I was appalled when I heard the news that schools in Louisiana are now required to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Along with exasperation and outrage at such a blatantly unconstitutional mandate, it raises a lot of questions. How and why did they choose the particular version of the Ten Commandments each classroom must display? And why waste time and resources on performative religion when they could be used instead to, say, provide free breakfast and lunch to all schoolchildren.
The more I’ve thought about this law, the more I’ve come to realize just how ironic it is. The Commandments have been used for generations to oppress people. But like so many aspects of religion, they didn’t start out as tools of harm. In the Book of the Exodus, the Commandments are given to Moses not long after the Hebrew people left Egypt where they’d long been enslaved. They were given as a covenant (a set of agreements between God and the people) not because God was some power hungry tyrant like the Pharaoh they just left, but because humans need laws, agreed ways of behaving, if freedom has any chance to flourish. Society can only function if people have laws against murder and lying and stealing they can depend on.
It’s ironic that a covenant established to protect an ancient people’s newfound freedom is now being used by Christian conservatives to take people’s freedom away. So often in the course of human history things that were originally meant to protect freedom later become tools of harm. I’m grateful to my colleague, the Rev. Darcy Roake, community minister based in New Orleans, for being part of an ACLU lawsuit against the state of Louisiana. In the midst of our broken and unjust world, it’s a blessing to know that people who share our values are making good, holy trouble.
There’s no shortage of news to be upset about, but I think this new Louisiana law hits close to home for a lot of UUs because so many people have come to our congregations seeking freedom from conservative religion, freedom from theology misused to control and terrorize rather than comfort and liberate. For any of us, but especially for people who have been on the receiving end of religious abuse, this kind of news can make us feel reactive. Who here has been feeling reactive lately after watching or reading or listening to the news? Yeah, me too.
That reactivity is important for us to notice. It’s important to reflect on. Because most religious and theological development happened in reaction to the ideas and practices, rituals and theologies that came before.
The Unitarianism and Universalism that form the foundation of our religious heritage were reactions to Calvinism. Transcendentalism was a reaction to Intellectualism. And the Humanism that has drawn so many to this free faith, was a reaction to all sorts of things – supernaturalism, philosophy, psychology, science.
Humanism – the idea that human choices matter – has had an undeniably powerful impact for good. And yet, it’s not without its own challenges. Because it’s not as simple as just replacing one’s belief in God with wholesale faith in humanity. All we have to do is watch the news to see why people find humanity anything but faith and trust.
For all of the progress humanity has made, for all of the good we’ve done, as a species we seem a lot more interested in accumulating wealth and power than in making the world a better place. All of the biggest threats to our well-being and the continued survival of life as we know it on Earth are the consequence of human choices. The conditions that have led to the climate crisis, the insatiable need for more and more things, the brutal inequality that leads some to die while others enjoy wasteful wealth.
What good is human agency if people are going to choose the path of suffering and global death? What good is democracy if people are just going to elect a proven fascist to lead them? How can we have faith in the same humanity that’s continues to bring these realities about? Entrusting the fate of the world to humanity seems just as unlikely, just as much a leap of faith, as believing a god will fix everything for us.
The recent Supreme Court decisions have been really heavy, and Project 2025 (a blueprint the political Right is following to radically restructure US government and laws) is downright scary. I’ve preached so many sermons in the last few years about what to do when things feel overwhelming, where to look for meaning when things feel hopeless. In times such as these, we look to stories of people who have made a difference in their own hopeless times.
We look to people like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper from today’s Time for All Ages. I can’t imagine how scary, how heavy the news of the Fugitive Slave Act would have been for her to learn about. And yet, somehow, she carried on. In times such as these, we sing songs like “There Is More Love Somewhere.” Like so many African American spirituals, not much is known about its origins. What we do know is that this song inspired people in completely hopeless circumstances to keep on keeping on. To keep on in the faith that even if they don’t find more love, more hope, more peace and joy, maybe those who come after them will.
