Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Life Issues

  • Jesus, the Solstice, Diwali, and Hanukkah

    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.

    Readings

    The first reading was from the book God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero. Prothero is a professor of religious studies at Boston University.

    “Being honest [about religion] requires being true to the religious traditions themselves…. I repeatedly come across scholars of Hinduism and Buddhism referring to ‘sin’ and ‘salvation’ as if these were Hindu and Buddhist concept. But these are Christian ideas, so when writing about Hinduism and Buddhism, I do not use them. For similar reasons, I do not refer to the Muslim Paradise or Buddhist nirvana as ‘heaven.’ Similarly, I do not assume that scripture is as important to Hindus as it is to Protestants, or that it is used in a similar way. The Vedas are the Hindus’ most sacred scriptures, but hardly any Hindu gives a fig about their content; as almost any Hindu can tell you, what matters is their sounds, and the sacred power these sounds convey. Nor do I assume, as many Protestants do, that religions are about faith and belief. Religions cannot be reduced to ‘belief systems’ and more than they can be reduced to ‘ritual systems.’ Belief is a part of most religions, but only a part, and in most cases no the most important part. (You can be a Jew without believing in God, for example.) So while I do refer to Protestants as ‘believers’ and to their religion as a ‘faith,’ I do not refer to religious people in general as ‘believers’ or to their traditions as ‘faith-based.’” (slightly edited from the original to make an independent reading)

    The second reading was a poem titled “The Good God and the Evil God,” by Khalil Gibran.

    The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top.
    The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.”
    The Evil God did not answer.
    And the Good God said, “You are in a bad humour today.”
    “Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been often mistaken for you, called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.”
    And the Good God said, “But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.”
    The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.

    Sermon

    During last year’s question box sermon, someone in the congregation wrote about “The great truths of the teachings of Jesus that are common to all major religions in the world.” The question implied is asking to what extent this is true. Are there great truths that are shared by all major religions in the world? While this may seem like an academic question, I feel it is one of the deepest spiritual questions of our time. I’ll be saying more about the spiritual side, but let’s begin by looking into the question of whether all religions share in the same great truths.

    This is an especially urgent question because we live in an increasingly multicultural society. We all know an increasing number of people who have very different worldviews from ours. We Unitarian Universalists like to think that we accept all worldviews equally, seeking to find value in everyone’s worldview. Many Unitarian Universalists have been inspired by Huston Smith, the renowned twentieth century scholar of religion. In his book “The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions,” Smith wrote: “It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge.”(1) Many Unitarian Universalists took this to heart — we’re following our own religious path, but we believe that eventually all religious trails end up on the same mountaintop. The belief that all religions have the same ultimate goal results in the laudable impulse to celebrate more than one holiday at this time of year — we celebrate Christmas, but we also want to acknowledge the other paths that lead to the mountaintop — the Jewish path which celebrates Hanukkah, the Hindu path which celebrates Diwali, the Pagan path which celebrates the winter solstice, the Buddhist path which celebrates Bodhi Day, and so on.(2)

    Yet we are also aware that there are other ways to understand what religion means in a multicultural society. There is, for example, the possibility of believing that not every religious path will lead you to an exalted place. We all know about the conservative Christians who would disagree strongly with Huston Smith, for they would argue that their brand of Christianity is the only path that will let you get to the mountaintop; or to use their phraseology, it is only through Christ that you can reach God. These conservative Christians would say that if anyone else claimed to get up to the mountaintop by a non-Christian path, they were being deceived by an Evil God.

    And there are still other possible ways to understand religion in a multicultural society. Some people doubt whether all trails wind up at the mountaintop. So, for example, those conservative Christians who believe women are inferior to men, and that LGBTQ people are filled with sin — I’m not sure I believe their religious path really leads to the mountaintop. That is, if all religious paths do in fact lead to the mountaintop, I sometimes wonder if getting to the mountaintop might not be as good as it’s supposed to be. Maybe both the Good God and the Evil God inhabit the mountaintop, which does not sound especially attractive. Or maybe there are many mountaintops, and the religions with whom I disagree climb to their own mountaintop, not my mountaintop. Or maybe I just can’t believe that every religious or spiritual journey winds up on a mountaintop — while at the same time acknowledging that other people look at Unitarian Universalism and claim that our spiritual journey will not wind up on the mountaintop.

    This in turn raises a host of questions. Do all religions share the same core teachings; is there a oneness to all of religion? Are the various religions different, while ultimately leading to the same final goal? Do the different religions have completely different goals that lead in different directions? Are there some religions which have goals I would disagree with? Are there religions that maybe don’t have a goal or a final destination in mind? Living in a multicultural society confront us with the possibility that we do not live in a straightforward religious landscape with a single mountain and a single path up that mountain; there is also the possibility that a multicultural religious landscape has more than one mountain, to say nothing of valleys and plains and a host of different trails that may lead somewhere or nowhere or everywhere.

    If the multicultural religious landscape does indeed have more than one mountain, this can be disorienting. Here in the United states, the militant atheists and the militant Christians avoid being disoriented by insisting the religious landscape is actually quite simple. The militant atheists insist that religion is mere illusion (a dictum they repeat with religious fervor), so there is no religious mountain to climb. For their part, the militant Christians insist that theirs is the only true religion, so there is only one religious mountain to climb with only one path up that mountain.

