Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Unitarian Universalism

  • Is It Religion? — Pt. 5, Unitarian Universalism

    Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Opening words

    They drew a circle that shut me out —
    Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
    But Love and I had the wit to win:
    We drew a circle that took them in.

    by Universalist poet Edwin Markham

    Unison chalice lighting words

    I am only one,
    But still I am one.
    I cannot do everything,
    But still I can do something;
    And because I cannot do everything,
    I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

    by Unitarian poet Edward Everett Hale

    Moment for All Ages: What do you say when someone asks what UUs believe?

    A tough question for Unitarian Universalist kids (and for Unitarian Universalist adults, for that matter) goes something like this: “So you’re a Unitarian Universalist. What do you Unitarian Universalists believe, anyway?”

    The thing is, we Unitarian Universalists can’t really answer this question. If you’re a member of a Christian church, usually you’re supposed to believe in God. But for us Unitarian Universalists, it’s different — some of us believe in God, some of us don’t believe in God, some of us worship the Goddess, and some of us don’t think much about gods or goddesses at all. Then if you’re a member of a Christian church, you’re usually supposed to spend time believe the Christian version of the Bible is a holy book. But for us Unitarian Universalists, it’s different — some of us do read the Christian version of the Bible, some of us prefer the Jewish version of the Bible, some of us read other sacred books like the Buddhist sutras, and some of us don’t believe in reading any sacred books.

    When someone asks us Unitarian Universalists what we believe, we can’t give them a simple answer. I recently had this happen to me. A Christian minister said to me, “So you’re a Unitarian Universalist. What do you Unitarian Universalists believe, anyway?” But when I started to say to give them a detailed answer, similar to what I said just now, I could see their eyes glaze over. They basically stopped listening.

    Honestly, when people ask us what we believe, they don’t want the real answer. They just want a sound bite. Over the years, I’ve come up with some sound bites you can use, and I thought I’d share some of these with you.

    When I get the question: “Do you Unitarian Universalists believe in Jesus?”… my sound bite answer is: “Yes, we believe Jesus was a radical rabble-rousing rabbi from Nazareth.”

    When I get the question: “What do you Unitarian Universalists believe?”… my sound bite answer is: “We believe that what you do is more important than what you believe.”

    When I get the question: “Do you Unitarian Universalists believe in God?”… my sound bite answer is: “We believe everyone has to figure out the truth for themselves.”

    And we really do believe that. This is what makes our congregation so interesting. We learn from other people. Together, we search for truth and goodness.

    Readings

    The first reading was a May 17, 2004, news story from the Fort-Worth Star Telegram. This story is no longer online, but read an extensive excerpt here. Seven days later, the state reversed its ruling, restoring tax exempt status to Red River Unitarian Universalist Church.

    The second very short reading is by Duncan Howlett, from a pamphlet titled “What Do Unitarian Universalists Believe?”

    “We reject all doctrines and creeds and theologies if they pretend to any finality. We think the fabrication of such systems valuable, but we do not believe one or another of them.”

    Sermon: “Is It Religion, pt. 5 — Unitarian Universalism”

    For the past few months, I’ve been doing a series of sermons titled “Is It Religion?” In the first sermon I asked whether sports is a religion; in the second sermon, whether Christian nationalism is a religion; in the third, whether communism and capitalism are religions; in the fourth, whether Christmas was a religion, or at least religious. In each sermon, the answer boiled down to — yes and no. If you’ve heard one or more of these sermons, you’ll recall that part of the problem is that there is no generally accepted definition for religion. Today I’m going to have a look at Unitarian Universalism, and I’ll ask whether it’s a religion or not. And once again, the answer’s going to be — yes and no.

    In the first reading this morning, we heard how the Texas comptroller’s office denied tax exempt status to a Unitarian Universalist congregation, on the theory that it wasn’t a religion. The reality was a bit more complicated than what we heard in that news story. An entry on Harvard University’s Pluralism Project website gives a fuller story:

    “On May 30, 2004 the First Amendment Center reported, ‘It’s been a strange and scary week for religious liberty in the great state of Texas. In September 2003, the office of Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn denied tax exemption to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Denison, Texas. This fact was not revealed until last week, when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram learned of the decision. After few days of bad press in the newspaper, Strayhorn’s office announced May 24 that she had reversed the decision and granted the church tax-exempt status. Nobody has paid much attention over the years as the comptroller turned down Wiccans, New Age groups and Freethinkers – not exactly popular groups down in Texas. But picking on Unitarian Universalists finally sparked some outrage.’”