I’ve heard many different iterations of this song over the years, in different churches and community spaces, at demonstrations and funerals. We’ve placed a lot of different words in the song – there is more love, more hope, more joy and peace, more faith. What I’ve never heard is anyone sing “there is more choice somewhere.”
I don’t think the heart of humanity’s problems is lack of choice. But I do think part of the problem is that we aren’t clear on what we really mean by choice. Humans have always been vulnerable to undue influence. Choices can be coerced through violence or the threat of violence. We can decide to do things because we want to be liked, or popular, or to avoid being ostracized. For more than a generation, the power of psychology has been used by marketing teams to sell products that solve problems they created. And increasingly, our perception of the choices available to us is shaped by algorithms designed to extract even more profit from us.
So I ask you, how many of our choices are truly our choices? How many decisions have we made because of some influence seeking to exploit us?
Clearly choice alone is not enough. For agency to carry power for good, for it to be worthy of any liberal faith, it must be balanced by both truth and freedom. Howard Thurman explains this better than anyone else I’ve encountered, and for him, human choice is inextricably linked to knowing and loving one’s self. He said”
It is a very difficult and perilous route to locate me, to separate me from the images of me projected upon me from when I was a baby… Before I can get to my self, I have to get through all of these images. I’m my mother’s son, my father’s son, etc. But who on earth am I? How can I find me?
It is comforting to say that I am as I am because my grandmother didn’t like me, or my brother bullied me. But when it is all said, when I have exhausted all of the extenuating circumstances, at last, it is I who act.
For Thurman, the civil rights movement wasn’t just what happens in the streets, in the halls of justice, or in the Oval Office. It was happening within the people working for a world where all people are treated with fairness and dignity. For Thurman, real choice was about mastering our own fear as much as it was about exercising our rights. Because our ability to stay centered in who and whose we are is the most potent power we have. When we know in our bones that we are loved, precious, when we really believe we are worthy, beautiful, and meant for great things, we can find the strength to refuse to collaborate with evil.
I am a theist and a humanist, and I don’t believe there is any one single thing that will save us from the problems we as a species have created. Not God, not human choices, and certainly not Supreme Court cases or democratic elections. Human agency is no more a silver bullet than following a bunch of rules perfectly or believing all of the supposedly right theological ideas. But if anything can save us, I think Jesus, Howard Thurman, and Derrik Jensen among many other wise teachers have spoken to it.
I think many of us, maybe even most of us, in the secret recesses of our minds, hope against hope that somehow, at the last minute, some miracle is going to happen. We will be saved from the future we fear by an amazing discovery, by some cutting edge technology, by one last check or balance in the system or a new political messiah. In other words, we hope that it is other people’s agency that will save us.
But the Hebrew people weren’t supposed to just rely on everyone else following the commandments while they did whatever they wanted. It was a covenant, and it would only work if everyone did their part. Unlike what many Christian churches choose to focus on, Jesus didn’t tell his followers to just watch him take up his cross; he told them to take up theirs, too, and follow him. And this is because salvation, in whatever form, is not a solo or substitutionary affair; it’s a group project. And it’s only when we give up the hope that someone else is going to take care of it for us that we can realize our true power. Derrik Jensen puts it this way:
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that… those in power — cannot really touch you anymore. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own…
This is not a sermon about becoming martyrs for democracy, our faith, or our values, though in the days ahead some may be called to do just that. This is a sermon about the power each and every one of us can claim when we root ourselves in our identity as a beloved member of the human family, a precious child of God, a miraculous creature made of stardust.
This is a sermon about what can happen when we stop waiting for more love, more justice to appear, and instead act out of a sense of trust that there must be more love, there must be more hope, there must be more peace and joy somewhere, even if it’s on the other side of what feels impossible right now, even if it’s on the other side of this life. For it is only then that our choices really become ours, free of coercion, free of undue influence. It is only then when our agency can help move mountains.
There is more love somewhere. It may be on the other side of all that feels too much, too hard, too scary right now. There is more justice, more peace, more joy somewhere. Let’s keep on ‘til we find.
Amen.