as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, October 6, 2024
This is one long plea to do something simple. Register to vote. Register others to vote. Go vote. Take others to vote. Get out the vote. Tomorrow is the last day to register. If you are here in the sanctuary, you can register to vote in Channing Hall next door. Early voting starts October 21st. And once it starts, it is never too early to vote.
In the last presidential election, 80% of people of eligible membership went to the polls. This election, I know we can do better. If every member who did not vote in the last election went to the polls, First Unitarian Universalist would bring out about another 60 voters. That is not an inconsequential number of people. The Arizona Attorney General’s race was decided by only 280 votes in 2022. If an election in Texas was similarly close, then our 60 additional votes would go a long towards deciding.
All told, First Unitarian Universalist has about 1,500 people that subscribe to our newsletter. Assume for a moment that all of them vote with the same frequency that our membership does. If 100% of our newsletter subscribers, rather than 80%, voted then we would, as a religious community, cast an additional 300 votes. If an election as close as the Arizona Attorney General’s race happened in Texas or Harris County, then our community would be the deciding factor.
Sit with that for a moment. Raphael Warnock likes to tell us, “a vote is a kind of prayer for the kind of world we desire for ourselves and our children.” Together, we are laden with the possibility of bringing that world into being.
Now, before, I go any further, I want to ask you if, you as a congregation, are willing to commit to the work of turning out 100% of our eligible membership at the polls. If so, can I get an Amen. Amen, after all, sometimes can be translated as “I’m in.” Can we get 100% of our eligible membership? Amen.
It is not enough to just say we intend to vote. We have to come up with plans to do so. I am going to go to Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, 3826 Wheeler Avenue, on October 21st, the first day of early voting. What about you?
In a moment, when Connie rings the bell, I am going to give you ninety seconds to discuss your voting plan with your neighbor. If no one is sitting near you, I invite you to get up and find someone. Ask your neighbor, neighbor are you registered to vote? Do you have a voting plan? Do you need help getting to the polls?
Connie is going to ring the bell to get us started. And she’s going to ring it a second time to call us back to together. Now, please ask your neighbor about their voting plan.
In Channing Hall, the room right next to the sanctuary, our voting justice team has a table set up. If you are not registered to vote, they can help you register. If you need help with your voting plan, they can assist you. If want to help our community get to 100% participation, you can be part of our effort. I know we can get to 100% participation. Can I get an Amen to that?
I suspect that a few of you might need convincing. We are not already at 100% participation. I have tried to be convincing on the practical level. Collectively, the members of this congregation have the power to decide a close election. Now, I want to offer a theological reflection on why I think you should get out and vote. And then, I want to connect my encouragement to vote with our Vidas Robadas installation.
I have said in the past that Unitarian Universalism is a this worldly religion. Our focus is not on whatever happens after we die. We do not only hope for Heaven when we are dead. We do what we can to make the world we live a more beautiful place. More than a century ago, the first preacher in our tradition to visit Houston, Quillen Shinn, put the matter this way, “What are we to live for but to make this world a Paradise, a pleasant, happy place for all to live in?”
A pleasant, happy place for all to live in, these are challenging words. They set forth a religious agenda for us that is not based in correct belief. It is centered on action. The good life, the ethical life, is found in the testament of our lives. “We are not born with a character, good or bad, but only with a capacity to form one,” is how another of our religious ancestors put it.
So, this is the second Sunday in a row where we are mixing religion and politics. It should not be surprising, given our overall outlook on both. The simplest way to define religion is to go to the Latin root of the word. Religare means to “to tie, to bind.” In this sense, religion is literally what binds us together.
And politics, I think that no one has given us a better definition than the civil rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer. She said, “But, baby, what we eat is politics.” It is the way that we humans figure out how to live together, or not. Humans are social creatures. We live together, in big cities, or in small bands, not all on our own. Politics is the roads. It is the buildings. It is the agricultural system. It is everything that we organize that binds us together.
The path to the good life, our religious forebearers believed, lay not with avoiding politics but with engaging in them. They would have agreed with the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s observation, “activity in a political community has a necessary … role in the development of good character.”
I mention all of this because this is the second Sunday in a row where we are gathering for a sort of political revival. Last Sunday, the leadership of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Climate Action Team, and I invited you to imagine renewal rather than collapse as we collectively struggle to address the climate catastrophe. We did so in the hopes that by lifting up the imagination we might be able to renew our commitment to facing the existential crisis of the hour. And, hour by hour, as the news about the devastation from Hurricane Helene gets worse and worse, it is hard to deny that we, as a human species are in crisis.
The most powerful force we have access to is the human power of the imagination. We have to imagine another way if we are to bring that way into being. Everything starts, the quest for good character, the creation of more beautiful cities, the confrontation with the climate crisis, with the imagination. It is like Danez Smith’s poem “dinosaurs in the hood.” There he cycles through the ugly and the humorous before finally landing on the dream. First it is “don’t let Tarantino direct this. in his version, the boy plays with a gun.” Then it is “i want a scene / where a cop car gets pooped on by a pterodactyl.” Before he ends with what is actually important, what he, and we, are truly after, “the only reason / i want to make this is for the first scene anyway; little black boy / on the bus with his toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless / his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there.”
And so, this Sunday, just like last Sunday, I want to invite you to get a bit into the revivalist spirit and offer up an Amen or Hallelujah if there is a something that I say that particularly moves you.