    Even though this happened twenty years ago, this remains a fascinating story because it reveals some important truths about the way our society defines religion.

    First of all, one of the key ways our society defines religion is through tax exempt status. The ability to bestow or withhold tax exempt status gives government officials the power to define what is religion and what is not religion. This is an incredibly difficult task for those government officials, because there is no consensus on how to define what a religion is. When the Texas state comptroller’s office tried to establish clear and consistent criteria for defining what constituted a religion, they turned to a definition of religion that is widely held in our country — a religion must include “a belief in God, or gods, or a higher power.”

    That definition worked well for several months, allowing the comptroller’s office to deny religious status to Neo-Pagan groups and Freethinker groups. However, we Unitarian Universalists were willing and able to fight back, and we regained our tax exempt status. Which put the Texas state comptroller’s office back in the position of deciding what a religion is, in the absence of any objective criteria. So it is that our society defines religion in part by asking government officials with no expertise or training in religious studies to decide who gets tax exempt status and who doesn’t. And religion can also be redefined by anyone is capable of pushing back on government rulings.

    A second important truth about the way our society defines religion: our society defaults to defining religion as “a belief in God, or gods, or a higher power.” That’s the definition the Texas state comptroller’s office defaulted to when they were trying to establish objective criteria to define religion. Here in the United States, we generally accept this as normal: if you’re religious, you believe in God; if you believe in God, you’re religious.

    As we Unitarian Universalists know, there are several problems with defining religion in this way. Perhaps most obviously, there are people who consider themselves religious who don’t believe in God. More importantly, naming “God” in this definition shows that we consider Christianity to be the paradigm for all religion. That definition does not say, “a belief in Allah, or gods, or a higher power.” That definition does not say, “a belief in the Goddess, or gods, or a higher power.” “God” comes first, and by that most Americans mean the God of Christianity. To which most Americans would probably add the following qualifying statement: “The Jews worship the same god as the Christians, so it’s also the god of Judaism.” Which simply isn’t true, because most Christians venerate a triune god consisting of three divine persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Jewish God most definitely does not include Jesus.

    Thus, when Americans assume that religion is the same thing as belief in God, we’re basically assuming that Christianity is our default religion. If it looks like Christianity, then it’s a religion. If it doesn’t look like Christianity, then it’s not a religion.

    From what I’ve seen, we Unitarian Universalists have mixed feeling about the Christian churches being the paradigm against which our religion is compared. On the one hand, we want to consider ourselves a religion. Obviously, we’d like to keep our tax exempt status. And many of us think of Unitarian Universalism as a religion — it’s something that offers us spiritual nourishment, and it enriches our lives in ways that religion is supposed to do.

    On the other hand, though, here in the U.S. many people now identify religion with a certain form of White evangelical Christianity. By this definition, to be religious means to oppose LGBTQ rights, to forbid women as clergy, to ban books, and so on. If that’s what it means to be religious, then we Unitarian Universalists do not want to be religious — we support LGBTQ rights, we welcome all genders as clergy, we are horrified by book bans, and so on.

    Because of the different ways in which Americans define religion, we Unitarian Universalists sometimes think of ourselves as religious, while at other times we feel that we’re not religious at all. It depends on how you define religion, and what the consequences are for either being a religion, or not being a religion.

    As you think about that, let’s quickly go back in time to India some two hundred years ago. As the British Empire started to take over more and more of the Indian subcontinent, the British decided that India had a dominant religion which they called Hinduism. Actually, there was no such thing as Hinduism before the British came along. There were several different traditions, including the people devoted to Vishnu, the people devoted to Shiva, the goddess-centric tradition devoted to Shakti, the Smarta tradition, and so on. But the British — perhaps out of bureaucratic convenience — lumped all these traditions together under the name Hinduism, basically meaning someone from the Indian subcontinent who was not a Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or other religion.

    Thus, “Hinduism” was originally a name imposed on India by outsiders. However, the people who got lumped together as “Hindus” quickly discovered that there were advantages to being classified as a religion, because the British Raj afforded certain legal rights to religions. It turned out to be very convenient to be categorized as “Hindu.” The people called “Hindus” by the British colonial government came to accept, and eventually to embrace the name.

