Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Western Religious Traditions

  • Easter Joy

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Sermon

    Traditionally, Easter tells the story of the literal resurrection of Jesus, in which he rises from the dead after being executed. The traditional Easter story is ultimately a story of how an impossible situation can be transformed into a hopeful and joyful situation. And I don’t know about you, but given the news these days, I could use some hope and joy.

    Now, we Unitarian Universalists happen to have a wide variety of theological viewpoints, and many of us interpret the Easter story in non-traditional ways. So this year, rather than offering just one interpretation of Easter, I’d like to give you four different takes on the basic message of Easter. We’re going to hear four poems by Unitarian Universalist poets, expressing beliefs ranging from liberal Christian, to very liberal post-Christian, to Neo-Pagan, to humanist. Most of these poems link Easter with the hope and joy and transformation of the spring season. Admittedly, if we were in the southern hemisphere where Easter comes in autumn, equating Easter with spring doesn’t work so well. But here we are in the northern hemisphere, so we can make a link between the Easter season, and the hope and joy and transformation of the spring season.

    With that introduction, let’s listen as our worship associate, Mary T., reads the first poem:

    “Dandelions” by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

    Welcome children of the Spring,
    In your garbs of green and gold,
    Lifting up your sun-crowned heads
    On the verdant plain and wold.

    As a bright and joyous troop
    From the breast of earth ye came
    Fair and lovely are your cheeks,
    With sun-kisses all aflame.

    In the dusty streets and lanes,
    Where the lowly children play,
    There as gentle friends ye smile,
    Making brighter life’s highway

    Dewdrops and the morning sun,
    Weave your garments fair and bright,
    And we welcome you to-day
    As the children of the light.

    Children of the earth and sun.
    We are slow to understand
    All the richness of the gifts
    Flowing from our Father’s hand.

    Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who lived from 1825 to 1911, represents typical Unitarian Christianity of the late nineteenth century. Although this poem doesn’t specifically mention Easter, it still feels like a Unitarian interpretation of Easter to me. Late-nineteenth century Unitarians were mostly interested in what Jesus did during his lifetime, and they thought a lot about how to live out his teachings in the present day. As a result, they didn’t spend much too time worrying about whether the Easter story of resurrection was literally true or whether it was a metaphor. Instead, they concerned themselves with trying to follow Jesus’s example — helping the poor, loving their neighbors, and so on.

    I see this pragmatic Unitarian attitude in Frances Harper’s poem about dandelions. Instead of writing a poem about the showy flowers that well-to-do people from in their gardens, she turns her attention to the lowly dandelion. Dandelions grow everywhere, even in “the dusty streets and lanes, / Where lowly children play.” So it is that God brings the joy of springtime — the joy that we associate with Easter — to everyone on earth, whether rich or poor. As an African American, Frances Harper was fully aware that Black people in late nineteenth century America often didn’t have equal access to many things; yet God brings beauty and joy to all human beings equally, regardless of race. Even though this poem doesn’t specifically mention Easter, it tells us something important about Easter — that God wants everyone to have equal access to the joy of Easter. Frances Harper would tell us that if we find some people don’t have equal access to Easter joy, well then, that’s a problem caused by humans, not by God — which means it’s a problem that we humans can solve.

    Now let’s hear another poem, “i thank You God for most this amazing day” by E. E. Cummings (poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions, but a legal audio version of the poem may be heard on the Poetry Foundation website)….

    E. E. Cummings, who wrote this poem, was the son of a Unitarian minister. As an adult he had no formal religious affiliation, yet even so this poem sounds very Unitarian to me. It’s what you might call a post-Christian poem — the poem uses some standard Christian images, yet those images are interpreted in a very free manner. Cummings writes “i who have died am alive again today,” which sounds like the standard story of Easter (except that story is not usually told in the first person). Then Cummings takes this in a decidedly non-standard direction by saying: “this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth / day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay / great happening illimitably earth.” This is not orthodox Christian theology.