    At the other end of the scale, we Unitarian Universalists are, on the whole, more likely to embrace multicultural confusion and disorientation. We have neither doctrines nor dogmas, and we have long supported the notion that each person is in charge of their own spiritual journey. There are situations that test our tolerance, as for example when a Unitarian Universalist’s adult child decides to join a dogmatic or doctrinaire religious group. But on the whole, we’re willing to accept the chaos of a multicultural religious landscape — actually, many of us find it fascinating.

    Yet while we find it fascinating, we also have to acknowledge that the multicultural religious landscape can cause a certain amount of personal spiritual confusion, or even a personal spiritual crisis. I speak from experience; I myself have experienced a certain amount of personal spiritual confusion. I was raised in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and my generation of Unitarian Universalists kids was taught to respect all religions equally because ultimately all religions led to the same goal. But when I got into my late teens and early twenties, I discovered that maybe all religious paths didn’t lead to places I wanted to go.

    I went to a Quaker college, and in my first year there some evangelical Quakers invited me to join their men’s Bible study group. I had become interested in the Bible, and I decided this was an opportunity to actually sit down and read it (being a Unitarian Universalist kid, I had read very little of the Bible, although I had read most of the Bhagavad Gita and parts of the Dao de jing). So I began attending this Bible study session, with a really nice group of guys. During one of the sessions, one of the other guys spoke about the power of prayer. As a Unitarian Universalist of my generation, I had absorbed the notion that while prayer could be a literary format, or a way to voice the concerns of a community, you couldn’t just pray for something and God would just give it to you, because the only way to get what you wanted was to work for it. But I realized that when this guy spoke to our Bible study group about the power of prayer, he literally believe that you could pray for something and God would give it to you.

    So, being pretty immature and also fairly clueless, I said, “Wait, you actually believe that God will answer your prayers? No one believes that!” Of course as soon as I said it, I looked around and realized that everyone else in that Bible study group did in fact believe that. Fortunately they were polite and courteous, and they kindly and gently explained to me that, yes, they did believe that. I give myself this much credit: at least I was embarrassed by my outburst.

    Because of interactions like this one, I began to question some of the religious and spiritual assumptions I had grown up with. I had always assumed that we Unitarian Universalists were pretty much like other religious groups; or if we were different in some ways, we were more or less all heading towards the same goal. But getting to know those kind and courteous evangelical Christians in that Bible study group helped me understand that, as nice as they were, they were on a very different spiritual path than I was. To my astonishment, they placed their highest priority on striving to get into their heaven through spiritual purity; and their striving not only involved a lot of rules and procedures which I didn’t fully understand, but it also involved an other-worldliness that I was not comfortable with. I stayed with them through my first year of college, but the next year I went to the meetings of the liberal Quaker student group instead (there being no Unitarian Universalist student group). The liberal Quakers were more like me: they didn’t worry much about getting into heaven after death, they worried about how they might make the world better here and now; and the way you made that happen was through hard work, not through spiritual purity. This I could understand, whereas I had a hard time understanding spiritual purity combined with petitionary prayer.

    Yet I couldn’t dismiss my evangelical Christian friends out of hand. For one thing, several of them were pacifists just like me; we may not have agreed on heaven, but we agreed on non-violence (remember, this was back in the last century before our society became so rigidly polarized, and before evangelicals started carrying handguns). But it wasn’t only that; I was having encounters with other religions as well. One of my Jewish friends invited me to his house for Pesach, for Passover. He and his family were Reform Jews, and so they were religious liberals like me; but they also had a significantly different religious worldview from mine. When they said “Next year in Israel!” at the end of the seder, I could tell they really meant it; whereas while I could understand the phrase at an intellectual level, I really didn’t understand it at an emotional level.

    When you begin encountering people from religious traditions unlike yours, you have several options. You can choose to double down and insist that yours is the only valid religious tradition. You can choose to doubt all religious traditions, on the theory that there’s no way to determine which is the correct religious tradition. You can assert that all religious traditions share in the same general truths, which may lead you to draw from the best of various religious traditions. You can leave behind your present religious tradition and find a new one that you feel more attuned to. Or you can choose to stay with your present religious tradition, while questioning its grounding assumptions. There is no single correct choice. As it happens, I chose to stay with Unitarian Universalism while questioning its grounding assumptions.

    One of the grounding assumptions of twentieth century Unitarian Universalism that I chose to question is embodied in that statement by Huston Smith: “It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge.” Or as Henry David Thoreau put it, “The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did…” — implying that Hinduism, ancient Egyptian religion, and Thoreau’s own Transcendentalism all share the same great truths. I suspect that many Unitarian Universalists today — perhaps most Unitarian Universalists today — would still affirm that all spiritual paths wind up leading to the same mountaintop. We can still affirm our belief that the great truths taught by Jesus are shared by major religions around the world. We still see an essential oneness to all religions.