    Obviously, our situation as Unitarian Universalists is very different from the Hindus under the British Raj. We Unitarian Universalists helped create the government of the United States; it’s not something that got imposed on us from the outside. But there is a rough analogy with our religious situation. Our society continues to be dominated by Christian assumptions and Christian definitions of religion. That definition of religion is imposed on us by others. Because we don’t fit neatly into the Christian definition of religion, we get misunderstood either as “a religion that doesn’t believe anything,” or, worse yet, “a religion where you can believe everything.” Yet even though we are misunderstood by the wider society, being classed as a religion provides certain benefits to us.

    Yet our biggest problem right now is the belief of an increasing number of young people that all religions are homophobic, transphobic, sexist, and anti-science. Even though we Unitarian Universalists are none of these things, there are many young people who don’t understand that.

    I’ve seen this play out in an unfortunate way when some Unitarian Universalist young people reach their middle teens. They get so disgusted by the excesses of White conservative Christians, they decide they don’t want to be part of any religion, not even Unitarian Universalism.

    I’ve also seen this play out in a less unfortunate way as some teenagers stick with Unitarian Universalism, but hide that fact from their peers. These teens understand that Unitarian Universalism is a force for good in our society, but they get so tired of explaining to their peers how Unitarian Universalism is not like conservative Christianity, that they finally give up and hide their religious affiliation.

    On a more positive note, I’ve seen quite a few Unitarian Universalist teens who are happy to be public about their Unitarian Universalism. I’ve known a couple of Unitarian Universalist teens who, when they turned 18, got a flaming chalice tattoo. That’s about as public as you can get with your Unitarian Universalism.

    Finally, on a very positive note, I’ve known a few teens who used their Unitarian Universalism as a force for change in the world. One case in particular stands out for me. An LGBTQ teen was an active member of, and leader in, their high school Gay Straight Alliance. During their freshman and sophomore years, they never talked about being a Unitarian Universalist at Gay Straight Alliance meetings. Then in their junior year, they made a conscious decision to go public with their religious affiliation. Some of their peers were aghast — how could an LGBTQ person be “religious”? To which this teen responded (in no uncertain terms) that Unitarian Universalism was a religion that very actively supported LGBTQ rights, and that kind of a religion was something they actively wanted to be a part of.

    Now we can return to the original question. Is Unitarian Universalism religion? No, because the paradigm for religion in our society is conservative Christianity, and Unitarian Universalism is most definitely not conservative Christianity.

    Is Unitarian Universalism religion? Yes, because we do the things that religions are supposed to do. We have high moral and ethical values that we live out in the real world, such valuing all persons equally regardless of their sexual orientation, gender, or race.

    Is Unitarian Universalism religion? Both yes and no at the same time, because we want to challenge the definition of religion that says all religion has to be like conservative Christianity.

    This brings to an end this series of sermons answering the question, “Is it religion?” Even if this sermon series is now a blur in your memory, I hope you will remember that there is no one generally accepted definition for religion. And if you get nothing else from this last sermon in the series, I hope you’ll remember that if someone asks you, “Are you religious?” you can reply, “It all depends on how you define religion.”

  • What about land acknowledgements?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Reading

    The reading this morning is a poem by Lucille Lang Day. The poet says her “mother, who was one-quarter Wampanoag, was raised from age seven by a couple who taught her that Native American ancestry was something to hide.” The poem tells a little bit about how she found out about this family story that had been intentionally suppressed.

    “I Always Knew It” — link to the full poem

    Sermon — “What about Land Acknowledgements?”

    I’d like to talk with you this morning about land acknowledgements. A land acknowledgement is one of those statements, which are now commonly given at the beginning of events, or which appear on websites of organizations, that go something like this: “We acknowledge we gather on land that is the traditional and ancestral homeland of the so-and-so people.” Sometimes these land acknowledgements consist of just a bare statement that Native Americans once lived wherever you are. But the more interesting land acknowledgements include some of the history of the Native Americans in question.

    At this point, I could go into the ethical, moral, and political arguments for and against land acknowledgements — and there is real debate about their value. (1) Yet while these ethical, moral, and political arguments about land acknowledgements might be fascinating to some, I’d rather start with the stories of some of the individual Native Americans we’re thinking about acknowledging. So I’d like to tell you some stories about Native Americans from Cohasset.

    (A word about terminology: Since we’ll be talking about the time before the United States of America was a country, it’s anachronistic to refer to “Native Americans,” because there was no country called America. Since the Native American groups that currently exist in our area often refer to themselves as “Indians,” I’ll use the term “Indian.”)