And, truthfully, today, I am not just trying to move you. This morning, First Unitarian Universalist is joining with congregations across the state as part of the Vidas Robadas, stolen lives, project. Over the course of the morning, we are hanging 150 t-shirts that represent the lives of individuals whose lives were ended by a bullet. Here in Harris County, there were 4,100 gun deaths between 2018 and 2023. Our service is a collective act of mourning and protest. It is a communal calling for a better way. It will conclude with an invitation for you to participate in the creation of an installation.
Vidas robadas, stolen lives, the mourning, none of the gun deaths in Harris County had to happen. Gun violence is now the leading cause of children’s death in the United States. There are nine fatal shootings of children each day. Every two hours and thirty-six minutes a child dies because of gunfire. During the five hours that we hold our Sunday programs, two kids will probably have their lives ended by a bullet.
Two children, two families shattered forever, that is a lot of grief, a lot of mourning. None of these deaths had to happen. Vidas robadas, stolen lives, the protest, the number of children killed by guns in the United States is almost forty times higher, per capita, than it is in other wealthy countries. Senator J. D. Vance has recently said that such deaths are “a fact of life.” Those are his words, “a fact of life.”
It is abundantly clear. Child deaths from gunfire are not a fact of life. They are the result of willful policy choices. They can be decreased through the implementation of common-sense gun reform. And they increase when gun safety laws are repealed.
Policy matters. Policy can protect lives. Policy can destroy lives. Policy matters. That is a fact of life. Can I get an Amen?
Vidas robadas, stolen lives, mourning, protest, there is a better way, we have the power to change policy. Two simple policy solutions. The first, background checks and permits to purchase a handgun. Background checks are proven to reduce gun violence. States with background checks have lower firearm homicide rates and lower firearm suicide rates. In 2021, Texas had the most total gun deaths of any state in the country. Texas does not require background checks for handguns. Lives would be saved by implementing them. Can I get an Amen?
The second, the passage of Extreme Risk or “Red Flag” laws. These laws allow for family members or friends to petition a court for intervention to prevent someone in crisis from accessing guns. Such actions are proven to save lives. Indiana saw an 7.5% decrease in firearm suicides in the decade following the implementation of such laws. Almost a third of people who commit mass shootings show signs before they start killing. Texas does not have a Red Flag law. Lives would be saved by implementing one. Can I get an Amen?
The national crisis hotline, should you ever need it, is 988.
There are many other policy solutions. I am sure that our friends from Mom Demand Action would be happy to talk with you about any of them. But my point is this: policy matters. Lives are saved anytime the state legislature passes sensible gun laws. Each time Texas repeals one or fails to implement one, well, the Governor and the legislature should know better. They are helping to place fingers on triggers.
That is the politics of cruelty. It places the profits and the interests of the gun lobby over the value of human life.
The value of human life, Vidas Robadas, stolen lives, through our service and through our installation, we are calling for a politics of compassion. In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, we “declare that every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.” Commonsense gun laws are expression of this declaration. Cam I get an Amen?
Unitarian Universalists are not alone in holding such a theological perspective. Since this the Sunday that falls between the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I thought I would talk about it from a Jewish one.
There is a Jewish teaching that one person is a world. It is found in the Talmud, the great collection of rabbinical wisdom which records the words of the sages as they wrestle with what it means to lead a good life. There we find a verse asserting that anyone who kills a single person, it “as if he destroyed an entire world.” And there we find another verse, anyone who “sustains one soul … [it is] as if he sustained an entire world.”
I apologize for the gendered language. It is an ancient text. However, the point is this, every person is a universe unto themselves. They contain unfathomable possibilities. Anytime a life is taken out of this world, then those possibilities disappear with them. For the young, those possibilities include future generations. For those past childbearing age, those possibilities contain all of the richness of individual creativity and collective action–bringing a more beautiful world into being.
And, here as we draw to a close, I want to share a story that I think about when we discuss gun violence. Governor Tim Walz has been mocked for misspeaking in his debate with Senator Vance. He mistakenly said that he has “become friends with school shooters.” Well, I have known a school shooter. Or, more accurately, I have almost known one, for my story has a happy ending.
When I was in high school one of the members of my Boy Scout troop brought a handgun to school. He was being relentlessly bullied by someone in his biology class. They had known each other for years. The bullying had gone on for since middle school.
So, one day, the aspiring school shooter told the bully that he had enough. He said he was going to come to school and kill him. The next day, he took a handgun from his father’s collection to school. Right there, the importance of locking up firearms. Right there, why Red Flag laws matter. and he brought it to our high school.
Then in biology he pulled it out with the intention of killing his bully. His plan was murder suicide. But miracle of miracles, somehow before he pulled the trigger, his biology teacher talked him out of it. Sometimes all it takes to stop someone from going through with a shooting is the right conversation.
Again, the national crisis hotline is 988. There is never shame in calling it.
I am not going to go further into the details of what happened when I was in high school. They are upsetting. But the story, has a happy ending. The aspiring shooter put the handgun down. Both he and the bully lived. He got the mental health care he needed. Several years later, he graduated from college with a nursing degree. He saved lives through his work. He got married and had a family. He brought lives into being. Each person is a world.
Each person is a world. We each contain a multitude of possibilities. Vidas robadas, stolen lives, we have 150 t-shirts on our campus. That is a 150 worlds brought to end. Many of them could have been saved by common sense gun laws. Many of them could have been saved by having someone to talk to.
None of these t-shirts should be here. None of them represent a fact of life. All of them are the result of policy choices. The United States is unique in the wealthy world for deaths by gun violence. We can mourn them. We can make a protest. We can dream of a more beautiful world. We can vote. We can bring that world into being.
So, in the hopes that we can bring our congregation to 100% voter participation, I invite you to say Amen.