    However, not all Unitarian Universalists agree with these statements. I’m one of those Unitarian Universalists. I’m no longer convinced that all religions lead ultimately to the same goal. It was feminism, more than anything else, that prompted me to question whether all religions have the same goal. If I, as a Unitarian Universalist, believe that women and girls are just as good as men and boys, what am I to make of the Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, who don’t allow women to be ordained to their priesthood? What am I to make of verse 4:34 in the Qur’an, which says that women should be obedient to men, and if they’re not obedient, then men should beat them? What am I to make of the sexism built into Confucianism? Not that we Unitarian Universalists are entirely non-sexist — but at least as a non-creedal religion, we are not bound by sexist scriptures, and as a democratic religion we are not bound by sexist pronouncements issued by a hierarchy. Yet as a religion which strives for equality between the sexes, I feel that Unitarian Universalism is fundamentally different from the Latter Day Saints, or traditional Muslims, or conservative Christians. Because we Unitarian Universalists affirm that all genders are equal, I find it difficult to accept that our religion winds up on the same mountaintop as patriarchal religions which claim that men and boys are better than other genders. Nor can I accept that those other religions are simply deluded — because that merely echoes their argument that I’m deluded for believing that women and girls are just as good as men and boys. — All this leads me to wonder if there’s more than one religious mountain; to wonder if there are multiple religious truths, not all of which I want to share in. And this in turn leads me to the conclusion that Christmas is something entirely different from Hanukkah, Diwali, Bodhi Day, or the pagan solstice celebrations.

    I have found this to be spiritually freeing. Instead of thinking that Hanukkah is somehow similar to Christmas, I can accept what my friend the rabbi says — Hanukkah is actually a minor Jewish holiday that has nothing to do with Christmas. Instead of worrying about celebrating Hanukkah to counterbalance Christmas, I can instead honor the importance of the Jewish High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. That is, instead of trying to elevate a minor Jewish holiday to importance just because it happens to fall at the same time as the major Christian holiday of Christmas, I can accept Judaism on its own terms. Or to give another example, while I can recognize that the Hindu holiday of Diwali prompts almost as much consumer spending among Hindus as Christmas does among Christians and nominal Christians, there are other Hindu holidays with as greater or greater religious significance, such as Durga Puja. Again, I can accept Hinduism on its own terms, rather than trying to fit it into Christmas. This also means I face less spiritual pressure at Christmas time; I can simply focus on Christmas instead of trying to integrate it with Hanukkah and the solstice and Diwali and Bodhi Day, and even Ramadan when it happens to fall in December.

    As I say, I have found this to be spiritually freeing. Instead of trying to stuff random holidays of non-Christian religions into a Christmas mold, I find myself more willing to appreciate those other religions for what they are, rather than for what I want them to be. It has been spiritually freeing in other ways too. Rather than struggling to make connections between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of other major world religions, I can simply read Jesus for what he has to offer, appreciating his unique contributions without having to compare him to other teachings. Conversely, I can read the Dao de Jing without having to try to figure out how it pertains to the teachings of Jesus. As scholar of religion Stephen Prothero puts it, “Being honest [about religion] requires being true to the religious traditions themselves.” So while it is disorienting, I find it easier to be true to the religions themselves. And personally, I’ve found the world to be a more interesting place when I accept the essential differences between religions; when I don’t try to make belief central to every religion just because Christianity does; when I’m able to truly listen to what other religions have to say, instead of listening for what I want them to say.

    Not that I necessarily recommend this spiritual path to anyone else. It is a disorienting spiritual path. It’s less disorienting to have only one mountain on life’s map — just one peak upon which all trails converge — than it is to deal with a complex multicultural landscape with mountains and valleys and plains and rivers and probably oceans besides. And maybe it’s more fun to celebrate Christmas while at the same time playing dreidel in honor of Hanukkah. It’s certainly more poetic to say along with Thoreau that: “The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did….” In the end, it’s your choice as to which spiritual path you prefer to follow.

    Notes

    (1) Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions, New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991, p. 73. This is a revised version of Smith’s earlier 1958 book The Religions of Man, which is turn grew out of a 1955 lecture series for television.
    (2) Sometimes we even include Kwanzaa, although those who created Kwanzaa have explicitly said that it is not a religious holiday. See, e.g., Karenga Maulana, Kwanzaa, University of Sankore Press, 1997, p. 121: “Is Kwanzaa an alternative to Christmas? Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday. And it is not an alternative to people’s religion or faith but a common ground of African culture….” Maulana goes on to emphasize that Kwanzaa is not religion, but a “cultural choice.”

  • Ethics of Housing

    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.

    Readings

    The first reading was from the book Rough Sleepers by Tracey Kidder. This book tells the story of Dr. Jim O’Connell, who has provided medical care for Boston’s homeless people for four decades.

    “A troubling philosophical issue also loomed. [Jim] served on a panel that was compiling a study of studies for the National Academies of Sciences. The aim was to show that housing for homeless people improved their health and saved the public money, and yet no studies fully supported those widely held claims, none at least that met the standards of the academics on the committee. Some of Jim’s old allies refused to give up the cost-savings argument. He wrote me privately: ‘Housing homeless people is mandatory. A human right. But I have long been skeptical of the drive to show that it saves money, because that leaves housing dependent on whether it saves money. Ridiculous. Who would ever say that Mass General [Hospital] exists to save money?’”

