as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, March 9, 2025
More than sixty years ago, a President from Texas stood before Congress with an important message. Lyndon B. Johnson told “the citizens of the richest … nation in the history of the world” that he was calling “for a national war on poverty.” During the rest of his administration the House and the Senate responded by working to create Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.
In the decades since tens of millions of people have benefited from these imperfect programs. Following the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Medicaid has come to cover 72 million. Without it they would not be able to easily access health care. They would struggle more. Their health would be worse. And they would be less able to contribute to society.
SNAP, meanwhile, currently provides food benefits to 42 million. It enables them to better feed their families and afford higher quality food. I should know. During a particularly difficult period of my life SNAP helped ensure that my family was food secure.
Now, I am lucky. I have never known true poverty. I grew up in an upper middle-income family. When I have struggled financially, I have always had the safety net of my parents to fall back upon. But I do agree with the poet Cynthia Cruz when she writes, “Poverty is not something one leaves behind.” Even the glimpses of it I have seen in my own life have made me profoundly grateful for programs like SNAP and shaped my perspective. When I needed them, they made my life easier and allowed me to focus less on the daily struggle to put food on the table and more on things like pursuing my education. Ultimately, I suspect, in the long run they have empowered me to contribute more to society than I might have been able to do otherwise.
That, of course, is the point. A society that provides a modicum of care for all of its members empowers everyone to reach more of their potential. It is as President Johnson said in the imperfect language of his day. We should live in a country “in which every citizen shares all the opportunities of … society, in which every … [person] has a chance to advance … [their] welfare to the limit of … [their] capacities.”
A chance to advance their welfare, have you ever benefited from these programs? Do you know someone whose life is better because of Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, or SNAP? I suspect that you have. 72 million people is a lot of people. 42 million is a lot of people. Even in our increasingly economically segregated society, I anticipate that even if you do not directly benefit from them you know people who have or who do.
These programs come from what we might call the politics of compassion. Compassion can be understood as the experience of suffering together. Intellectually, it is rooted in the realization so well described by our Unitarian foremother, the abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and later named by Martin Luther King, Jr. More than a century and a half ago, Harper observed, “[w]e are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest … of its members without receiving the curse on its own soul.” A hundred years later King reminded us, we “are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”
Compassion is closely connected to empathy. It is the ability to imagine ourselves in the place of another. I am empathic when I can picture myself living your life. The Unitarian Universalist theologian Forrest Church once named the experience as the ability “to love your enemy as yourself; to see your tears in another’s eyes.” He thought it formed the core of our universalist theology, the recognition that we each “a living member of the great Family of All Souls,” as the Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing put it.
Religious teachers across numerous tradition have long recognized that opening ourselves to compassion and empathy is a central spiritual practice. God “is compassionate and gracious, / slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love,” claims one psalmist in the Hebrew Bible. “A light shines … in the darkness” for those who are “gracious, compassionate, and beneficent,” advises another. “Blessed” are those “that considereth the poor,” began a nineteenth century prayer from our own tradition. “If you want others to be happy, practise compassion. If you want to be happy, practise compassion,” enjoins our famous contemporary the Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama.
It would be easy to go on. Instead, I will invoke the Unitarian Universalist theologian Rebecca Parker to move us along. She wrote to “have a soul is to live with sensitive awareness of the real presence of other human beings and the earth.” It is to recall that compassion and empathy lie at the core of genuine religion. Religion, I have said in the past, can best be understood as what binds us together. Compassion and empathy are ways in which we each connect to each other. Placing them at the center is, as Parker states, an invitation to make “your whole being an act of praise” and grow your soul.
To grow a soul, to make your whole being an act of praise, children are often particularly empathetic. They can sometimes see our common humanity across all human divisors. Yet almost every autobiography written by someone a generation or more ago from the segregated South contains a story of witnessing White children being taught to hate people of color. The Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka documented a number of these stories in her book Learning to White. In it she catalogs how White children are often systematically instructed that there is something wrong with people who are not White. She offers case after case where as children of four or five, White kids are implicitly instructed that they “had done something wrong” by associating with playmates across racial boundaries. This leads to the breaking of empathy, the rupture of compassion, the shriveling of souls, the casting of one community as an other by another community.