    Our story begins in the early seventeenth century as Europeans first began to make contact with the Indians who lived in coastal Massachusetts. Some time in the years 1616 to 1619, a contagious disease wept through the Indians who lived here on the South Shore. Scholars continue to debate about what, exactly, the disease was. It could have been smallpox, measles, or some other highly contagious disease from Europe for which the Indians had no immunity. (2) A huge percentage of the coastal Indians of Massachusetts died — no less than four out of five Indians died, and in places as many as 19 out of 20 died.

    Because so many of their people died, the Indians living along the coast found themselves vulnerable to attack by their traditional enemies from further inland. This helps explain why, in 1620, the Wampanoag Indians in the Plymouth area were keenly interested in allying themselves with the Pilgrims. That military alliance lasted for about fifty years, until King Phillip’s War in 1675. After that war, Indian military power in southeastern New England was essentially broken. The Indians who remained here had to figure out to adapt to European social norms.

    By 1640, there were about 300 Europeans living in Cohasset — then called the Second Precinct of Hingham. (3) The history of Cohasset in the eighteenth century tends to focus on those Europeans. But Indians also continued to live here, and I’d like to tell you about three of them.

    Mary Judah

    First, I’d like to talk about Mary Judah.

    Our church was formally organized in 1721, and the first minister’s record book contains a sad entry for Mary Judah from which we can reconstruct a bit of her life: “Feb. 1, 1739 [New Style]. Long Mary, alias Mary Judah, was found Dead in the woods upon the High Way between this & Hingham and as tis supposed Perished in a storm of cold & snow the Sabb[ath] before. An elderly Indian [woman].” (4)

    February 1, 1739, was a Sunday, meaning Mary Judah’s body wasn’t found for a whole week. If she had been enslaved, surely her enslavers would have noticed, and gone to search for her. Or if she had lived with someone else, again they would have noticed. So it seems she was an elderly woman living entirely alone. Since she was older, Mary Judah would have been born in the mid-seventeenth century, a time when the Indians of Cohasset were still living in the traditional way. Most likely, Mary Judah was keeping to the old Indian ways as best she could. As a result she wound up living on the margins of European society, both economically and politically — eking out a subsistence existence in the face of encroaching European agriculture, with essentially no political rights, though at least she was not enslaved.

    Photo of an old handwritten record book.
    Minister’s record of Mary Judah’s death. Image copyright (c) 2024 First Parish in Cohasset, used by permission; all rights reserved.

    Sarah Wapping

    The second person I’d like to talk about is Sarah Wapping.

    On November 25, 1736, the minister of our church wrote in his record book that he officiated at the marriage of Sarah Wapping, an Indian from Cohasset, and “Cesar,” a man of African descent (who, according to the custom of the time, was allowed no last name). Cesar was enslaved by Captain Caleb Torrey of Scituate, and his and Sarah’s marriage intention was recorded in the Scituate town records. (5) We can assume that Sarah was either enslaved, or functionally became enslaved upon her marriage.

    After her marriage, Sarah attended services at our church here in Cohasset; we can assume that she went to live with Cesar and his enslaver, but for some reason Sarah was willing to walk several miles to the Cohasset church each Sunday. Sometime in 1736, she decided to join our church. Remember that in 1736, this congregation was one of the established Christian churches of Massachusetts Bay Colony; we became Unitarian a century later, but back then we were a liberal Christian church.

    There are many reasons why Sarah Wapping, an Indian living in Cohasset, might decide to become a Christian, that is, become a member of one of the established churches of Massachusetts Bay Colony. First and perhaps most obviously, Sarah Wapping probably felt genuine sympathy with the Christian ideals of the church. Beyond that, she may have been attracted to our church’s eighteenth century covenant. In that old covenant, church members promised to one another “that with all tenderness & Brotherly Love we will with all faithfulness watch over one anothers Soul.” To someone who was enslaved, perhaps that covenant offered a recognition of their essential humanity, or as we’d say today, their inherent worthiness and dignity.

    More pragmatically, becoming a member of the church may have been a smart move for Sarah Wapping, in that it helped to raise her social status in the community. Many people in those days were reluctant to become members of the church, because they would be held to a higher standard of moral behavior; men, in particular, were likely to put off becoming church members until they knew they were dying, at which time they didn’t have much opportunity to engage in sinful behavior. Thus if you became a member of the church, you entered a morally elite group, which gave you a certain social status.

    Sarah Wapping was baptized and formally joined the church on January 7, 1738 (N.S.) — 296 years ago today. The fact that Sarah Wapping had to be baptized before joining the church tells us that she probably didn’t come from a Christian family; otherwise she would have been baptized as a child. So it seems likely that she was raised in a traditional Indian family.