    The second reading, “Once the World Was Perfect,” a poem about hope for the future by Joy Harjo, is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

    Sermon

    This is another sermon topic that came from a question posed by people in this congregation during last year’s question-box service. Someone asked, “What can we do about the reality that there is so much injustice and inequality in the world while we are surrounded by such abundance?” This is such a big topic that I felt I had to split it up into a couple of different sermons. Earlier in the autumn, I spoke about White poverty. And today I’d like to talk about the ethics of housing.

    I’ll begin by considering some of the ethical questions that confront us in the present housing situation. Although housing is a political issue, I’m not going to make this a political sermon, but rather I’m going to sort through some of the ethical considerations that arise when we talking about housing and access to housing. As usual, I’m not going to make a grand pronouncement and tell you exactly how to solve the housing crisis we’re facing in our region — I don’t pretend to have answers when far better minds than mine have failed to solve the housing crisis. But I do feel that it’s helpful to sort through the ethical issues involved, and see if there’s a possibility of bridging the various divides in our society that seem to prevent us from making much progress in the housing crisis. And I’ll end with some thoughts about the spiritual and religious implications of the housing crisis.

    And before I begin looking at the ethics of housing, I should tell you my personal moral bias. Personally, I feel that everyone should have safe and affordable housing. But if we’re going to have an ethical discussion, I don’t want to focus on my personal moral feelings, I want to focus on broad values that can be held by a wide range of people in our society.

    Let’s start by reviewing the extent of the current housing crisis. First, if we look at homelessness, about three quarters of a million people in the United States are living on the street, in their car, in a shelter, or in transitional housing.(1) There are also a large number of people who are couch-surfing, that is, staying with friends and acquaintances but moving frequently “with no fixed address.”(2) I was unable to find much hard data on the number of couch surfers, but a 2017 study found that 20.5% of young adults aged 18 through 25 were couch surfers in the past twelve months.(3)

    Moving beyond people who are homeless, about 5.2 million households in the United States receive federal rental assistance (most of them are working families).(4) Perhaps another 10 million households were waiting for some form of government subsidized housing.(5) And close to half of all renter households live in so-called cost-burdened housing, where more than 30% of the household income goes towards rent(6) I was unable to find equivalent statistics for homeowners, but no doubt there are plenty of homeowners spending more than 30% of their income on housing costs.

    So much for statistics. Now let’s move on to some ethical considerations.

    First, do people have a right to housing? From a legal perspective, the answer is no. Attorney Maria Massimo summed it up neatly in the Boston College Law Review when she wrote, “In the United States, housing is treated as a commodity or investment, rather than as a human right.”(7) Yet if housing is not a legal right, should we nonetheless feel an ethical compulsion to provide housing to people who need it? On this question, our society is divided. One important strain of American ethical thinking asserts the importance of personal responsibility and self-reliance. Our very own Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spent eight years as a Unitarian minister before becoming a full-time writer, said, “It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail.”(8) Another important strand of American ethical thinking asserts the importance of equal justice for all persons. John Haynes Holmes, another Unitarian minister as well as one of the cofounders of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), also placed a high value on personal responsibility; but, drawing on the Christian tradition, he preached that society had the responsibility to help the poor and downtrodden.

    There are of course other ethical strands that have shaped us, but these two seem especially important when considering the ethics of housing. Each of these two ethical strands has a very different understanding of the role of the individual in curing social ills.

    On the hand, the ethical strand that believes fighting evil is primarily the responsibility of an individual asserts that the best way to fight social evils is to assign primary responsibility to individuals. Today, this ethical stance tends to deplore government intervention in social problems, such as providing housing or food assistance, because of the belief that individuals, not impersonal social structures, are ultimately responsible for taking care of themselves.

    On the other hand, the ethical strand that believes fighting evil is primarily a battle to be fought at the level of social institutions asserts that the best way to fight social evils is to assign primary responsibility to the major institutions. Such institutions are presumed to have more power than mere individuals. Today, this ethical stance tends to advocate for using government and other large-scale institutions in solving social problems, such as providing housing or food assistance, because of the belief that individuals are not powerful enough in themselves to fight social evils.

    These two ethical stances perceive people who are homeless or cost-burdened by housing in two different ways. One ethical stance believes that if you’re homeless or cost-burdened, you have some personal flaw that has led to your housing problems. The other ethical stance believes that if you’re homeless or cost-burdened, it’s not your fault but the fault of impersonal forces outside your control. And given that American society is strongly influenced by American Christianity, sin and salvation tend to enter these ethical stances: either sinfulness is within you and within your power to do away with; or sinfulness comes from without and you need the help of others to cast it out.

    Now of course I’m oversimplifying things here. Both these ethical stances are more subtle and more nuanced than I’m making them out to be. Nevertheless, let’s take these oversimplified ethical stances and apply them to three real-life situations.

    The first case study comes from an actual homeless person I knew, although I’m obscuring personal details to preserve confidentiality. I was helping serve dinner at a homeless shelter a decade or so ago, and I got to know some of the guests. One of them was a personable and articulate middle-aged woman who was quite forthright in saying that she was homeless due to her alcohol addiction. She knew alcohol addiction was a disease. She knew about social inequalities. But she also knew that had the choice to go into recovery sooner, and if she had done so she could have kept herself from being homeless.