    The final stanza of the poem, while clearly unorthodox, does carry an echo of some of Jesus’s words. In the synoptic gospels (that is, the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in the Christian scriptures), Jesus often tells his followers to pay attention. For example, Jesus says: “After all, there is nothing hidden except to be brought to light, nor anything secreted away that won’t be exposed. If anyone here has two good ears, use them!” (Mark 4:22-23, Jesus Seminar translation). We hear lots of talk about the importance of mindfulness these days, but this is not a modern phenomenon. For thousands of years, prophets and sages have been telling us to wake up and pay attention. E. E. Cummings is echoing not only Jesus, but other prophets and sages, when he tells us, “now the ears of my ears awake and / now the eyes of my eyes are opened”. And what is Cummings urging us to pay attention to? — he is telling us to pay attention to wonder, and beauty — in short, he is telling us to wake up to joy. Or as Jesus put it, “Anyone here with two ears had better listen!” (Matt. 13:9, Jesus Seminar translation)

    Now let’s hear another poem, this one by a Neo-Pagan Unitarian Universalist — “Seed for Spring Equinox / March 21” by Annie Finch. The poet says: “For the full effect, speak the poem aloud 3 times.”

    Annie Finch is a Neo-Pagan; the Neo-Pagan religions reach back in Western culture to the ancient earth-centered religions that existed before Christianity took over. Like many Neo-pagans, Annie Finch recognizes eight main holy days in the year: the two equinoxes, the two solstices, and the four days that lie halfway between the equinoxes and solstices. Like many Neo-pagans, Annie Finch traces the roots of the Christian holiday of Easter back to an older pagan holiday called Ostara, which was connected with the spring equinox. The poem we just heard is an Ostara poem, and it’s also a spring equinox poem.

    Finch also believes in the power of the spoken word. Poetry is not just something your high school English teacher made you read. Poetry contains a kind of magical power, the power of incantatory words spoken or chanted aloud. This may seem an alien concept to many of us today; but all human cultures have recognized the power of the spoken word. Our politicians still rely on the spoken word to sway the electorate. Religions rely on the spoken word through chanting scriptures, repeating mantras, saying prayers aloud, or even hearing sermons. People who are deaf might cast some doubt on whether the power of the spoken word is universal. In response, some religious traditions would reply: it’s the vibrational energy that’s important, or the communal aspect of speaking something aloud to a group of people, not the actual perceived sound.

    Whatever you might believe, or disbelieve, about the mystical powers of poetry, this poem by Annie Finch is — to my way of thinking — a poem about hope, and ultimately a poem about joy. The poem is spoken from the point of view of a seed that has been planted and is beginning to sprout — therein lies the hope, for as any gardener can tell you, the act of planting a seed is an expression of hope for the future. And then there’s the moment when the seed’s “head and shoulders past the open crust / dried by spring wind” and the new plant emerges into the spring sunshine — this is a moment of joy. By speaking the poem aloud, we enter into that mindset of transformation, and perhaps that may help us to transform ourselves — a hopeful thought.

    Now let’s hear one final poem, from the 1923 book “Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams:

    By the road to the contagious hospital
    under the surge of the blue
    mottled clouds driven from the
    northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the
    waste of broad, muddy fields
    brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

    patches of standing water
    the scattering of tall trees

    All along the road the reddish
    purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
    stuff of bushes and small trees
    with dead, brown leaves under them
    leafless vines —

    Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
    dazed spring approaches —

    They enter the new world naked,
    cold, uncertain of all
    save that they enter. All about them
    the cold, familiar wind —

    Now the grass, tomorrow
    the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
    One by one objects are defined —
    It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

    But now the stark dignity of
    entrance — Still, the profound change
    has come upon them: rooted, they
    grip down and begin to awaken

    This poem by William Carlos Williams contains no mention of Easter or Ostara, no mention of Jesus or God. Nevertheless, it seems to me it poem tells much the same story as the other poems we have heard. There is a sense of hope for the future, the hope that comes every spring as the world emerges from winter cold and darkness. There is a sense of joy, the joy of new life, of new beginnings — we might even say, the joy that comes with the sense of resurrection of the natural world from the dead time of winter. Above all, there is a sense of the importance of paying attention. Pay attention to “the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf”, for in that tiny, easily-overlooked detail we can find a revelation of what is to come.

