Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Religion in society

  • What About the Afterlife?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Moment for All Ages

    The great philosopher Socrates, who lived two thousand five hundred years ago, once had a long conversation with another philosopher named Gorgias. During that long conversation, Socrates told a story about what happens to human beings after we die.

    “Listen, then (said Socrates), as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale, which I dare say that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only. But I believe this is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth.

    “Since the days when the god Cronos ruled the universe, there has been a law about what happens to human beings after death: human beings who have lived their whole lives in justice and holiness shall go to the Islands of the Blessed, to dwell in perfect happiness; while human beings who have lived unjust and irreverent lives go to Tartaros, the house of punishment.

    “In the time of Cronos, judgement was given on the very day on which people were to die. The judges were alive, and the people had not yet died. But the judgements were not well given. So Hades came from Tartaros, and the authorities from the Islands of the Blessed came to Zeus. They said some people were sent to the wrong places after they died.

    “Zeus came up with a plan. “First of all,’ he said, ‘we must put a stop to human beings knowing the time of their death.
    Next, human beings must be fully dead when they are judged — not alive as is currently true — and being dead, they will be stripped of their their bodies, and stripped of everything else that might bias the judge either for them or against them. Then the judges themselves must also be dead, so that the judge’s naked soul will be able to perceive the truth of the other naked souls.” Zeus said only in this way could the judgement of the dead be truly just.

    “Zeus then decreed that three of his own human children, who were already dead, should become the judges. These three were assigned to stay in the ‘meadow at the parting of the ways.’ Two roads left this meadow: one way went to the Islands of the Blessed, and the other to Tartaros. Rhadamanthus judged all the humans who died in Asia. Aeacus judged all the humans who died in Europe. And if these two had any doubt about a human being, Minos served as the final court of appeal.”

    So ends the story that the philosopher Socrates told about the afterlife. Although this story sounds a little bit like the story that some Christians tell about what happens to humans after we die, it is a very different story, and Socrates told his story hundreds of years before the Christian era.

    You probably noticed some problems with the story. For example, if Rhadamanthus judges those who died in Asia, and Aeacus judges those who died in Europe, who judges those who died in Africa? With such obvious problems with the story, why did Socrates tell Gorgias that he was speaking the truth? You must remember that Socrates spoke a different language from us, and his word for truth — aletheia — meant revealing and disclosing, it meant the opposite of forgetfulness. In other words, there is more than one way to define the word “truth.”

    Readings

    The first reading comes from Mark Twain’s book “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” In this passage, Captain Stormfield has arrived in heaven, received a robe and a harp, and sets off to enjoy himself:

    “When I found myself perched on a cloud, with a million other people, I never felt so good in my life. Says I, ‘Now this is according to the promises; I’ve been having my doubts, but now I am in heaven, sure enough.’ I gave my palm branch a wave or two, for luck, and then I tautened up my harp-strings and struck in. Well, Peters, you can’t imagine anything like the row we made. It was grand to listen to, and made a body thrill all over, but there was considerable many tunes going on at once, and that was a drawback to the harmony, you understand…. By and by I quit performing, and judged I’d take a rest. There was quite a nice mild old gentleman sitting next me, and I noticed he didn’t take a hand; I encouraged him, but he said he was naturally bashful, and was afraid to try before so many people. By and by the old gentleman said he never could seem to enjoy music somehow. The fact was, I was beginning to feel the same way; but I didn’t say anything. … After about sixteen or seventeen hours, during which I played and sung a little, now and then — always the same tune, because I didn’t know any other — I laid down my harp and begun to fan myself with my palm branch. … Finally, says he, “Don’t you know any tune but the one you’ve been pegging at all day?”

    “Not another blessed one,” says I.

    “Don’t you reckon you could learn another one?” says he.

    “Never,” says I; “I’ve tried to, but I couldn’t manage it.”

    “It’s a long time to hang to the one — eternity, you know.”

    “Don’t break my heart,” says I; “I’m getting low-spirited enough already.”

    After another long silence, says he — “Are you glad to be here?”

    Says I, “Old man, I’ll be frank with you. This ain’t just as near my idea of bliss as I thought it was going to be, when I used to go to church.”

    Says he, “What do you say to knocking off and calling it half a day?”

    “That’s me,” says I. “I never wanted to get off watch so bad in my life.”

    So we started. Millions were coming to the cloud-bank all the time, happy and hosannahing; millions were leaving it all the time, looking mighty quiet, I tell you. We laid for the new-comers, and pretty soon I’d got them to hold all my things a minute, and then I was a free man again and most outrageously happy.

    The second reading comes from a small book published by the Buddhist Church of America. The book is titled “The Heart of the Buddha-Dharma” and it is by one of the great leaders of the late 20th century in the Buddhist Church of America, Kenryu T. Tsuji.

    “In the Jodo Shinsshu school of Buddhism, the spiritual development of the person is completed with their birth in what is known as the Pure Land…. ‘Birth in the Pure Land’ means the perfect growth and fulfillment one’s personality, to achieve a state of perfect selflessness whereupon one is able to realize the oneness of the whole universe; to become a Buddha and achieve oneness with Amida Buddha. While the human weaknesses of greed, anger, and ignorance are still functioning, this perfection of the personality is an impossibility.

    “Shinran Shonin and the teachers before him explained that the Pure Land was situated in the western corners of the universe, zillions of miles away. It was pictured as a very beautiful place, free of suffering, where everyone is happy. Philosophically speaking, however, the Pure Land does not refer to a specific location out there somewhere. Rather, the Pure Land is symbolic; it symbolizes the transcendence of relativity, of all limited qualities, of the finiteness of human life. In this transcendence, there is Compassion-Wisdom, an active moving, spiritual force. The Pure Land ideal is the culmination of the teaching of Wisdom and Compassion.”