    In the months before January 7, Sarah would have met with the minister at least once — probably more than once — as part of her preparation for baptism and full church membership. On January 7, she would have been required to stand up before the rest of the church and give a public statement of her moral failings. This would have happened in the old meetinghouse, which stood south of here on Cohasset Common, across from the present Parish House.

    That’s all I was able to find out about Sarah Wapping. After this event, she apparently disappears from the historical record. But we can speculate that she probably had children. Her children would have been born into slavery, and they were might have been considered black, while also maintaining their connection with the Indian communities in southeastern Massachusetts. Sarah’s children, or at least her grandchildren, would live to see slavery abolished in Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century. It is entirely likely that at least some of her descendants live in southeastern Massachusetts to this day.

    Photo of a part of a handwritten document.
    Minister’s record of “The Names of Those Adult Persons who Owned the Covenant” — Sarah Wapping’s name is at lower right. Image copyright (c) 2024 First Parish in Cohasset, used by permission; all rights reserved.
    Photo of part of a handwritten document.
    Minister’s record of Sarah Wapping’s marriage. Image copyright (c) 2024 First Parish in Cohasset, used by permission; all rights reserved.
    Part of a microfilmed handwritten document.
    Digitized copy of the marriage records of the Town of Scituate, with Sarah Wapping’s marriage intention.

    Naomi Isaac

    The third person I’ll tell you about is Naomi Isaac.

    On September 19, 1736, Naomi Isaac, another enslaved Indian, became a member of our church. I was able to find out a bit more about Naomi Isaac, and based on some admittedly slender historical evidence, I’ve pieced together a hypothetical life story for her.

    Naomi Isaac became a church member about the same time Sarah Wapping got married; the two women would have been rough contemporaries. When Naomi joined the church, the minister’s record book refers to her as “an Indian girl.” If we guess that she was roughly eighteen years old, she might have been born somewhere between 1716 and 1720. Since she did not need to get baptized before she joined the church, it seems probably that she came from a family of Christian Indians.

    Assuming she had been raised as a Christian, her decision to join our church was not as big a step as it was for Sarah Wapping. Naomi Isaac must have liked the religion in which she had been raised, and wanted to commit more deeply to it. Then too, like Sarah Wapping after her, Naomi Isaac might have been attracted to our congregation by the wording of the covenant. She may also have desired the increase in social standing church membership would bring.

    As did every church member, Naomi Isaac would stood in front of the hundred or more people who came to services each Sunday and confess her moral failings. Again, this was in the old meetinghouse. At about 25 by 35 feet, that first meetinghouse was smaller than our present meetinghouse, and more intimate. I like to think that Naomi Isaac served as an inspiration for Sarah Wapping. We can imagine that Sarah Wapping was in the congregation that day, looking down from the balcony where enslaved people and Indians had to sit (but no more than twenty feet away from the pulpit), watching as the young Naomi Isaac become the center of attention of the entire church.

    On February 7, 1737, four and a half months after Naomi Isaac joined our church, someone named Naomi Isaac got married to a man named Caesar Ferrit in Dorchester. I could not confirm that this is the same Naomi Isaac. In fact, in the mid-nineteenth century, there was a romantic story told of how Naomi was the ward of a rich man in Boston who had arranged a wealthy marriage for her, but she chose instead to marry Caesar Ferrit, the coachman for the rich man; and some have interpreted this to mean that this second Naomi Isaac was White. (6)

    I think there may be a tiny nugget of truth in that romantic story, some of which got covered over by later romance. Naomi Isaac of Cohasset was either enslaved or an indentured servant. I speculate that her master moved to Boston, taking her with him. Then she decided to marry Caesar Ferrit against the wishes of her master. I like to think my speculation is correct, because it shows both Caesar and Naomi to be resourceful and forceful people. I also imagine that Caesar managed to purchase Naomi’s freedom, for she was able to leave her master and go with him. While I believe my interpretation fits the historical evidence, I cannot say with complete certainty that Naomi Isaac of Cohasset is the same woman as Naomi Isaac who got married in Dorchester — yet I think later events in Naomi’s life bear out my interpretation.