The shriveling of souls, theologians in our tradition like Thandeka argue that empathy and compassion are basic human emotions. We are each born with them. And to lessen them is to lessen yourself. To lessen yourself, to do that in the words of Rogers and Hammerstein, “You’ve got to be carefully taught!”
You have got to be carefully taught. It is not a coincidence that Elon Musk–the world’s richest man and the defender, of amongst other things, a German political party closely connected to Neo-Nazis–has claimed that the “fundamental weakness of” our society “is empathy.” Nor is it random chance that the Vice President has misdescribed Catholic theology as teaching that compassion is supposed to placed in a hierarchical order. You “love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community. And then you love you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” he has claimed. I guess he has not read either the Hebrew Bible or the Christian New Testament. In those texts, “the royal law found in the Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,” as A Letter to James calls it, can be found nine times. So, it is probably not surprising that Pope Francis appeared to rebuke the Vice President in a recent letter to bishops in the United States by writing, “Christian love is not a concentric expression of interests.”
Love is not a concentric expression of interests, it appears that we are facing the nationalization of the politics of cruelty. Such politics are connected to a conception of God who limits empathy and compassion to only part of the humanity community. Some years ago, Congressman Al Green named this link on the floor of the House.
He was debating a bill that expanded federal civil rights law to include protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. He was speaking after another Congressperson had invoked God as a reason not to protect vulnerable members of our society. Green responded by saying, “You used God to enslave my foreparents. You used God to segregate me in schools. You used God to put me on the back of the bus.”
The God who puts people in the back of the bus, the God of segregation, the God of discrimination against transgender people, the God who hates the entire LGBTQ community, the God of slavery, the God of the politics of cruelty is a God who should not be worshipped!
Green counterposed this God with God of politics of compassion. “God created every person in this room,” he said. “Are you saying that God made a mistake? This is not about God. It’s about men who choose to discriminate against other people because they have the power to do so.”
Because they have the power to do so, this past week the current President stood before both houses of Congress and made a very different speech than Lyndon Johnson did decades ago. He celebrate a vision of a nation ruled by the politics of cruelty. In a speech so infused with doublespeak that it would have made George Orwell blush, he declaimed “our country will be woke no more.” He bragged about the reinstitution of hiring practices that favor White men. He gloated over the elimination “of critical race theory from our public schools”–places and where it has not been taught–and implicitly advocated the teaching of lies to children.
He boasted about pushing policies based around the bizarre belief “that there are only two genders.” It is a belief repudiated by the rich diversity of human cultures, ways of being, and biology itself. Almost 2% of people are born intersex, that is at birth they have chromosomal or physical variations that do not neatly fit the categories of “male” and “female.”
He praised himself for planning to exacerbate the existential climate crisis. He placed targets on his political enemies. But mostly he declared that this country is moving from the war on poverty to the war on the poor.
The war on the poor, one vision of the federal government is that it can be used to redistribute wealth from the richest to the rest of us so that we might all have some of the good things of life. The war on the poor, another vision of the federal government is that its principal purpose is to maintain what economists sometimes call its regalian functions. These are those parts of the government that include the police, the courts, and the army. When governments are reduced to these functions then their primary direction is not the elimination of poverty. It is the protection of the property of the wealthy from the rest of us. The function of the government then becomes the waging of war on the poor. It works to ensure that the lowest wages possible are paid, that low quality housing is widely permitted, and that food security is not guaranteed.
In his declaration of war on the war, the President spewed nonsense about Social Security. The war on the poor, he announced it when he described his aspirations for tax cuts.
Social Security has been one of the most effective poverty elimination programs. Without it millions of older people will not be able to make ends meet. They will not be able to pay for food or shelter. They will not be able to enjoy the good things in life as they live out their years.
The President and his acolytes have let us know that they have Social Security firmly in their sights. They have made the ridiculous claim that millions of people over the age of 120 continue to fraudulently receive benefits. He suggested that they are costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, has declared that the nation’s retirement program is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
It most definitely is not. It is money that currently working people use to support those who have already made significant contributions to society. It could be extended indefinitely by lifting the income cap of social security taxes and more heavily taxing the rich.