    Sermon

    This is another in a series of sermons based on questions that were asked during last spring’s question-and-answer sermon: someone asked about the afterlife. I found this to be a difficult topic. My limited thinking about the afterlife is probably summed up in the following stupid Unitarian Universalist joke:

    Two Unitarian Universalists die, and next thing they know they find themselves standing in line in front of these large pearlescent gates. Somewhat to their surprise, they’re actually waiting in line to talk with St. Peter. When their turn finally comes, St. Pete asks them what religion they used to be, and they say, “Unitarian Universalists.”

    “Hmm. Unitarian Universalists,” replies St. Pete. “Well, even though you’re heretics, because you did so much good work on earth, you can go into heaven.”

    The two Unitarian Universalists look at each other, and one of them says, “You mean you actually send people to hell?”

    “Oh yes,” says St. Peter.

    On hearing that, they step out of line and start to picket the gates of heaven: one has a sign saying, “St. Peter Unfair to the Damned!” and the other’s sign says, “End Discrimination in Heaven!”

    This stupid joke represents about all the thinking I’ve done about the afterlife. Having the usual Unitarian Universalist preoccupation with the here-and-now, I tend to treat the afterlife as another social problem that needs fixing. Yet I’m also aware of how limited and narrow my thinking is, aware that much more can be said about the afterlife. Other people in our society do think about the afterlife, and some of them have come up with some pretty detailed descriptions of what it’s like. So let’s consider what the afterlife might be like. And I’d like to begin with the fable told by Socrates that we heard in the story for all ages this morning.

    According to Socrates’s fable, when Zeus took over from his father Cronos, he determined that admission to the afterlife was being poorly managed — some humans were being sent to the Islands of the Blessed after death when they really belonged in Tartaros. The humans were being judged before they had quite died, and their judges were also still alive, which meant that the judges could be impressed with the appearance or wealth of the people they were supposed to be judging impartially. So Zeus reformed the system, requiring that humans be judged after death, and also requiring that the judges themselves should be dead, which apparently removed the possibility of error or corruption from the whole process. This is a vivid description of what we might call the admissions process for the afterlife.

    Parts of this ancient Greek fable remind me of the story told by some Christians — the Christian story talks about heaven and hell rather than the Islands of the Blessed and Tartaros, and many Christians would say that it’s St. Peter who judges the dead, not Rhadamanthus — but in both cases, humans are judged after they die, and sent either to a good place or a bad place. Thus we can see that some people think of the afterlife as a place where humans will be judged based on our actions during our lifetimes; and furthermore, in the afterlife some humans will be condemned to punishment, while others will lead a delightful existence.

    And I’d like to consider a very specific story that was told about heaven and hell in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In these American stories, the Christian belief in heaven and hell takes on more details. If you went to heaven, so it was said, you’d receive a robe and a crown and a harp and wings, and you’d spend your days sitting on a cloud playing your harp. The American humorist Mark Twain decided to explore this nineteenth century American story more carefully, by telling about the adventures of one Captain Stormfield as he arrived in heaven; and as is so often the case with Mark Twain, underneath his humor lies some serious thinking and questioning.

    In the story, Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven and receives a robe and crown and wings and harp just as he expected. But he quickly finds out that it isn’t much fun sitting on a cloud and playing a harp — especially when you can only play but one song over and over again, and when everyone around you plays a different song, mostly with the same low level of skill that you have. After a time, the Captain sneaks away from his cloud, dumps his robe and crown and wings and his harp, and heads off to explore heaven.

    In the course of his explorations, Captain Stormfield meets up with his old friend Sam, who has been in heaven for a while. Sam fills the Captain in on the realities of heaven. To the Captain’s surprise, Sam tells him that pain and suffering exist in heaven. “You see,” Sam tells him, “happiness ain’t a thing in itself — it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant. That’s all it is.” In other words, in order for there to be happiness in heaven, there must also be pain and suffering, to serve as a contrast. The difference is that in heaven pain causes no lasting harm, and suffering cannot last.

    Mark Twain is not making fun of heaven in this story. Instead, he’s thinking carefully and logically about the afterlife by asking serious questions. He asks: what age will we be in heaven? If you die as a baby, will you have to remain as a baby throughout eternity? — in other words, can those in heaven continue to grow and change and gain more wisdom? Another question Twain asks is this: If heaven is a place where we’ll meet up with those who have died before us, how will that work, exactly? — will you still have something in common with someone who died twenty or thirty or forty years before you did? Twain also brings up a point that would have been very challenging for some white people in his time (and maybe equally challenging for some white people in our time): the majority of people in heaven would not be white, because white people have been a minority throughout human history. Those white people who are expecting an all-white heaven are going to be sadly disappointed.

    There’s more that could be said about American conceptions of heaven. But I’d like to consider some other ideas of the afterlife that are floating around in today’s popular culture. The other great proselytizing religion in the United States today is Buddhism, so it feels important to consider some Buddhist conceptions of the afterlife.

    Traditional Buddhism holds that after we die, we get reborn as something else. The goal is to get off the endless cycle of rebirth. Ordinarily, we don’t remember our previous lives, so one of the remarkable things about Gotama Buddha was that after he became enlightened he could remember his previous lives, and told his disciples more than five hundred stories about those previous lives. These stories became the Kataka tales, which are now part of the Buddhist scriptures, and in these stories Buddha remembers previous lives in which he took on human forms, animal forms, even the form of a tree. According to traditional Buddhism, we’ve all had hundreds of previous lives. Our actions in this life determine in what form we shall be reborn in our next life. Furthermore, in many Mahayana Buddhist traditions, there is a place called naraka into which you can be reborn if you were extremely bad in your previous life. Naraka is roughly equivalent to the Christian hell, though you don’t arrive through by being judged by someone else; furthermore, and you don’t stay there for all eternity, but rather only for as long as it takes to work out your karma so that you can be reborn again into a higher world.