    The second case study also comes from an actual homeless person I met, and again I’ve changed some of the details to preserve confidentiality. A young man in his late twenties arrived at the homeless shelter in his car, and gave a little as I greeted him. He had grown up in an affluent suburb, gone to college, and gotten a good job. But he had been laid off at the same time as he faced unforeseen medical bills, and before he knew it he was living on the streets in his car. He had a job, but he couldn’t come up with the down payment for a new apartment, and even if he had that rents had gotten so high that he couldn’t afford them anyway. He knew he had made mistakes in his life (just as we all have), but on the whole nothing he had done should have pushed him into homelessness.

    The third case study concerns a family that I met, not in a homeless shelter, but through a social event. This family had made some less than ideal financial choices — the parents had not built up their savings when they could have, and they foolishly left good jobs just so they could move to a place they hadn’t adequately researched. Then when the parents’ new jobs didn’t pan out, they moved back to the major urban area where they had begun; one spouse and the children were able to move back in with the parent of that spouse — but there was no room for the other spouse, who wound up couch surfing. In this case, the family had made some poor choices, but their poor choices were not of a magnitude to send one of them into functional homelessness.

    From these three stories, we can see that’s it’s not a good idea to make blanket ethical judgements. We can’t make a blanket statement that homelessness can only result from poor personal choices; the second and third case studies show that it’s not always entirely the fault of the person concerned. We also can’t make a blanket statement that homelessness only results from societal forces; the first and third case studies show that sometimes we do have to take into account individual responsibility.

    Thus an ethics of housing has to be flexible enough to cover a wide range of actual cases. An inflexible pronouncement that housing problems are always the fault of the individual (but never the responsibility of society) is not very helpful. An inflexible pronouncement that housing problems are always the result of societal forces (but never the responsibility of the individual) is also not very helpful. I believe it might help us bridge some political divides in our country if we could adopt more flexibility in our ethical pronouncements.

    But ethics in a multicultural democratic society like ours must also take into account that different citizens can hold quite different views of the world. Now we’re starting to get into the realm of religion, because these different world views often correspond with different religious views. But here again, we have to let go of old stereotypes.

    Take, for example, the Christian worldview. The ethical stance that emphasizes personal responsibility may be held by progressive Christians in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and also by conservative Christian evangelicals. The ethical stance that emphasizes protecting individuals from societal forces may be held by progressive Christians and Jews who emphasize community ties over individualism, and also by conservative Christians who feel called by their religion to care for the poor and to feed the hungry. It seems to me that Christian priorities depend a great deal on whether you prioritize Jesus’s commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, or whether you prioritize the parts of the Christian scriptures that tell you to take individual responsibility for gaining everlasting life.(9)

    We also find diverse ethical priorities among atheists. Some atheists emphasize survival of the fittest, with the thought that the human race will be stronger if we allow weaker humans to die off (I’m making this sound harsh, but it is a valid and defendable ethical stance). Other atheists emphasize that because there is no God, then we humans not only have the ability, we also have the responsibility to solve human-caused problems like poverty and hunger. And there are many other possible atheist ethical stances besides. Similarly, we find diverse ethical priorities among Buddhists. So-called “engaged Buddhists” apply Buddhist teachings to social and political issues. Other Buddhists prefer to focus on withdrawing from a chaotic world to seek enlightenment within oneself. And of course there are other possible Buddhist priorities as well.

    Often, people just assume that their ethical priorities are shared with everyone else. The progressive Christian who assumes that everyone believes in the Golden Rule is going to be frustrated by the atheists who believes that saving people from trouble goes against the principle of the survival of the fittest. The atheists who believes it’s up to humans to solve human-caused problems is going to be frustrated by Buddhists who turn away from the chaos of the world to seek enlightenment within. And so on.

    I would like to suggest that we Unitarian Universalists should be especially good at helping people look at their ethical assumptions, and helping people speak more openly about their ethical priorities. This should be one of our strengths, because this is the foundation of our own religion — we are always questioning things and examining our own assumptions. Furthermore, our communities often include people who have a fairly wide range of religious worldviews — First Parish, for example, includes Christians and Jews, Buddhists and atheists, Transcendentalists and existentialists and who knows what else. If you’re going to be part of a Unitarian Universalist community, you have to be able to cultivate an openness to other ways of thinking about the world, openness to other ways of being in the world. You might call this our hidden secret superpower.

    At this point, I’d like to return to the question that prompted this sermon: “What can we do about the reality that there is so much injustice and inequality in the world while we are surrounded by such abundance?” Here on the South Shore, we live surrounded by great abundance — abundance of beauty, abundance of community resources, abundance of financial wealth, and so on. Here on the South Shore, we also live surrounded by housing inequality: we have many cost-burdened renters, we have plenty of people living in subsidized housing,(10) we have lots of people who are couch-surfing, we even have a few people who are living in their cars or sleeping rough.

    We also live in a time of great polarization. It seems to me that we are especially polarized when it comes to housing. Here in Massachusetts, affordable housing proposals often prompt divisive and bitter political battles — witness, for example, the divisive battle going on right now in Milton, which voted not to comply with the state MBTA zoning law. Unfortunately, bitter and divisive political battles like these often serve to distract people from reaching goals we all share, such as making housing more affordable. Once we get involved in bitter and divisive politics, no one wins — everyone loses.