Taxing the rich, the war on the poor, tax cuts are to be the major weapon in the war on the poor. The President has declared his intention to cut taxes, primarily for the wealthy, by $4.5 trillion. The House has recognized that this will require $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid. How many of the 72 million people on it will lose their access to health care as a result? Without health care how many people will die early or struggle with insurmountable medical debt? And for what? So that men like the President and his leading Afrikaner ally can have even more money?
Shaking his cane at the President, Congressman Green was clear about the consequences of the proposed tax cuts and the announced war on the poor. He stood up and said, there is “no mandate to cut Medicaid!” He was removed and Congress censured him. It did so after failing to censure its members who encouraged the January 6th insurrection. It did so after refusing to rebuke its members who disrupted speeches by Presidents Biden and Obama.
Friday, on Democracy Now, Congressman Green explained his remark. The President, Green stated, does not “have a mandate to gut or … to cut Social Security, [or] … Medicare. We live in a government that is of the plutocrats, by the plutocrats, for the plutocrats. … They have doctors. We have to stand for people who are not as fortunate as others. I have good healthcare. I want my constituents to have the same healthcare I have. … I’m going to protect what they do have.”
I am going to protect what they do have. It is a statement rooted in the politics of compassion. That is a good deal of what we need right now, clear articulations of the politics of compassion. In the face of tax cuts for the rich, we might call for taxing the rich more. The economist Thomas Piketty and others have thoroughly documented that those countries which heavily tax the rich offer more of the good things in life it ordinary citizens. Do you want better health care for you and your loved ones? Tax the rich. Resources to address the housing crisis? Tax the rich. More food security for those that struggle? Tax the rich. Quality education for everyone who needs it? Tax the rich.
You might not agree with this vision. You might not approve of Green’s recent actions. But we are at a time where in the face of the nationalization of the politics of cruelty we need name a strong politics of compassion. If taxing the rich will not undergird it then I encourage to imagine what might. How else might we, as a society, collectively achieve a world where we are each invited to realize our full potential, and no one struggles for want of housing, food, or health care? I do not pretend to have all such answers, but I do believe deep in my heart that it is possible to live in a country that is more thoroughly guided by compassion and empathy. So, tax the rich or please offer another empathic solution.
Such solutions will likely be based in what I have called in the past the resurrection of the living. This is the waking up to the world as it is. It is inspired by a line in the gnostic Christian text The Treatise on the Resurrection. There we find this 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.”
Truth, transformation, the revelation of what is, a transition into freshness, the resurrection of the living is that teaching, that wisdom, found in so many of the world’s religions that tells us that the purpose of life is to open ourselves to the glory, the beauty, the wonder around us. It is to become aware of the suffering of others and to recognize that we are called, collectively, to do something about it.
Now, I know that things are hard right now. It can feel like there is little we can do when the President uses the national pulpit to call for a war on the poor. If you feel that way, I encourage you to recall the words of Dorothy Day, placed as they are, in our hymnal:
People say, what is the sense of our small effort.
They cannot see that we must lay one brick at time, take one step at a time.
A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.
I invite you to cast pebbles with me. We do not know where the ripples might land.
In the face of the war on poor, in opposition to the politics of cruelty, we can, together, claim a space–this pulpit, our fellowship hall, our time together–to articulate the politics of compassion and the religious vision that underlies them. “A light shines for the upright in the darkness” when they are “gracious, compassionate, and beneficent,” again advises the psalmist.
We can act. You can participate in the boycott of Target. You can join me and our Justice Coordinating Council on Monday, March 17th to travel to Austin and tell our legislature that we want a society governed by the politics of compassion, not the politics of cruelty. You can be part of the March for Future Generations taking place today and tomorrow here in Houston. Who knows where the ripples from such pebbles will reach?
But mostly you can seek to live your life as part of a community guided by compassion and empathy. Living together, taking care of each other, encouraging each other to do what we can to take care of all, can and should form the basis of the politics of compassion, however we might ultimately imagine it.
That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