    Just as naraka is not the same as the Christian hell, Buddhists don’t have an exact equivalent for the Christian heaven. The goal is to break the endless cycle of rebirth, which you do by achieving nirvana; as I understand it, the word nirvana means in a literal sense something like extinction or nothingness. Gotama Buddha was able to achieve enlightenment, to reach nirvana, and what made him truly great was that he was then able to turn back from nirvana so that he could tell others how to be freed from the endless cycle of rebirth.

    You can see that traditional Buddhism doesn’t think about the afterlife in the same way as the ancient Greeks did, nor as nineteenth century American Christians did. Yet each of these three different religious traditions argues that if you live your life in the right way, you can be rewarded after death with something good. Interestingly, we find this same basic notion in some atheist traditions — or to speak more precisely, in the tradition of religious naturalism, a tradition that rejects any kind of supernaturalism in religion. Religious naturalists argue that the only way we can live on is in the thoughts and memories and actions of the people who survive us. If during your lifetime, you treat other people with kindness and compassion, then after you die you can live on in them whenever they act with whatever kindness and compassion they may have learned from you. So this is yet another kind of afterlife — and it’s not just a metaphorical afterlife, because your memory can have a very real and literal impact on the world. While there is no heaven or hell, no nirvana or endless rebirth, nevertheless your actions during you life affect what happens to you after death.

    These are just a few of the more common ideas of the afterlife that are floating around in our culture today. But I find I don’t fully agree with any of these ideas of the afterlife. I’m a Universalist, as the result of which I demand an egalitarian afterlife. Universalism began as the Christian heresy of universal salvation: if God is indeed omnibenevolent or all good, then God would not damn anyone to eternal punishment; so everyone gets to go to heaven. By now, I think I’ve heard all the standard rebuttals of Universalism — from people who want to make sure their political opponents go to hell; from people who want to make sure someone they especially dislike, like an ex-spouse, doesn’t join them in heaven; from people who rebel at the idea that evil-doers get to go to heaven; and so on. But I remain a Universalist because I figure if there is an afterlife (a question I remain neutral on), then universal salvation is my only chance of getting to heaven. I’m a fallible human being, and like every other fallible human being, I’ve done plenty of things that were — to use Mark Twain’s phrase — “ornery and low down and mean.” If there really are pearly gates, and if I get there, St. Peter is going to open up his big book and remind me of the time when I was four years old and I bit my older sister — and that would be only the beginning of a very long list of low-down, mean, ornery things I’ve done.

    In my opinion, the problem with all these schemes of an afterlife is how exclusive they are. You have to be a far better human being than I’ll ever be to make it into the afterlife. Not only would I not be allowed into heaven, I’m no good as a Buddhist, either. I meditated for fifteen years, and finally gave it up because it was making me miserable; which means I have no doubt I’m accumulating all kinds of karma that will keep me on the endless cycle of rebirth forever. Nor am I comforted by the religious naturalists who tell me that I’ll live on in the memories of those who knew me: partly because that’s a pretty short afterlife, lasting maybe sixty or seventy years; and partly because (as is true of all of us) there are plenty of people who don’t like me, and honestly I don’t want to live on in their memories.

    If there’s going to be an afterlife, I want it to be an egalitarian afterlife — I want everyone to get in. If I were a Buddhist, I’d be a Pure Land Buddhist. As I understand it, the Pure Land Buddhists teach that anyone can gain access to the Pure Land after you die; you don’t have to go into seclusion, you don’t have to engage in difficult esoteric practices like mindfulness, you don’t have to achieve some higher spiritual state. Really, all you have to do is to chant, “I take refuge in Buddha.” There, I just did it — now I get to go to the Pure Land. That’s why I want everyone to get in — because if everyone can get in, then I know I can get in, too.

    And there are many other notions of the afterlife that are more or less current in our society today. We can see traces of traditional African cultures in which someone who’s dead remains with us as long as there’s someone who knew them when they were alive, and who can pour libations for them; after everyone who knew them is dead, then they merge into a broad group of the dead, a sort of collective unconscious. In traditional Navajo religion, once you die you’re supposed to fade into oblivion, but if there’s something to keep you tied to the world of the living, then you persist as a troubled ghost; this is not the kind of afterlife any of us would hope for. Among some religious naturalists, the afterlife is nothing but a metaphor, and we heard an echo of that in the second reading this morning: “The Pure Land is symbolic; it symbolizes the transcendence of relativity, of all limited qualities, of the finiteness of human life.” And to return to Socrates — Plato tells us that when Socrates was on his deathbed, he gave two possibilities for what happens to us after we die: either we all go to the Elysian fields, enjoying there a blessed existence for all eternity; or we slip into oblivion, which he describes as having the most perfect sleep possible, without the disturbance of dreams or nightmares. This last idea of the afterlife retains currency for some people in our society today.

    These are but a few of the possibilities for the afterlife. All these different possibilities remind me of another stupid joke, which goes like this:

    A Unitarian Universalist dies and, somewhat to her surprise, finds herself standing in a long line of people waiting along the road to heaven. Way up ahead, she catches sight of a fork in the road. When she gets up to the fork in the road, she sees there’s a signpost. One sign, which points to the right, say “This Way to Heaven.” The other sign, which points to the left, says “This Way to a Discussion about Heaven.” She takes the left-hand path, going to the discussion about heaven.

    It’s just a stupid joke, but I think it reveals something that’s true for me. If the afterlife is going to be a place of exquisite perfection, I’d be exquisitely bored — and I don’t want to be bored for all eternity. If I were confronted with the situation in the joke, I guess I too would go to the discussion about heaven. At least it wouldn’t be boring, and there’d always be the possibility of making some kind of progress.