    Williams was a physician, and as is true of many physicians he had a scientific outlook. His poetry reflects that scientific outlook in the careful attention to small details, and the ability to connect those small details to a larger whole. Our culture likes to pretend that science and religion are opposed to one another, but a poem like this shows that science and religion can find unity in a sense of wonder — unity in the joy that can come from paying close and careful attention to the world around us.

    As a Unitarian Universalist, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about deep theological questions like the existence of God, the existence of the historical Jesus, the relative truth values of the world’s religions, and so on. These will always be attractive questions, questions which have been worthy of the attention of some of the greatest minds through human history. As I get older, I find myself less interested in questions that (quite apparently) won’t be answered in my lifetime. So I have no longer have much interest in trying to settle, once and for all, all the debates and questions about the story of Easter. Instead, I find myself increasingly adopting the attitude that I sense in the William Carlos Williams poem. I spent yesterday taking a class on the graminoids, a group of plants that include grasses, rushes, and sedges. Talk about paying close attention! — we spent much of the class looking at the seeds of plants through a dissecting microscope. And talk about hope for the future! — we examined the fine structures that have evolved to allow the seeds a maximum chance of creating new life. This seemed a worthy and appropriate way for a Unitarian Universalist like me to spend Easter weekend. So you can see, science and religion are not so far apart as some would have us believe.

    So there you have it — four very different poems about hope and joy and transformation. Believe whatever you wish about God and Jesus and Easter; we Unitarian Universalists have no required beliefs. Believe what you want, but pay close attention to the world. And if you’re willing to pay close attention to the world, no matter who you are — no matter how much money you have, or what race or ethnicity you are, or whom you love, or what your gender might be — your attention will be rewarded with amazement and transformation and hope and joy; for the wonder and beauty of the world remains universally open to all.

  • Who Knows What’s True?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 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 first half of one of the more troubling stories from the Bible, from Genesis chapter 22.

    Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”

    “Here I am,” Abraham replied.

    God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love — Isaac — and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

    Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”

    “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.

    “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”…

    The second reading was by Rev. Dr. William R. Jones, a humanist Unitarian Universalist minister, from his essay “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows”:

    Abraham’s situation, when he is commanded to slay Isaac, represents the human situation. Forced to decide whether he is addressed by God or Moloch and given the impossibility of demonstrating whose voice he hears, Abraham … must decide the source of the command, and in the final analysis his judgment of the source determines the value of the command. If he concludes that the decree is from God, it is morally imperative. If, however, he decides that it is Moloch’s voice that he hears, the order must be rejected. But clearly, only Abraham can make this crucial decision.

    Sermon

    In the first reading, we heard the first half of the story of Abraham and Isaac, which is one of the more troubling stories in the Hebrew Bible. While this story has been interpreted and reinterpreted in many different ways, I’d like to draw on it as a way for us to think about truth. How do we know what is true, and what is false? Who is it that knows what is true? And along the way, I’ll also make a connection between truth and justice.

    I’ll begin by retelling the whole story, interspersed with some of my own interpretation and commentary. As usual, my interpretation and commentary are provisional, so after the sermon please tell me where I went wrong.

    Before I begin, I have to say a little bit about the names for the God of the Israelites. In this story, two names for God appear: Elohim, and the name that is spelled Y-H-W-H, which we English speakers often pronounce as “Jehovah.” Explaining why these two different names are used to refer to the same deity would get us into fairly deep waters, so I’m going to skip over that for now; but as I retell the story of Abraham and Isaac, I’ll use the names “Jehovah” and “Elohim” to show where the original text had two different Hebrew names.

    The story begins with Elohim deciding to test Abraham. Elohim says to him, “Abraham!”

    And Abraham replies to Elohim, “Here I am.”

    Elohim says to Abraham, “I want you to take your only son, Isaac, whom you love. I want you to go to the place called Moriah. When you get there, I’m going to show you a mountain where you will sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering.”