    After Naomi Isaac and Caesar Ferrit married, they lived in Milton, where their first children were born. Around 1750, they moved to Natick, where their youngest children were born. The town of Natick had been founded for the so-called “praying Indians,” that is, Indians who had become Christian. While Natick was intended to be an Indian town, in practice other non-White people wound up living there too — people like Caesar, Naomi’s mixed-race husband. But Caesar could also claim Indian ancestry. Although he had been born in the West Indies and came to Massachusetts later on, he said that he had two European grandparents — one Dutch, one French,— an African grandparent, and an Indian grandparent. (7)

    Naomi Isaac Ferrit appears in the written record eight times — first when she joined our church, next when she got married, and then in the birth records for six of the seven or so children she had. After the birth of her children, she disappears from the historical record. But let’s assume that she lived until April 19, 1775. In the early morning of that historic day, she would have helped her husband Caesar, then aged 55, get ready to respond to the alarm that the British regulars were on the move. She would have watched as Caesar, and their youngest son John, marched down the road towards Lexington with the rest of the Natick militia company.

    Caesar, John, and the rest of their company arrived in Lexington not long before British regular troops returned through the town on their retreat from Concord. The two Ferrits took cover in a house near the meetinghouse on Lexington Green, and from its cover fired upon His Majesty’s troops. The regulars searched the house to find those two snipers, and the Ferrits hid under the stairs in the cellar to avoid capture. In short, Naomi’s husband, and her child John, were two of the hallowed veterans of the Battle of Concord and Lexington, engaging in an act of bravery at great risk to their lives.

    Caesar Ferrit proved to be quite a Patriot. Although many veterans of the Battle of Concord and Lexington went back to their farms, in late April Caesar enlisted for a tour of duty in the Massachusetts army. Then later in the war, he enlisted once again. His military service was remembered for the rest of his life. In 1796, three years before his death, the town of Natick petitioned the state for a pension for him. (8)

    One of Naomi’s sons-in-law, Thomas Nichols, had a very different experience on April 19, 1775. Thomas was a free Black man who married Patience Ferrit, Naomi and Caesar’s second daughter. On April 19, 1775, Thomas was being held in the town jail in Concord, having been accused of “enticing” enslaved persons “to desert the service of their masters.” While his father-in-law and brother-in-law were firing at the British troops on Lexington Green, he witnessed the events of April 19 from the Concord jail. After being held for three months, the authorities found that there was no evidence to support the accusations against Thomas, so he was sent back to Natick. (9) The story of Naomi’s son-in-law shows how the Indian communities and the Black communities of Massachusetts became intertwined. And I wonder if Thomas really was helping other Black people liberate themselves, and managed to get away with it — if he was one of the early precursors to the conductors of the Underground Railroad. I like to imagine that he was.

    That’s all I was able to find out about Naomi Isaac. After the birth of her children, she apparently disappears from the historical record. Yet her legacy may live on in a very literal way. In our own time, descendants of the Natick Indians gather each year for the Natick Praying Indians Powwow, held on the last weekend of September. I like to think that some of Naomi Isaac’s descendants are among them.

    Photo of part of a handwritten document.
    Minister’s record of “The Names of Those Adult Persons who Owned the Covenant” — Naomi Isaac’s name is at bottom left. Image copyright (c) 2024 First Parish in Cohasset, used by permission; all rights reserved.

    This brings us back to the topic of land acknowledgements.

    I’ve spun out some stories for you about what might have happened to some specific individuals who were Cohasset Indians. I readily admit that my stories are partly speculative. Nonetheless, I believe there’s some truth in the stories I’ve just told. If we were to decide to offer a land acknowledgement, we might want to acknowledge the three women I’ve talked about this morning. And I’ll end this sermon with one of many possible land acknowledgements for our congregation:

    “We gather on land that is the traditional and ancestral homeland of Mary Judah, Sarah Wapping, Naomi Isaac, and other Indians of Cohasset. We think it’s likely at least some descendants of Sarah Wapping and Naomi Isaac, former members of our congregation, are still alive today. We acknowledge the many contributions these women and their descendants have made to our society, including their children’s service in the Revolutionary War. And we wonder how we can ever repay them.”

    Notes

    (1) According to “So you began your event with an Indigenous land acknowledgment. Now what?” reported by Chloe Veltman on National Public Radio, All Things Considered, March 15, 2023
    [https://www.npr.org/2023/03/15/1160204144/indigenous-land-acknowledgments] — some Native American leaders believe land acknowledgements are a waste of time, while others believe they are useful. It’s a complicated issue!