  • What Are Our Visions for the Future?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below was rewritten, and differs in some respects from the original sermon text.

    Readings

    The first reading was a short poem titled “A Center” by Ha Jin.

    The second reading was an excerpt from the long poem “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman.

    Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
    Healthy, free, the world before me,
    The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

    Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
    Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
    Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
    Strong and content I travel the open road.

    The earth, that is sufficient,
    I do not want the constellations any nearer,
    I know they are very well where they are,
    I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

    (Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
    I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
    I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
    I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)…

    Whoever you are come travel with me!
    Traveling with me you find what never tires.

    The earth never tires,
    The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,
    Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,
    I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell….

    We must not stop here,
    However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,
    However sheltered this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,
    However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.

    Sermon

    During last spring’s “Question Box Sermon,” this congregation asked some difficult and challenging questions — about life, death, ethics, and more. One of the most challenging questions, however, was a question about the future of this congregation: What’s going to happen to First Parish when the current crop of lay leaders steps back? Who’s going to step forward to replace them? All of which raises another question: Will our congregation survive?

    Let me start by giving you some good news. This congregation is in excellent shape. I see no reason why it should not continue as a healthy, vibrant congregation through the mid part of this century and beyond. But the good news comes with a caveat: First Parish in the year 2050 will not look much like First Parish in the year 1950. In fact, First Parish in the year 2050 will look significantly different from today’s congregation. And to help explain why I think this is so, I’d like to take you back two centuries in time, to the early nineteenth century.

    In the year 1800, this congregation was in a relatively thriving state. Four years previously, they had gone through a major conflict where they had had to fire their minister, Josiah Crocker Shaw, for reasons that weren’t recorded at the time (but probably have to do with Shaw taking up with a woman who was married to someone else). Fortunately for them, they were able to dismiss Shaw quickly, before too much damage was done. Then the congregation brought in a new minister named Jacob Flint, who was by all accounts entirely ethical. Within two years of brining Jacob Flint, the congregation had recovered to such an extent that they could afford to add the steeple on the north side of the Meetinghouse. Completing a major building project seems to indicate both good financial health and a well-organized and happy congregation.

    So in the year 1800, First Parish had settled in with their new minister, and completed a major building project. But it was a very different congregation from our congregation today, and very different from what it would be fifty years later. I’d like to consider some of the ways that 1800 congregation was different from today’s congregation.

    First, in 1800 there was still quite a bit of social pressure to participate in organized religion. Furthermore, in a small rural town, which is what Cohasset was in those days, there wasn’t much to do for entertainment but go to Sunday services. Not only were there these compelling reasons to participate in organized religion, but in addition First Parish was the only organized religion available in town. Compare that with Cohasset today, where people have a wide variety of options for filling their leisure hours, including several different organized religions.

    Second, in 1800 First Parish was organized on a very different basis. The congregation had three separate but intertwined governance structures — town, society, and church — each of which was funded separately. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had not yet separated church from state, and First Parish was a state-established church funded in part by tax dollars, and governed in part by town meeting and the selectmen (as they were then called); the town paid the minister’s salary. There were also the proprietors of the Meetinghouse, sometimes called the “society,” who governed the maintenance and improvements on the building; they raised money in large part through taxes on pews, which were formally owned by different families, and also through other assessments and fundraising efforts. Finally there was the “church,” a separate governance structure which governed the religious efforts of the congregation; the minister and the deacons were the officials in charge of the church, with the power to admit individuals into communion; and this governance structure required little funding, except perhaps for the purchase of communion silver.

    While town, society, and church each had their own specific responsibilities, there was also overlap. One example of this overlap is the long battle over music during worship services, which began at least as early as 1760, with several town votes about whether to have a choir, and where to put the choir, and whether to have musical instruments, and so on. The battle over music shows that the church did not have sole jurisdiction over worship services; the society and the town also got involved at times.

    In the year 1800, it probably felt like this state of affairs would last forever. But wider societal forces were beginning to make changes in organized religion in Massachusetts. In one notable change, the Massachusetts Universalists managed to get a court ruling that if they didn’t didn’t want to belong to the established church in town, they didn’t have to pay their tax dollars for its support. In another notable change, the religious divisions that had long been present in the established church of Massachusetts began to come to the surface. These religious divisions were mostly about whether or not to believe more in free will, or more in predestination; and also about whether to adhere to a more openly emotional religious feeling centered around the experience of individual conversion, what we’d now call being “born again.” Over the course of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, these broader religious differences were reduced in the public mind to a debate as to whether Jesus was God or not. The religious liberals, who believed that humans had the free will to do good or evil, and who didn’t have much to do with being born again, took up the Unitarian banner, saying that Jesus was not God.

    Here in Cohasset, Jacob Flint declared himself to be one of the religious liberals. He grew concerned that some of his parishioners were adopting beliefs that he considered to be erroneous: the belief that Jesus was God, the belief in predestination, and the belief that emotionalism should be central to religion. As I read the old documents, it seems to me that Flint lived up to his name: he was flinty and stern. In December, 1823, in order to combat religious conservatism in his congregation, he delivered two sermons in which he did his best to demolish the arguments supporting the divinity of Jesus. I’ve read those sermons. They are not what I’d call pastoral sermons, where the preacher tries to minister to the feelings and needs of his congregation. Instead, they were uncompromising sermons, in which Flint all but tells his congregation that anyone who believes in the divinity of Jesus is a downright fool.

    In response to these two uncompromising sermons, the small number of religious conservatives in town reached out to other religious conservatives elsewhere in the state. The Cohasset religious conservatives received financial support to help start up a Trinitarian congregation, build a new church building, and hire a more conservative minister. This small group of religious conservatives built Second Congregational Church right across Highland Avenue from the Meetinghouse, and the story goes that Jacob Flint would sit up in the high pulpit before the service, looking out the window behind the pulpit and writing down the names of the people who went in to Second Congregational Church.