    At this point, I’ll pause to interject some commentary. The Biblical story remains silent at what goes through Abraham’s head when Elohim speaks to him. I can imagine many different thoughts he might have had. For one thing, Abraham might not be entirely sure that this is actually Elohim speaking. One of the Canaanite gods, a deity named Moloch who is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as existing at this time, was kind of notorious in those days for requiring child sacrifices, so Abraham might be concerned that this is actually Moloch speaking, not Elohim. For another thing, I imagine that Abraham would wonder what Sarah, Isaac’s mother, would think about all this, and I imagine that Abraham is going to want to talk this over with Sarah. That’s enough of my commentary; let’s get back to the story.

    So the next morning, Abraham gets up real early, loads up his donkey, wakes up Isaac and two of the family servants, and cuts a bunch of wood so he can do a burnt offering. Then they all set out for Moriah. It takes them most of three days to get where they can see the place about which Elohim told Abraham. Abraham turns to the two servants, and says, “You two stay here with the donkey. I’m going over there with the boy. We’ll worship by offering up a burnt offering, and then we will come back to you.”

    Another pause for commentary: I like how Abraham says, “WE will come back to you.” To my way of thinking, this means that he fully expects that he is not going to have to kill Isaac, that both he and Isaac will be returning to the servants. To put it another way, Abraham is pretty sure that he is not being deceived by the evil deity Moloch, that something else is going on here; he is feeling his way towards the truth. Now back to the story.

    Abraham takes the bundle of wood that they had carried for the past three days, and gives it to Isaac to carry. Abraham carries the fire (remember, they didn’t have matches or lighters, so he’s carrying some kind of live embers) and the sacrificial knife. They walk along together, and Isaac says, “Father, I see we’ve got the wood and the fire, but where’s the lamb we’re going to sacrifice?”

    Abraham says, “Don’t worry, Elohim is going to provide the lamb for the burnt offering.” And then they get to the place that Elohim told Abraham about, and Abraham builds an altar, and sets up the wood for a fire. Then he ties up Isaac and puts him on top of the wood. Then Abraham picks up the knife….

    Another pause for commentary: At this point Abraham must be wondering if he has correctly discerned the truth. Who was it that spoke to him? Was it Moloch, the evil god who demands child sacrifices, or was it Elohim, the good god? If it was Elohim, then Elohim is waiting until the last possible moment to keep him from killing his son. Determining the truth has become a life and death matter! Now back to the story.

    Just at this moment, the angel of Jehovah calls out, “Abraham!” And Abraham replies to the angel from Jehovah, “Here I am.” And the angel says, “Don’t do anything to the boy. Now I know you fear Jehovah, because you didn’t hold back when you were asked to sacrifice your only son.”

    A quick pause for commentary: You will notice that in this short passage, Genesis 22:11 and 12, the deity is referred to as Jehovah, not as Elohim. Some Biblical scholars believe that this short passage was added into the original story. We’ll come back to this in a moment, but now back to the story.

    So Abraham looks up from the sacrificial altar, and sees a ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket. He goes over to the ram, grabs it, and sacrifices it as a burnt offering instead of Isaac. Abraham names the place “Elohim Will Provide.” Which gives rise to a proverbial saying, “On the mountain of Elohim it will be provided.”

    Another pause for commentary. If you leave out the short passage about the angel from Jehovah, the story still works. But without the passage with the angel from Jehovah, we wind up with a different story. The philosopher Omri Boehm puts it this way: “In the original narrative, Abraham ultimately disobeys God’s command, sacrificing the ram ‘instead of his son’ by his own decision. [But] the interpolated figure of an angel takes out of Abraham’s hand not just the knife but the responsibility for stopping the trial: It takes a story that culminates in Abraham’s ethical disobedience as the symbol of faith, and makes it into one that celebrates obedience….” Boehm goes on to cite the great medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides, who found two levels of meaning in this story — the familiar meaning of obedience to the deity, and another meaning of disobedience. Or maybe it’s not disobedience, but something else instead? The story is almost over, so let’s finish it, then think about this some more. (1)

    The angel of Jehovah calls to Abraham a second time and says, “I swear by myself, declares Jehovah, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.” So speaks Jehovah. Abraham and his son and his servants head back home. So ends the story. (2)

    Now that the story is over, I’d like to think with you about a question: Is there a difference between the parts of the story with Elohim, and the parts of the story with Jehovah? Biblical scholars continue to debate this question, and I’m not qualified to give a definitive answer. But I would like to consider what Rev. Dr. William R. Jones said in the second reading this morning:

    “Abraham … must decide the source of the command, and in the final analysis his judgment of the source determines the value of the command. If he concludes that the decree is from God, it is morally imperative. If, however, he decides that it is Moloch’s voice that he hears, the order must be rejected. But clearly, only Abraham can make this crucial decision.”

