us. How do you understand death? What legacy do you want to leave? How do we honor those who have gone before?

But prior to tilting towards questions like those, we are spending this month and next on an aspect of the future that just about everyone in this country is struggling with at the moment. We attempting to envision the future of our society. It is, after all, election season. We are living through a time when we are being invited by the various presidential candidates to imagine what our lives will look like if they get elected.

It is unfortunately my contention that no matter who gets elected, we are in for hard times. One of the candidates has been described by his running mate as “America’s Hitler.” A major military leader who has worked closely with him has described him as “fascist to the core.”

He is promising to deport more than ten million people. Many of his allies hope Project 2025 will provide a blueprint for his administration. If he is elected, we can expect assaults on women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, workers rights, really any kind of rights, of a kind that have not been seen since the rise of Jim Crow.

Hard times, the other major party candidate is not stridently demanding a ceasefire in the Middle East. I am skeptical about her ability, if elected, to pass the kind of legislation needed to adequately address the climate crisis. Nor do I anticipate that her policies will prove adequate to confront the housing crisis, rising inequality, or the resurgence of white supremacy.

She almost always frames her remarks in terms of the needs of the middle class. She talks about how, “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal.” She rarely mentions the working classes. She has little to say about the poor. I have yet to hear her mention eliminating poverty as a goal. Help to buy houses is all fine and well for people who have economic stability. But what about everyone else?

No matter who wins, it is hard to imagine that the United States will stop selling arms to Israel. No matter who wins, poverty will be allowed to persist. No matter who wins, rising oceans, warmer summers, and fiercer storms.

Last week, I said that my sermon was one long plea to get out the vote. I challenged First Unitarian Universalist to reach the goal of 100% voter participation for our members and friends. Can I get an Amen to that?

This week, I am going to take a different tact. It might be a bit risky because of what I want to say. It is this. Voting is not going to save us. It is not enough. It is never enough.

Again, please go vote. If you have questions about the importance of voting, consider the old apocryphal quote, misattributed to Emma Goldman. It runs, “If voting did anything, they would outlaw it.” Well, here in Texas, over there in Florida, all throughout the South, and anywhere the party of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy has power, politicians have been trying to outlaw it. Or at least, more accurately, they have been working to make it hard for working class and poor people to vote.

The misinformation being spread is pervasive. I fell for a little of it last week. In the first service, I made the mistake of directing people to a state of Texas website that contains misleading voter registration information. Fortunately, between services a couple of members of the congregation pointed out my mistake. I had better information in my second sermon.

To me, the episode was a reminder about the power of religious community. We can only get free together. None of us can do it alone, on our own. We need each other to survive, to thrive. So, today, and most Sundays between now and the election, I am going to tell you this: the best source for non-partisan information about the election is our voting justice team. They have sorted through all of morass of material floating around. They are committed to getting 100% of our members and friends to the polls. If you have a question the election–where to vote, how to vote, when to vote–please ask one of the good folks in Channing Hall. During the week, or if you are viewing online, you can also call our administrative offices. They will connect you with someone who can help you develop a voting plan and get to the polls. They can also empower you to be part of our get out the vote effort. Our members are block walking. They are phone banking. We are going to be bringing, as the phrase goes, souls to the polls.

Souls to the polls, having said all of that, I am going to repeat myself. Voting is not going to save us. It is not enough. It is never enough. Can I get an Amen?

We are on the cusp of what sometimes gets called a Kairos moment. The word is Greek. It means “the right time.” David Graeber and David Wengrow, who we spent time with last month, describe it “as one of those … moments … when … frames of reference undergo a shift–a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols.. and … change is possible.”

This Kairos moment is being brought on, primarily, by the climate crisis. How we, as a human species, respond to it will determine the human future. It, as the activist and journalist Naomi Klein has said, changes everything. There is a chance, as she and many others hope, that it can be “a catalyzing force for positive change.” And there is a chance that it will lead to a dystopian era.