    The founding of Second Congregational Church led to big changes for our congregation. Within months, the town quietly reached a consensus that tax dollars would no longer go to the support of the congregation. Now First Parish had to pay for everything — minister’s salary, building upkeep, and so on — and it appears they turned to the owners of the pews to raise the additional money they now needed. Furthermore, town meeting no longer governed any aspect of First Parish, and so First Parish had to set up their own annual meeting, which they closely modeled after town meeting. But perhaps the biggest change of all was the fact that there were now two churches in town. Instead of being united on Sunday morning, the town was now divided.

    This huge change in First Parish must have felt overwhelming at the time. From what I can gather, our congregation needed a few years to recover. But by 1837, thirteen years after the split with Second Congregational Church, our congregation had achieved enough financial stability that they were able to completely renovate the interior of the meetinghouse, including installing attractive new pews that were uniform in appearance — the pews we’re sitting on today — to replace the old pews each family had built for themselves.

    In hindsight, these changes seem inevitable. Today, the separation of church and state is the norm, and we no longer believe tax dollars should support organized religion. Today, we appreciate the diversity of organized religion that’s now available to us. But as I say, at the time it must have felt overwhelming.

    Fast forward another century, to the mid-twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, First Parish was once again facing huge changes. By the 1920s, a fair number of the pews were owned by people who no longer lived in Cohasset, or who no longer were active in the congregation. Yet they owned those pews, and therefore no one else could use them. On Sunday morning, the ushers would go around and close the doors of all the pews that were owned by someone. If you were a newcomer, just moved to town and deciding whether you wanted to belong to this congregation, imagine how off-putting that would be. You’d walk into the Meetinghouse, you’d see all these empty pews that no one could sit in. It appears that these absentee pew owners were also forcing changes in how First Parish received revenue. Pew rentals now accounted for only part of the congregation’s revenue stream; thus instead of relying on taxes on pews for our primary source of income, First Parish was beginning to move towards a new funding model, the funding model we now use, where instead of a fixed assessment, people could freely decide how much to donate each year.

    Some key records from this era are missing, but we do know that First Parish consulted a lawyer about how to abolish pew ownership. This lawyer advised them to send letters to each absentee pew owner, asking them to donate their pew back to the congregation; if that failed, the congregation would have to purchase the pew back from the absentee owner. In the mean time, a new generation of church-goers, people who knew nothing about the old pew rental system, was joining First Parish; this new generation would have been less tolerant of the social stratification of pew ownership, where the rich people bought the most desirable pews. And as these societal changes were going on, the Great Depression hit; during the Depression, church attendance dropped to the lowest level ever seen in Massachusetts.

    The challenges that First Parish faced a hundred years ago must have felt overwhelming. No doubt some people asked themselves: What will happen when the old guard die off or step back from their leadership positions? Who will carry on, and how will we pay for anything? About a third of all Unitarian congregations closed during the Great Depression, and we can be grateful for the lay leaders who managed to keep First Parish going during those challenging years.

    Now we fast forward another century, to the present day. We’re in the midst of more major changes. One of the biggest changes is that the influence of organized religion in American society has been declining for decades. It’s not entirely clear why this is so. The so-called secularization theory claims that the declining influence of organized religion has to do with the societal changes of modernization and the move away from agrarian to post-industrial society. However, professor Gina Zurlo of Harvard Divinity School attributes the decline of organized religion to the fact that religion is now more of a private matter. She says, “Our hyperindividualistic society has essentially granted people permission to be religious in their own way. They can pray, believe in God, read Scripture and engage in other spiritual practices completely on their own — without ever stepping foot in a house of worship — and still be considered a religious person.” And Landon Schnabel of Cornell University argues that we’re seeing a return to the way humans used to do religion: not in organized institutional religions, but in more local and fluid forms; he says religion may become “more personalized, syncretic and centered on individual authority rather than institutional power.”(1)

    Regardless of the cause, the declining influence of organized religion is forcing changes on First Parish. On the one hand, there are now fewer people who want to participate in organized religion. On the other hand, the people who do choose to participate in organized religion are more passionate about it. And on top of this, among the people who choose to participate in organized religion, there’s a growing number with multiple religious affiliations — for example, you can be Unitarian Universalist and Buddhist at the same time. All these changes mean that we’re seeing fewer people wanting to join First Parish, but the people who do choose to participate are often more passionate about religion than they were fifty or a hundred years ago.

    Based on my own experience, I feel that I’m seeing some other interesting changes. As our world becomes increasingly multicultural, it becomes more difficult to claim that your religion is the only true religion. I’ve seen three main responses to the challenge of multiculturalism: some people become dismissive of all religions; some people double down and claim that theirs is the only true religion; or some people develop an increasing openness to the wisdom that may be found other religions. The religious right dismiss all religions except their own. The hard-core secularists dismiss all religions, period. We Unitarian Universalists tend to respond in the third way: we are open to the wisdom contained in all the world’s religions.

    I feel the real challenge for us lies in this last point. We are open to the wisdom in all the world’s religions; indeed, we’re open to the wisdom in all the world’s cultures. If we were dismissive of all religions except our own, we’d have an easy time raising money and finding leadership from among a fanatical core of believers. If we were dismissive of all religions, period, then we wouldn’t have to raise money or find leadership. Thus our openness creates some financial challenges for us.

    Yet our openness is also one of our greatest strengths. The second reading this morning, the opening stanzas to Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” (a poem that has long been a favorite of Unitarian Universalists), seems to me to capture something of what we should now stand for — a feeling of being light-hearted as the path before us leads wherever we choose. Yet it’s not enough to be light-hearted and open; we also must have core values, a core philosophy. This is what the poet Ha Jin was telling us in the first reading this morning: Hold on to some enduring core values.