    (2) The debate is very much alive among epidemiologists. E.g., in 2010, a new possibility was outlined by John S. MarrComments and John T. Cathey, in “New Hypothesis for Cause of Epidemic among Native Americans, New England, 1616–1619” (Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 16 no. 2, Feb. 2010 https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/2/09-0276_article). The authors of this study say: “Classic explanations have included yellow fever, smallpox, and plague. Chickenpox and trichinosis are among more recent proposals. We suggest an additional candidate: leptospirosis complicated by Weil syndrome.”

    (3) Bigelow, Narrative History of Cohasset, p. 106.

    (4) Woody Chittick, “Slavery in early Cohasset,” n.d.

    (5) Information from Family Search website.

    (6) The romantic story is in the Natick Bulletin, “Local Centennial Events,” June 18, 1875; quoted by George Quintal, Patriots of Color (Boston Nat. Hist. Park, 2004), p. 102.

    William Biglow, History of the Town of Natick, Mass. (1830) says this about Cesar Ferrit and his wife:

    “April 19th. — On this memorable morning, as one of the survivors lately expressed it, every man was a minute man. The alarm was given early, and all marched full of spirit and energy to meet the British. But few had an opportunity to attack them. Caesar Ferrit and his son John arrived at a house near Lexington meeting house, but a short time before the British soldiers reached that place, on their retreat from Concord. These two discharged their muskets upon the regulars from the entry, and secreted themselves under the cellar stairs, till the enemy had passed by, though a considerable number of them entered the house and made diligent search for their annoyers.

    “This Caesar was a great natural curiosity. He was born on one of the West India islands, and was accustomed to boast, that the blood of four nations run in his veins; for one of his Grandfathers was a Dutchman, the other a Frenchman; and one of his grandmothers an Indian, and the other an African. He married a white New England woman, and they had several children, in whose veins, if Cæsar’s account of himself be true, flowed the blood of five nations. His son John served through the revolutionary war, and is now a pensioner.”

    While this story seems to argue against Naomi Isaac Ferrit being the same as Naomi Isaac of Cohasset, its claims must be weighed against its late date, nearly a century after Naomi would have left Cohasset. Biglow gives no source for this anecdotal evidence, but if this story were told to him by Naomi’s descendants it could well have been to their advantage to have their mother posthumously “pass” as White; many people in Massachusetts considered it shameful to have Indian ancestry, and persons with Indian ancestry were regularly discriminated against, right up through the twentieth century. (Note, too, that Caesar’s wife’s is not named in this account.) For all these reasons, I’m inclined to place little trust in Biglow’s account.

    Also, I was unable to find anyone named Naomi Isaac anywhere in Massachusetts in the usual genealogical records, for this time period. This proves nothing in of itself, but is worth considering when evaluating other evidence.

    (7) J. L. Bell, “Thomas Nichols of Natick,” Boston 1775 blog, April 28, 2016. (https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2016/04/thomas-nichols-of-natick.html). See also the previous footnote.

    (8) J. L. Bell, “The Service of Caesar Ferrit,” Boston 1775 blog, April 30, 2016. (https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-service-of-caesar-ferrit.html).

    See also: entry on Caesar Ferrit in George Quintal, Patriots of Color (Boston Nat. Hist. Park, 2004), pp. 102 ff.; and entry on Caesar Ferrit, Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War: A Compilation from the Archives, Volume 5, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Office of the Secretary of State, 1899, p. 632.

    (9) J. L. Bell, “Reviewing Thomas Nichols’s Case,” Boston 1775 blog, April 29, 2016. (https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2016/04/reviewing-thomas-nicholss-case.html)

    More resources on land acknowledgements

    “Beyond Land Acknowledgements: A Guide,” Native Governance Center website

    One current organization of Native Americans in our area which may include descendants of Sarah Wapping and Naomi Isaac: Praying Indians of Natick and Ponkapoag

    The Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag lists last names of tribal members in the 1800s. None of the last names mentioned in the sermon — Wapping, Isaac, Ferrit, or Nichols — appear on their list. However, the time frame they’re looking at is one or more generations later, and thus might include descendants of the people I mention.

    Other Native American groups in our area include the Cothutikut Mattakeeset Massachusetts Tribe, with ancestral lands in Bridgewater

    The indigenous people in Cohasset were most likely part of the Massachusetts people, not the Wampanoag people. There are several well-known Wampanoag groups in southeastern Massachusetts. Descendants of Cohasset Indians might have joined one or more of these Wampanoag groups, through marriage or in other ways.