The activist adrienne maree brown has noted that the Buddhist philosopher “Johanna Macy speaks of [this time as] the ‘great turning,’ a collective awakening and shifting direction, away from wanton destruction of this planet and each other … towards life and abundance.”

The image is really lovely. The question though, really, is that which way are we going to turn? brown, Macy, Graeber, Wengrow, and lots of other folks are hoping that we are turning towards “life and abundance.” But the world is on a knife’s edge. It seems quite possible that we are turning the other way, hard times.

The question I see us collectively wrestling with in this difficult epoch is simple this: what is our role, as a religious community, in turning the wheel towards life and abundance and away from scarcity and death?

We have done much to try and answer this question already. We have dedicated ourselves to widening love’s circle. Our Unitarian Universalist Association claims, “Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values.”

For generations, the world’s great spiritual activists have been telling us that we must learn to place love at the center of our lives and our communities. When, decades ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., stated that our society “must undergo a radical revolution of values,” that is what he was talking about. When today someone like brown writes, that placing love as “the central practice of … organizers and spiritual leaders,” that is what she is arguing for.

Love is the power that holds us together. We are committed to widening love’s circle. Can I get an Amen?

These are pleasant words. I want to suggest, however, that living into them requires both personal and congregational transformation. We are not there yet. We are aspiring. We need, I need, you need, to change if we want to fully live into such visions.

Two orienting insights as we consider what it means to put this vision into action. The first comes from the Chinese American philosopher Grace Lee Boggs. I suspect that you have heard me speak about her in the past. She was part of last year’s “Lives of the Spirit” series. One of the great spiritual activists of the last decades, she mentored generations of activists–including adrienne maree brown–from her home in Detroit. Like King, she believed that our human future depended on undergoing a revolution in values.

She did not necessarily think that such a revolution was coming. The mass movements of the mid-twentieth century–the labor movement, the civil rights movement–are not coming back. Instead, the only hope that we humans have, she believed, was in small scale projects that we can use to sow the seeds of something larger. It is through networking such projects together, she understood, that we might have some chance of reviving humanity as we collectively struggled with the intwined threats of the climate crisis, rising white supremacy, and growing inequality. Holding this wisdom in her heart, she taught, “Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.”

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual. If we are to provoke the great turning, we have to transform both ourselves and our communities.

Our next orienting insight comes from the nineteenth century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. A political radical, he spent considerable time living in exile or suffering in prison. He was nearly executed by firing squad. His last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is considered one of the greatest works ever written. In it we find the observation, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing. Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual. Widening love’s circle, the work ahead, if we are truly committed to these things, is profoundly challenging.

Taking love as a guiding principle in life places us radically at odds with the powers and principalities of our day. Here in Texas, we seem to be caught in the politics of cruelty. Widening love’s circle means creating a politics of compassion.

This can start with small actions. It can be offering kindness and empathy when we find ourselves living through the most difficult of times. One of the most powerful stories I know about this comes from the Holocaust survivor Gerta Weissman Klein. Writing of her time in Auschwitz, Klein recollects, “Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf.

Imagine a world in which your entire possession in one raspberry and you give it to your friend.”

No matter how rough and rocky, no matter the road we trod, we are always haunted by the politics of compassion. That is what adrienne maree brown is talking about when she says we need “to practice the world we wish to see.” I wish the Israeli government, with their world class military, would wake up to this reality. I wish that all of the violent actors, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian government, in the Middle East and elsewhere, would open themselves to this truth. I wish President Biden, Vice President Harris, and whomever is the next president of the United States, would come under its sway.

The politics of compassion, sometimes I like to say that the purpose of our religious community is to help us undergo what I call the resurrection of the living. My inspiration here comes from the gnostic Christian text “The Treatise on the Resurrection.” In it we find an answer to the query, “What is the resurrection?” “It is truth standing firm. It is revelation of what is, and the transformation of things, and a transition into freshness.”