    When we look back at our history, we can get a sense of what some of our enduring core values are.

    In 1823, we were animated by a core value of not blindly accepting the teachings and doctrines of the past, but instead using our reason together to find out what is true and what is good. Jacob Flint may have thought at the time that he was arguing in favor of Unitarian theology, but he was really arguing in favor of the use of reason over unthinking acceptance.

    In the 1920s, we were animated by a core value of making our community as open as possible to as many people as possible. The old traditional practice of ownership had become exclusionary. So we got rid of it, although it took quite some time before it was completely gone. And while it may have seemed that we were simply exchanging one funding model for another, what we were really doing was making sure our community remained as open as possible to anyone who wanted to join us.

    In the 2020s, we are animated by our openness to the wisdom in all the world’s cultures. We’re still not sure where this openness will lead us, but we feel it to be an important value.

    This is how we have always adapted to changing times. We stand by our core values; and we retain our sense of openness. This sounds simple in theory, but it does become complicated when we begin to confront the practical reality of making it happen. After Jacob Flint took a stand for our core value of the use of reason, back in 1823, it took years for us to adapt to the new financial reality that resulted. After we decided to open up our community by getting rid of pew ownership in the 1920s, it took more than a decade to figure out how to implement that as a practical reality.

    And here we are in 2025, once again figuring out how to stand by our core values while retaining our sense of openness. We have not yet completely figured out how to bring our core values into this new era in which religion is “more personalized, syncretic, and centered on individual authority rather than institutional power” — though we have a head start over other religions, since we’ve always been more aligned with individual authority rather than institutional power.

    To return to the original question: What will happen when today’s congregational leadership passes the baton to the rising generations? We will change the way we do things, as we’ve been changing for the past three centuries. We don’t yet know what that change will look like. But we do know that we will continue to hold fast to our core values. And I will end by repeating the words of Roscoe Trueblood, minister here in the 1950s and 1960s, who articulated our core values in this way:

    “The first, best, and greatest aim we have may be to gather here … and remind ourselves that certain values exist in the universe and in human character; that the ultimate reality behind the reality is goodness of spirit; and that in some way, through the efforts of sincere people who give their best to the world and try to improve their best, goodness lives.”

    So may it be.

  • White Poverty

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Story: How To Feed Five Thousand People

    Once upon a time, Jesus and his disciples (that is, his closest followers) were trying to take a day off. Jesus had become very popular, and people just wouldn’t leave him alone. Jesus and the disciples wanted a little time away from the crowds that followed them everywhere, so they rented a boat and went to a lonely place, far from any village.

    But his fans figured out where they were going. By the time Jesus and his friends landed the boat, there were five thousand people waiting there for them. So Jesus started to teach them, and he talked to them for hours.

    It started getting late, and the disciples of Jesus pulled him aside and said, “We need to send these people to one of the nearby villages to get some food.”

    “No,” said Jesus. “The villages around here are too small to feed five thousand people. You will have to get them something to eat.”

    “What do you mean?” his disciples said. “We don’t have enough money to go buy enough bread for all these people, and even if we did, how would we bring it all back here?”

    “No, no,” said Jesus. “I don’t want you to go buy bread. Look, how many loaves of bread have we got right here?”

    The disciples looked at the food they had brought with them. “We’ve got five loaves of bread, and a couple of fried fish. That’s it.”

    “That’ll be enough,” said Jesus.

    His disciples looked at him as if he were crazy. There was no way that would be enough food for five thousand people!

    Now, Jesus had spent the whole day teaching people about the Kingdom of God, teaching them that everyone is dependent on someone else. And while he was sitting up in front of the crowd teaching, he looked out and saw that many of the five thousand people had brought their own food with them. He watched them as they surreptitiously nibbled away at their own food, ignoring the fact that many of the people around them had no food at all.

    Jesus brought out the five loaves of bread. Being a good Jew, he blessed the bread using the traditional Jewish blessing: “Blessed are you, O Holy One, Creator of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” Then he broke the bread, cut up the fish, and gave it to the disciples so they could hand it around.

    Everyone saw that even though Jesus and his disciples had barely enough food for themselves, they were going to share it with everyone. The truth began dawning in people’s eyes. All day long, Jesus had been teaching them that the Kingdom of Heaven existed here and now, if only people would recognize it. Now Jesus was giving them a chance to show they understood, and to act as if the Kingdom of Heaven truly existed.

    The disciples began to pass around the bread and the fried fish, shaking their heads because they knew there wasn’t going to be enough food for everyone. Yet, miracle of miracles, there was plenty of food to go around. People who had brought their own food put some of theat food into the baskets so it could be shared. People who hadn’t brought food with them took some food from the baskets. By the time the followers of Jesus had passed the baskets to all five thousand people, everyone had gotten enough to eat, and there was so much food left over that it filled twelve baskets.

    Today, many people tell this story differently. They believe that Jesus performed some kind of magic when he blessed the bread and fish, so that somehow Jesus and/or God turned a dozen loaves of bread and two fish into thousands of loaves of bread and thousands of fried fish. To my mind, that’s easier to believe than to believe that humans could perform the same miracle by simply sharing. Why is it easier to believe? Because if humans could perform this miracle back then, we could do the same thing today: to share with those who need it, and to live as if the Kingdom of Heaven existed here and now. (1)

    Readings

    The first reading was from an essay by Andrew Tait titled “Living in the Shadow of the American Dream,” published on August 1 on DailyYonder.com. The author is White.