    Jones would have agreed with Omri Boehm that the story of Abraham could be interpreted to mean, not that Abraham is to be celebrated for his obedience to God, but rather that Abraham is to be celebrated for using his free will to figure out the truth of the matter. Jones was a humanist who did not believe in the literal truth of God, but he believed in the deeper truth of this story — that we human beings are sometimes confronted with impossible ethical decisions, and when that happens it is up to us to make “the crucial decision.”

    William R. Jones implies that Abraham makes this crucial decision alone, without talking to other people. To me, this is a crucial point — must we make ethical decisions like this entirely on our own? Ralph Waldo Emerson, who started out as a Unitarian minister and who remains one of our greatest Unitarian theologians, also seems to think that we make big ethical decisions on our own, solely in consultation with some kind of divine power. In his essay titled “Greatness,” Emerson quoted one of his intellectual mentors, Mary Rotch, as saying:

    “I do not pretend to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some plan, propose a journey or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very well, — I let it lie, thinking it may pass away, but if it do not pass away I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and which the consent of all mankind could not confirm.”(3)

    Thus Emerson believes that some kind of divine voice or divine guidance can require our obedience, to the point where we cannot be shaken in our decision even though the rest of humankind says we are wrong. We can see how this might apply to the story of Abraham and Isaac. Under the urging of a voice claiming to be Elohim, Abraham forms the plan of sacrificing his son Isaac. But it’s not clear to me whether Abraham is obedient to the voice of Elohim, or to the messenger from Jehovah, or whether instead he finds a silent obstacle in his mind that prevents him from killing Isaac, an obstacle for which he cannot account. From whence does that obstacle come? Does it come from Elohim, or Jehovah? Or does that silent obstacle come from a sense of truth and justice to which even Elohim is obedient? Abraham lets that obstacle lie there, thinking it might pass away, but it does not. And when the time comes to actually sacrifice Isaac, that silent obstacle stops him — or perhaps it stops Elohim from letting him proceed.

    Here is where I part ways with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and with Dr. William Jones. I do not believe that this kind of ethical decision-making is a solitary occupation. Yes, it is critically important that we learn to make these kinds of ethical decisions on our own, but we must also check in with other people to confirm whether or intuitive insight into truth is correct. Emerson himself had occasion to insist that we check in with other people to make sure our insights are correct. Jones Very, one of Emerson’s younger proteges, was a talented poet who also suffered from periodic bouts of mental illness. Emerson was impressed by Jones Very’s poetic talent, but Emerson was also aware of his mental illness. One time, so the story goes, Jones Very brought some poems to Emerson to read. When Emerson ventured to make some small criticism of the poems, Jones Very said that the poems had been dictated to him by God, and therefore no valid criticism could be offered. To this Emerson responded dryly that surely God knew enough to use correct spelling and grammar. In other words, Emerson knew that no matter how it might seem that our insights are divinely inspired, we have to check in with other people.

    Because of this, when I hear the story of Abraham and Isaac, I tend to believe that some important bits got left out of the story. When Elohim first tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, I have to imagine that Abraham goes immediately to his wife Sarah to talk it over. I can imagine Abraham saying, This is what Elohim said to me; but can this be Elohim, or is it really Moloch who is trying to deceive me? I also imagine Abraham must have talked this over with other leaders in his clan. The decision to kill his only son is not a decision that he can make alone. Abraham and Sarah, along with other leaders and their close associates in the clan — they must all talk this over together, to determine if what Abraham has heard is the truth. Yes, the burden of final decision and of action ultimately rests on Abraham’s shoulders alone; but he is not alone in making his decision. Like all humans, Abraham is a limited and fallible being; at the same time, he is always a part of humankind; and so he must rely on other humans to help him determine truth.