    So here’s my answer to the question “What can we do about the reality that there is so much injustice and inequality in the world while we are surrounded by such abundance?” — We can use our secret superpower of openness to other ways of thinking about the world to help bridge the divides that separate us. We can do this by showing our willingness to listen to other points of view, and to try to find common ground with people we don’t agree with. As people who believe that creeds or dogmas are limiting, we can show our willingness to think creatively, to think outside the box, working together with many different people to find ways of making housing more affordable, without relying on the usual partisan politics.

    I really can’t emphasize enough the power of our secret superpower of openness to other ways of thinking about the world. The political world of the United States is currently dominated by dogmatic thinking. And such dogmatism is not going well. It’s up to people like us to help out country move away from polarization, and move towards flexible, pragmatic thinking and action. This may not seem like much, but I actually feel it could be revolutionary — we can help our fellow citizens to listen to one another, to come together to solve the massive problems that face us, and begin building a land where all people are valued for who we are.

    In the words of poet Joy Harjo:

    A spark of kindness made a light.
    The light made an opening in the darkness.
    Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
    [One] person climbed out first into the next world,
    And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
    And their children, all the way through time —
    To now, into this morning light to you.

    Notes

    (1) Part One of the “2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report” by the Office of Community Planning and Development of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; this report is dated December, 2024, and offers a “point in time” snapshot of homelessness. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-AHAR-Part-1.pdf

    (2) “Hidden homelessness – the realities ‘couch surfing’,” 17 April 2019, VincentCare website https://www.vincentcare.org.au/news/latest-news/hidden-homelessness-the-realities-couch-surfing/

    (3) Study by Chapin Hall cited in Susanna Curry and Gina Miranda Samuels, “Youth Homelessness and Vulnerability: How Does Couch Surfing Fit?”, American Journal of Community Psychology, August 2017, DOI: 10.1002/ajcp.12156

    (4) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “United States Federal Rental Assistance Fact Sheet,” 23 January 2025, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/federal-rental-assistance-fact-sheets#US

    (5) “Housing Agency Waiting Lists and the Demand for Housing Assistance,” Public and Affordable Housing Research Corporation, February 2016, https://www.pahrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/spotlight-housing-agency-waiting-lists-and-the-demand-for-housing-assistance.pdf

    (6) “Nearly Half of Renter Households Are Cost-Burdened, Proportions Differ by Race,” September 12, 2024, Press Release Number: CB24-150 https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/renter-households-cost-burdened-race.html

    (7) Maria Massimo, “Housing as a Right in the United States,” Boston College Law Review, vol. 62:273, https://bclawreview.bc.edu/articles/76/files/639ad28b6069d.pdf

    (8) Emerson, “Self Reliance.”

    (9) See, e.g., John 3:16.

    (10) According to the most recent state report from the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, here’s the percentage of Chapter 40B Subsidized Housing Inventory (SHI) as of September 30, 2025, for towns where First Parish members and friends live:
    Cohasset 10.38%
    Hanover 10.94%
    Hingham 10.33%
    Hull 1.66%
    Marshfield 10.31%
    Pembroke 8.78%
    Scituate 6.08%
    This report is online here: https://www.mass.gov/doc/subsidized-housing-inventory-2/download

  • Giving Thanks

    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.

    Readings

    The first reading was the poem “Since You’ve come” by Jimmy Santiago Baca. This poem was selected for the Pushcart Prize in 1989. You can listen to the poet reading this copyrighted poem here: https://voca.arizona.edu/track/id/64026

    The second reading was an excerpt from the long poem “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” by Maya Angelou.

    Shadows on the wall
    Noises down the hall
    Life doesn’t frighten me at all

    Bad dogs barking loud
    Big ghosts in a cloud
    Life doesn’t frighten me at all

    Mean old Mother Goose
    Lions on the loose
    They don’t frighten me at all

    Dragons breathing flame
    On my counterpane
    That doesn’t frighten me at all.

    I go boo
    Make them shoo
    I make fun
    Way they run
    I won’t cry
    So they fly
    I just smile
    They go wild

    Life doesn’t frighten me at all….

    Sermon

    The thanksgiving holiday is coming on Thursday. Which got me thinking: Why should I be thankful?

    If you follow the news, you can find many reasons to not be thankful. Internationally, our planet is in the middle of several major conflicts: here in the United States, we mostly hear about the Gaza/Israel war and the war in Ukraine, but if you dig deeper into the international news, you can find the war in Sudan where an estimated 150,000 people have died since April 2023, many of them in alleged genocide. Here in our own country, we have far too many national leaders who appear to be more interested in scoring partisan points than in actually governing. Then there’s the ongoing environmental crisis, ranging from climate change to invasive species to microplastics in our brains. And turning to the sports pages isn’t going to help all that much — the Celtics are losing as often as they’re winning, and (for those of you like me who only care about baseball) I’d rather not remember how the Red Sox yet again blew their post-season chances. Oh, and for those of you who follow cricket, we also don’t want to talk about England’s terrible batting in the Ashes Test with Australia.