    I live in Shenandoah County, Virginia. I’m a factory worker. A farmer. A father of two girls, one still in diapers. I get up before the sun, and most days I don’t sit down until after it’s gone. My partner Hannah and I raise our girls on a small farm in the Valley. She works full-time too — though nobody calls it that. She’s a caregiver, a homemaker, a livestock handler, and a mother. She doesn’t get a paycheck….

    …We heat with firewood I cut myself. We raise animals for milk, eggs, and meat because the grocery bill outpaces my paycheck. We’ve stayed unmarried — not because we don’t love each other, but because getting married would kick my partner and our daughters off the Medicaid that keeps them healthy. My employer offers insurance, sure — but only if I pay nearly as much as our mortgage. I can’t, so we stay as we are; in love but locked out.

    I’m not ashamed of our life. It’s honest work, and it’s full of love. However, I am ashamed that in a country as wealthy as ours, people like us are left out in the cold….

    I’m not writing this as a Democrat or a Republican. I’m writing this as a man watching families like mine wear themselves thin; working hard, doing the right things, and still falling behind. This isn’t about Red or Blue. It’s about the fact that we’re being divided against each other while both sides forget that real Americans bleed the same when the cost of insulin triples or the cost of groceries goes up again.

    The second reading was one of the most famous scenes in the book “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens.

    The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his cook’s uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long grace was said over the short commons. The gruel disappeared; the boys whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:

    “Please, sir, I want some more.”

    The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with wonder; the boys with fear.

    “What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.

    “Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.”

    The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.

    The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high chair, said,

    “Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more!”

    There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance.

    “For more!” said Mr. Limbkins. “Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?”

    “He did, sir,” replied Bumble.

    “That boy will be hung,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. “I know that boy will be hung.”

    Sermon

    I’d like to speak with you this morning about White poverty; that is, about poor people who happen to be White. This may sound like a political topic, but there’s a spiritual reason behind this. I’ve borrowed the phrase “White poverty” from another minister, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, who used this phrase in the title of a book he wrote last year: “White Poverty: How Exposing the Myths about Race and Class and Reconstruct American Democracy.”

    Barber is a minister, but he is probably best known for his “Moral Mondays,” which he started in his home state of North Carolina. Now we have to touch upon politics for just a moment. The state of North Carolina is dominated by Republican politicians, and because William Barber’s Moral Mondays were protests aimed at state government, it would be easy to assume that Barber is a Democrat. I know I assumed he was a Democrat. But reading his book, I realized that he is motivated not by partisan politics, but by religion and spirituality. I’ve come to feel that both the Democrats and the Republicans have lost their religion and spirituality, so while I may not agree with everything Barber says, I feel he is well worth listening to as we try to find a way out of the mess that partisan politics has gotten us into.

    Barber in fact claims that the battles between the two parties hide a basic fact that we should not ignore. He says: “While these same [political] fights are regularly recycled for our public consumption, nearly half of Americans — people of every race, creed, and region — are united by the experience of being poor. They share the hardship, but they do not share a name because our formal definition of poverty has left tens of millions of Americans in the shadows. Even when we hear reports about poverty, they are based on numbers that severely undercount Americans who are living with their backs against the wall, unsure of how they are going to make it.” So writes William Barber.

    We heard the story of one of those people in the first reading this morning, a White man named Andrew Tait living in the South. Tait and his family just about manage to keep their heads above water. But you can hear in his story that just one crisis — unforeseen medical expenses, for example, or getting laid off — could put his family over the edge.

    There are many families in this same situation right here on the South Shore. A year or so ago, the town social worker here in Cohasset asked to meet with the Cohasset clergy. The town social worker wanted to talk with us, because she kept encountering situations where people in crisis who needed immediate financial assistance. She was adept at finding sources of assistance for Cohasset residents with long term needs — home heating assistance, food assistance, and so on. But she had no source for immediate one-time crises — such as a landlord who doubled the rent for a family who just couldn’t move before the end of the month. We clergy had been helping such people in an ad hoc manner with one-time gifts; we tried to help out the town social worker when we could, but sometimes that involved one of us writing a personal check to the town social worker and getting reimbursed later. But there was no other source for these kinds of one-time grants here in Cohasset. There are groups that can provide grants to organizations, but not to individuals. The town social worker urged us to get together and start a fund similar to Scituate’s “Christmas Fund” (which actually has nothing to do with Christmas, it’s just the name of a fund that provides one-time financial assistance). So began the Cohasset Community Assistance Fund, a fund which grew out of the needs of a town that’s 96% White. Poverty exists in towns like Cohasset, it’s mostly White poverty, and it’s mostly invisible.

    To return to partisan politics for just a moment: Neither of the two major political parties is very good at addressing White poverty. The Democrats, for some very good reasons, have focused on the financial needs of historically marginalized groups, such as African Americans, Native Americans, and so on. The Republicans, for some very good reasons, have focused on fostering a pro-business environment that will in the long term create jobs. But what if you’re White and poor right now? Then it can feel as though both political parties have abandoned you, as Andrew Tait said in the first reading.

    We don’t have to go as far away as Andrew Tait in ?Virginia to find example of how White poverty I’m going to cite four figures on the Cohasset Community Assistance Fund website. One: 21% of Cohasset households are considered low income, because they earn less that 80% of the area’s median income of $187,060. Two: 34% of Cohasset households experience what’s known as housing cost burden, where the housing cost is too high for income; 15% of Cohasset households are severely cost burdened. Three: Nearly 1 in 5 town residents use public health insurance (Medicare and Medicaid). Four: 142 people in town get Snap benefits, or food stamps; and the Cohasset Food Pantry gives crucial support to 80 Cohasset families. These figures are for Cohasset, but nearby towns like Scituate and Hull and Hanover and Pembroke and Hingham all have similar figuresw.