  • Scrooge and the Christmas Mythos

    Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    A homily for Christmas Eve

    Christmas is an interesting holiday for Unitarian Universalists. Those of us who relate to the Unitarian side of our heritage don’t believe in the trinity, so we tend to ignore all the parts of the Christmas mythos claiming that Jesus is God. And those of us who relate to the Universalist side of our heritage don’t believe in original sin and eternal damnation, so we tend to ignore all the parts of the Christmas mythos claiming that Jesus came to save us from our sin. We honor Jesus of Nazareth, and we take seriously all of his teachings. As a result of our religious outlook, we don’t expect Jesus to solve all of humanity’s problems; instead, we feel it’s up to us to get ourselves out of the messes that we’ve created.

    With this in mind, I’d like to talk with you about Ebeneezer Scrooge, whom we met in a reading earlier today. The character of Scrooge comes from the book “A Christmas Carol,” written by the novelist Charles Dickens in 1843. This has been a hugely influential book, one of the most important contributions to our contemporary Christmas mythos. Indeed, Scrooge is one of the reasons why we now think of Christmas as a time to help those who are less fortunate than we are.

    You won’t be surprised to learn that Charles Dickens was a Unitarian. Although on paper he remained a member of the Church of England all his life, his moral and religious convictions brought him to Unitarianism as an adult, and that’s where he found his religious home. I suspect he was drawn to the Unitarian commitment to get heaven into Earth while we’re still alive, rather than waiting until we die to get into heaven. Dickens was always concerned with making the world better in the here and now, especially for the poor and the downtrodden.

    In the book “A Christmas Carol,” Ebeneezer Scrooge starts out as someone who doesn’t worry much about getting into heaven after he dies, nor does he worry much about getting heaven into Earth while he’s alive. He’s only concerned with making lots and lots of money. In that concern, he was a product of his times. Just as with our world today, making money was the highest value in Ebeneezer Scrooge’s world.

    Yet I find myself sympathizing with Scrooge. There have been times when someone has wished me a “Merry Christmas” when they really didn’t mean it, and I have wished that person boiled in their own pudding. I also sympathize with Scrooge’s condemnation of Christmas as “humbug.” I think that condemnation is especially poignant this year, when, instead of a Christmas of peace on earth and good will to all, we are faced with war in Ukraine backed by the Russian Orthodox church, who claim to be followers of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. And I have a hard time with the commercialization of Christmas — it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that American consumers spend something like a trillion dollars during the Christmas holiday season. “Bah, humbug,” indeed. This year I was sorely tempted to get one of those red Santa hats with “Bah, humbug” embroidered in the fuzzy white part.

    No wonder, then, that we might feel some sympathy for Ebeneezer Scrooge. Yet by the end of the story, Scrooge comes to the realization that Christmas does not have to be a humbug. Christmas can become a humbug, if we let it; sadly, it often is a humbug. Christmas can also be, in the words of Scrooge’s nephew, “a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.” And so it is that in the end, Scrooge understand that he has the power to make Christmas something more than a humbug. He has the power to reach out to other people; to help other people; and ultimately to love and to be loved in return.

    On Christmas morning, Scrooge begins his transformation by reaching out to the people to whom he feels the closest. He has no family of his own any more; that’s part of Scrooge’s tragedy, and part of the reason he had become so crabbed and loveless. But he can go to eat Christmas dinner with his nephew Fred, and when he does that, he finds that love has begun to enter his life again. The day after Christmas, he raises the salary of his employee Bob Cratchit, and again he finds that this does as much good for his soul as it does for Bob Cratchitt’s pocketbook. Scrooge then goes on to become a second father to Bob Cratchitt’s son Tiny Tim, which does even more good for his soul.

    This is how the Unitarian Charles Dickens understood Christmas. For Dickens, as for most Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists, Christmas doesn’t have much to do with sin and salvation. Instead, it has to do with trying to create a heaven here on earth, preferably in our own lifetimes. We start by finding a source of love in our own hearts. We next try to extend that love to family and friends and chosen family, spending time with them, and doing the best we can to get along as peaceably as possible with those whom we love. After that, if we can, we might spread love out to our neighborhood, or even the wider world.

    But it’s enough at Christmastime to start as Scrooge did, by finding love within your own heart, and then by doing your best to live out that love with those closest to you. If your heart feels shut up, open it. When you see other people, think of them, not as an alien race, but as fellow-passengers on the journey of life. And if we can make Christmastime a kind, forgiving, charitable time of year — perhaps we can make the rest of the year kind and forgiving and charitable as well. Perhaps, as Jesus of Nazareth claimed, we really can create heaven here on earth.