    If you follow the news, you’re probably going to say: It’s just another horrible year. Everything is going wrong. Oh, sure, there are a few good things — the Patriots are having a great season (except I don’t follow football), the drought has ended in Massachusetts, and there’s a very fragile ceasefire in the Gaza/Israel war — and yet this last piece of good news shows that even the good news isn’t very good.

    But it’s not just the news that’s causing us to feel that we have nothing to be thankful for. Social media is also making us feel that way. On Wednesday, the Boston Globe published an article titled “With luxury always in our faces, it’s no wonder we’re feeling poor,” which reported on the ways social media makes us feel like we’re always falling behind. The article opened with a portrait of a 27 year old teacher named Chris Tringali who’s still living with his parents so he can save money to buy his own home. The article quoted Tringali as saying: “You go on social media and every weekend someone is getting married, someone is in Italy, or someone is in Europe, having all these milestones…. Meanwhile, I’m doomscrolling through all these big life moments for all these other people and I’m still living at home.”

    Tringali sounds like a great guy with a pretty amazing life — he has already paid off his student loans; he has parents who are willing and able to let him live at home; and as a teacher, he’s got the kind of job where he’s actually making the world a better place. Yet through social media he is forced to compare himself to people who appear to be leading a more lavish lifestyle than he is. The Globe article goes on to quote cognitive scientist Tali Sharot, the head of the Affective Brain Lab at MIT, who said that “the constant flood of high-end content ‘makes you believe that you are less than others.’”

    In other words, if you follow the news, you’re going to believe that we have little to be thankful for (aside from the Patriots who are having a winning season). In other words, if you spend any time at all on social media, you’re going to believe that you have little to be thankful for and furthermore that you are less worthy than those perfect people with lavish lifestyles who appear on your social media feed. And please don’t tell me to stop following the news; please don’t tell me to stop using social media. In a democracy, we actually do need to follow the news; and many of my friends and relatives only communicate via social media any more.

    So what can we do? I do not recommend spiraling into depression and withdrawing into some dark place inside ourselves. I’ve actually known people who have done that, and you probably have, too that; it is not a good solution to this problem, and if you’re feeling that way, please come talk to me and we’ll figure out how to get some professional help so you can climb up out of that rut.

    Without spiraling into depression, the rest of us can feel pretty strongly that the news is all bad, and that we are not as good as anyone on social media. While these are genuine feelings, we don’t have to be stuck with them. And I’m going to suggest an easy daily practice that has helped me get out of that feeling that the news is all bad and I’m a lesser being. This daily practice is quite simple: all you have to do is to give thanks for something. This practice probably gives the best results if you do it every day. But even if you do it once in a blue moon, it still can offer real relief.

    You don’t have to wait for something stupendous to happen before you give thanks. In fact, this practice works best if you give thanks for simple everyday things. I’ll give you an example. For lunch the other day, I took some leftovers and made myself a vegetable-salmon sir fry over rice. This was just an ordinary lunch; it was not photogenic, and not the kind of hyper-attractive meal that you photograph and post on your social media feed. But it tasted good, it was healthful, and it was satisfying. So after I ate lunch, I paused for a moment and said to myself, “I’m thankful for a lunch that made me feel good, that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, and that tasted pretty good.”

    I’ll give you another example of being thankful for something that I would never put on my social media feed. I have a friend in California who’s in recovery from alcoholism, and who has been sober for quite a few years now. Now that we no longer live in California, I don’t see this person very often, but when I do see them, I’m thankful for their dedication to the twelve-step program that helps keep them sober. I’m giving you this example of thankfulness for a couple of reasons. First, thankfulness doesn’t have to remain focused on oneself; of course we can be thankful for the good health and well-being of friends and family. Second, thankfulness doesn’t have to be all about rainbows and sunsets and mystical magical poetical happenings (although those are nice, too); thankfulness can be simple, down-to-earth, prosaic, and practical.

    When you start giving thanks for ordinary, everyday things and events, you begin to realize that actually life presents us with a great deal to be thankful for. The poet Ross Gay wrote a long poem titled “Catalog for Unabashed Gratitude” which is a long poetic list of simple things he’s thankful for: a robin outside his window; spreading rotting compost which (although it stank) would help fertilize a community garden; a friend who didn’t smoke meth with his mother; bees in a bee hive; a friend who survived suicide; for the love of family; the men he saw helping an elderly woman after she fell on the city street; winning a pick-up basketball game; and many more ordinary things for which he’s thankful. At the end of this long poem, Ross Gay apologizes for being so long-winded, and he concludes by saying:

    “…Soon [this poem] will be over,
    which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
    holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
    hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
    who said it’s much worse than we think,
    and sooner; to whom I said
    no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
    this singing and shuddering is,
    what this screaming and reaching and dancing
    and crying is, other than loving
    what every second goes away?
    Goodbye, I mean to say.
    And thank you. Every day.”

    The perfect ending to a long poem on thankfulness: Say thank you, every day.