The resurrection of the living, it contains the realization that among the essential building blocks of a politics of compassion are small, daily, actions. We can only effect the great turning if we include an understanding that giving a raspberry to a friend is a core part of our politics.

So let me ask you this, how would you need to change yourself in order to do that? I know that I am always in process. I am not already there. But I am constantly trying to shift, to change, myself. When I make a mistake, like I did last week, I attempt to assume that efforts to correct me are coming from a commitment to widen love’s circle, not to play the game of get the minister.

I will admit that making that shift has been somewhat difficult for me. Get the minister is a favorite game in many Unitarian Universalist congregations. It is no secret that the majority of First Unitarian Universalist’s settled Senior Ministers have had what we now call negotiated resignations. The congregation’s very first settled minister, John Petrie, was forced out by the Board. Horace Westwood, his immediate successor, had the same fate.

I know that if my settled ministry with you is going to be successful, I need to assume that suggestions to help me grow are coming from a desire to widen love’s circle. But it is going to equally important for the members of the congregation to discover what you need to do to change to avoid playing further rounds of get the minister. That cannot be a subject for a sermon. It has to be something you figure out for yourselves.

That is not to say that your previous settled ministers did not make mistakes. My immediate predecessor resigned his fellowship pending an investigation into misconduct. Clearly, a negotiated resignation in case was warranted. But was that really the case for the four other ministers who had a similar experience? Again, the congregation’s question not mine.

It might be that we have done all the work together we need to do to be certain that such a pattern does not reassert itself. It could be that there is more work to do. Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing, I suspect that both personal and congregational transformation are necessary to truly widen love’s circle and live into our mission.

Because when we do, when there is a healthy relationship between the congregation’s lay leadership and its clergy, First Unitarian Universalist can do great things. You might know some of the history: the first historically White congregation in the city to legally desegregate; the first non-LGBTQ congregation to have an openly gay Senior Minister; a national leader in the sanctuary movement of the 1980s…

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing, none of that was possible without the hard work of personal transformation. In 1954, it meant that White members of a congregation living in the Jim Crow South had to figure out how to set aside their personal, racial, prejudices, to boldly open the doors of our sanctuary. In 1982, it meant being willing to be ministered to by an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was profoundly stigmatized, especially by the region’s political establishment and dominant religious traditions. In 1983, it meant a willingness to risk arrest, and possibly the continued existence of the congregation, over a commitment to loving welcome the stranger and the refugee.

In 2024 truly widening love’s circle will require personal transformations. It is not for me, in this sermon, or in this moment, to speculate exactly on what those personal transformations will look like. That is for you to figure out. But one of the reasons why I love First Unitarian Universalist is that so many of the longtime members have stories about how the congregation empowered them to undergo personal transformation: to move past prejudice; to become less angry and more loving; to undergo the resurrection of the living and wake up to the beauty of the world as it is.

It is an honor to be with you on such journeys of transformation. When we undergo them, together, we start to turn this congregation into even more of a significant spiritual and civic institution than it already is. We start to move past the work of voter turnout and towards the work of creating a better way. Just in the past week, First Unitarian Universalist has made strides in doing this. We held a press conference with allied organizations as part of our Vidas Robadas installation that was covered by Univision. We convinced TMO, one of the city’s most significant networks of congregations, to come out against the HISD bonds. We are building up our congregation as a prophetic voice for widening love’s circle in Houston and beyond.

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual. Voting is not going to save us. But community, a community that demands of us the difficult work of personal transformation, well, that might just enable us to survive and even thrive.

The politics of compassion, love in action, we Unitarian Universalists are the inheritors of a beautiful tradition that invites us to place love at the center of our lives. Doing so has allowed our religious ancestors to do much to bring about a revolution in values. We are charged to do now.

That, together, we might live into our vision of widening love’s circle, I invite the congregation to say Amen.

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