    These are community portraits showing people, mostly White, who are more financially vulnerable than they should be. Most of these people would not be poor by standard political definitions of poverty. But as William Barber and others have pointed out, the political definition of poverty may be too restrictive. A better definition of poverty might be something like this — If your household had a sudden expense of $1200, such as a major car repair, could you pay it without a problem? Or would you have to choose between paying the rent, or buying food, and fixing the car? By this latter definition of poverty, nearly half of all Americans are poor or on the edge of being poor. If nearly half of all Americans are poor, we cannot avoid the issue of poverty. This also puts the lie to the myth that poverty just a Black issue; it’s an issue that all of us, no matter what race or political party, need to face head on.

    The prevalence of poverty in America today reminds me of the story I told this morning, about Jesus feeding the five thousand. This story comes from the Christian scriptures, the book of Mark, chapter 6, verses 32 through 44. This story is usually interpreted as recounting a miracle performed by Jesus with the help of God: after seeing the five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish that his disciples have, Jesus increases this meager store of food by supernatural means until there’s enough to feed everyone. However, from a religious perspective, I would say that this usual interpretation of the story completely underestimates divine power, turning a major miracle into a very meager miracle. If you magically produce enough bread and fish for everyone, that really doesn’t change anything, does it? A major miracle would be to actually change human hearts from selfishness to sharing. I interpret this as a story of a major miracle, not a meager miracle.

    On a smaller scale, by the way, this is a miracle that preschool teachers perform on a regular basis: they teach children how to share. Alas, by the time most Americans reach adulthood, they seem to have forgotten what they learned in preschool. As a result, we have the Democrats saying that there’s nothing to worry about, because they passed a big infrastructure bill that’s going to provide jobs five years from now; and yet Andrew Tait struggles to make ends meet right now. Then we have the Republicans saying that there’s nothing to worry about, because they’re going to get rid of immigrants and slap tariffs on overseas manufacturers which will produce jobs five years from now; and yet Andrew Tait struggles to make ends meet right now.

    In the current political environment, it appears that divisive American politics have made our political leaders powerless to help people like Andrew Tait. But this was the same situation faced by Jesus in the Roman empire of two thousand years ago. Things were much worse in the ancient Roman empire than they are in America today, with even less political will to address the problem. Yet Jesus pointed out that the problem of poverty could be solved. A partial solution could come from a spiritual change emerging in the hearts of ordinary people. Of course that spiritual change would require a reduction in selfishness, and an increase in generosity; that is, it was a spiritual change which would require individual human beings to understand that they were connected to all other human beings.

    In my interpretation of the story, this is the real miracle of Jesus feeding the five thousand. When those five thousand people were gathered in front of him, listening to him teach, he was teaching about how we are all interconnected. Yet he saw that some people had no food while others had brought their own food. So he performed a miracle: he helped people understand that because of their essential interconnectedness, sharing was the normal, natural thing to do. He was teaching them: do not separate yourself from community, and one way that you separate yourself from community was by not sharing. What a great miracle this was! — such a great miracle that we really cannot believe it happened. We would prefer to believe that God somehow magicked enough food for all five thousand people. If it was just magic, then we don’t have to change our hearts. But if it was not magic, then we ourselves must change.

    And in fact the early Christian community did change their hearts. One of the earliest Christian liturgies we have record of says that during communion services, the communion table would have on it not just bread and wine, but cheese and fruit and enough food to make a full meal. Thus the earliest Christian communion services provided not just some kind of spiritual food, but actual literal food so that if you were poor and hungry, you were fed; and if you were rich, you could give of what you had and thus grow spiritually. No wonder the early Christian church spread so quickly, across racial and national and class divisions: the earliest church fed body and soul, erasing divisions and hatred.

    I want to be clear that this same spiritual impulse appears in all the great religious traditions. One of my favorite ethical thinkers, Rabbi Hillel, gave voice to the same spiritual impulse from within the Jewish tradition. Hillel taught that we cannot blind ourselves to the suffering of others, saying, “Do not separate yourself from the community” [Avot 2:4]; that is, in your over-confidence, do not think that you can live your life solely on your own, without needing the wider human community. And this same spiritual impulse is present in the Sikh tradition. When American Sikh communities build a gurdwara, or temple, they include a commercial kitchen capable of cooking meals for dozens or hundreds of people; then each week they offer a free meal to all want to join them.

    Sadly, this spiritual impulse seems to have mostly disappeared among our allegedly Christian political leaders. Too many American Christians believe that Jesus said that we’d get pie in the sky when we die; that we’ll all have enough to eat, not now, but in the sweet bye-and-bye. These political leaders seem to have forgotten that Jesus was talking about the here and now when he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” Jesus united the spiritual with the physical: when there are people who are poor, then the Kingdom of God is not truly present; when if there are people who are hungry, then none of us can be spiritually filled.

    This ancient spiritual impulse does live on in many of today’s Christians, people like Rev. William Barber. And this ancient spiritual impulse lives on in many of today’s Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Sikhs and atheists — anyone who understands that true spirituality means recognizing that all human beings are interconnected. This deep knowledge of human interconnectedness is a kind of Enlightenment, arising from our hearts when we realize we can never be an isolated individual; the spiritual promptings of our hearts teach us that we are always connected to all other human beings. Then we can begin to see how artificial divisions keep us from working together to create a world where there is no hunger or poverty.

    We can let go of those artificial divisions, like the myth that poverty is a Black problem; and we can recognize that half of us in America, including a great many White people, are either in poverty or close to poverty. While we have come to think of this as a political problem, it is also a spiritual problem, and to solve that spiritual problem we have to remember how to work together in harmony; beginning in our immediate neighborhoods, then extending out into our towns and the South Shore region and maybe eventually through the rest of our country, and even the rest of the world. The more we can work together across borders and across divisions, the easier it will be to ignore those who promote division and hatred and violence; and if we persist, this spiritual revolution could wind up changing the world.