    Ross Gay does not tell us to whom he offers his thanks. Nor do I plan to tell you to whom you should offer your thanks. You should thank whomever you want to thank. Maybe you want to thank God or Goddess, Adonai or the Dharma, Allah or the Spirit of Life, or maybe you’re thankful without feeling the need to direct your thanks to any particular subject or object. Personally, I just offer my thanks without worrying too much about to whom, or to what, I’m offering those thanks; I simply toss my thanks out to the universe.

    What Ross Gay does tell us is that giving thanks is much the same thing as “loving / what every second goes away.” Every single thing in life is transitory, which means that the good things in life are also transitory. What is bad in life will eventually end or pass away; by the same token, the good things in life also must come to an end or pass away. As we give thanks for that which is good, it is already passing away. (That vegetable stir fry I made for lunch? — it has long since been eaten.) And so Ross Gay ends his “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by reminding us to give thanks every day. It doesn’t matter to whom you give thanks (if anyone); but you should do it every day.

    Give thanks even as what you are thankful for is passing away. This Thursday we have an official governmental holiday in which we are called upon to give thanks. But the point here is that we shouldn’t wait until the Thanksgiving holiday to give thanks; we should give thanks every day.

    Since the Thanksgiving holiday takes place this week, let’s talk a bit about that holiday. Part of the current mythology of Thanksgiving is that it has something to do with the Pilgrims and the Indians. Even though historians tell us that when Thanksgiving first became an official government holiday the Indians and Pilgrims were not mentioned, I still like to think about them at Thanksgiving time. And I sometimes like to imagine what the English settlers and the Wampanoag gave thanks for, and to whom they extended their thanks, when they gathered to celebrate together on that autumn day back in 1621.

    Perhaps the Wampanoag gave thanks for surviving the pandemic in which perhaps three quarters their people had died just a couple of years previously; perhaps they Wampanoag gave thanks for these new military allies, the Pilgrims, whom they hoped would help them keep the Narragansett Indians from invading their country. Perhaps the English settlers gave thanks that they had survived that first winter in which perhaps half their people had died; perhaps they too gave thanks for these new military allies whom they hoped would help keep them safe. In other words, in my imagination, both the Wampanoag and the English gave thanks for simple survival; they gave thanks for the simple but profound fact that they were still alive.

    To whom did they offer their thanks? Those of the English settlers who were Pilgrims gave thanks to the orthodox Pilgrim version of God. But not all the English settlers were part of that religious group, including some of the military leaders and some of the indentured servants, and those people might have given thanks in their hearts to some less orthodox version of God, or even to older folk deities who have been lost to time. As for the Indians, although today’s Mashpee Wampanoag have stories about their culture heroes Moshup and Granny Squannit, it’s hard to know now exactly to whom seventeenth century Wampanoag gave thanks. Maybe it was culture heroes like Moshup and Granny Squannit. Maybe it’s not important to know to whom they gave thanks; what’s important is that they gave thanks.

    I also like to imagine what would have happened if there had been a 24 hour news cycle and social media in 1621, at that first mythical Thanksgiving dinner. Here’s the way it appears in my imagination. The English and the Wampanoag would have spent the meal doomscrolling through all the bad news of their day — Narragansett Indians rumored to be on war footing! Established church in England speaks out against the Separatists in Plymouth Colony! The city of Riga falls in the Polish Swedish War prompting a major humanitarian crisis! After doomscrolling the bad news, they would have turned to their social media accounts, which would have given them FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) when they saw the photographs of the lavish meals served in the comfortable aristocratic houses of England, and the lavish meals of the Narragansett Indians (remember, the Narragansetts hadn’t been decimated by the plague of 1619) lying around in their comfortable wetu, or dwelling; both the English and the Wampanoag would see all these lavish meals on 17th century social media, making them all too aware of how inadequate their own Thanksgiving dinner was. In my imagination, between the doomscrolling and social media FOMO, the Wampanoag and the English would have decided they had nothing to be thankful for, and the Thanksgiving holiday would have died before it even got started.

    At least, that’s what happened according to my hyperactive imagination. But there was one key difference between the seventeenth century and our own time. Both the English and the Wampanoags had the habit of giving thanks in spite of adverse circumstances, a habit which many of us today have forgotten or neglected. They gave thanks for what they had, even in the face of catastrophes like a pandemic that killed more than three quarters of all Wampanoag, or a brutal winter that killed more than half of all English settlers. Perhaps we can learn from their example. For those of us who forget to give thanks, perhaps we can start giving thanks for something each day. For those of you who never lost the habit of giving thanks, perhaps you could be more public about your habit of thankfulness to help the rest of us. We can support each other in the habit of giving thanks at least once a day. We can give thanks for the baby that disturbs our sleep, because we have never loved anything more than that baby. We can give thanks for friends and family who alive and still with us, and we can give thanks for the memories of the friends and family who have died. We can give thanks for the astonishing beauty of the world around us; we can give thanks for the simple fact that we can draw breath. We can give thanks for the simple food we eat — without feeling the need to post it on social media.

    Doomscrolling and social media show us what we lack, and that makes us fearful. Giving thanks shows us what we have, and makes us stronger. Giving thanks give us strength. We have the love of friends and family. We have the necessities of life, most of the time. We live in a world filled with beauty. And while it is true that all these things are transitory, yet even so, when we give thanks for what we have, we gain something permanent even from that which is transitory.