    I am not saying, however, that truth is relative, or that truth is made up by humans, or that truth is nothing more than a human construct. Not only is that not something I believe, it is also not something that appears in the story of Abraham and Isaac. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, there exists an ultimate truth to which both Abraham and Elohim are answerable. Abraham must answer to Elohim, who is his god; but both Abraham and Elohim must answer to absolute truth and justice. Elohim, being answerable to that absolute justice, would never have let Abraham sacrifice Isaac. Abraham is also answerable to that absolute sense of justice, but being a mere human being, his vision is cloudy; he can’t always be certain that he perceives absolute truth and justice with absolute clarity. The drama of the story arises from his lack of certainty; Abraham knows that Elohim is answerable to absolute justice, and Abraham must judge whether Elohim would actually tell him to kill his son, or whether he is being deceived by a false deity like Moloch.

    Like Abraham, all of us human beings cannot see absolute truth and justice with absolute clarity. Because we cannot see clearly, it is possible for us to believe that there is no ultimate justice in the universe. Yet just because we can’t see it clearly doesn’t mean truth and justice don’t exist. And so we are forced to ask, “Who knows what is true?” Our own time, the mid-twenty-first century, is filled with things that prevent us from perceiving with clarity: social media algorithms, fake news, AI-generated falsehoods, and so on. We thus may be tempted to believe that all we have to do is to listen to an inner voice to know what is true, even if what I hear my inner self saying contradicts what you believe is true. If we rely only on ourselves, we may not realize that we have been deceived by Moloch.

    The great philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who died two weeks ago, believed in the power of communication between human beings as a way to arrive at ultimate truth and justice. In this belief, Habermas differed with many people today who are convinced that there is no one single truth; that there are many truths and many kinds of justice, no one of which pertains to all humankind. We see this in our current political debates here in the United States. Many political liberals and many political conservatives no longer believe that we can arrive at a single sense of truth that applies to us all. Both liberals and conservatives accuse the other of creating fake news. Some political conservatives have decided that there is only one way to interpret the history of America, and they want to ban any competing interpretations. Some political liberals have decided that different identity groups have different truths, and that those not included in a given identity group cannot question truths claimed by that identity group. Thus in our time it seems few people believe that truth is universal; and few people believe we must work with other people, including people we disagree with, to establish what is true, and to establish a truly just society.

    I find myself agreeing with Jurgen Habermas: there is an ultimate sense of truth and justice in the universe. Limited being that I am, I can sense it only dimly by myself. As a limited being, I may have some small insight into this ultimate truth and justice; perhaps there is that of the divine in me that gives me that insight, or perhaps there is a divinity that sends messengers to me with notice of what is true and just. The story of Abraham and Isaac tells me that even if I have some small insight into ultimate truth and justice, I may still be forced to make decisions that wrack my soul.

    But I believe we should not interpret the story of Abraham and Isaac as telling us that we must make these decisions alone, by ourselves, as rugged individualists. The story of Abraham and Isaac is but one episode in the larger story told in the book of Genesis; and the book of Genesis tells but one part of the much larger story that is told in the entirety of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is not merely a collection of stories about individuals, but it is rather a larger story of a group of people. Thus, when the Hebrew Bible tells a story of an individual, that individual’s story must be understood as being a part of the larger story of a people. While the story in the Hebrew Bible tells of one people, it implies a still larger story that includes all peoples, all of humankind. In that larger story, the story that includes all humankind, we discover that there is an ultimate truth, there is ultimate justice; that ultimate truth and justice apply to all humankind equally. This is, in fact, one of the origins of our modern conception of justice and human rights for all human beings.

    Each individual and each group of people perceives a small part of this larger truth. When we Unitarian Universalists perceive a small part of this larger truth, we like to proclaim the inherent dignity and worthiness of all human beings. We like to say that although we can perceive it but dimly, we know the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. We also know that we human beings are easily deceived. And so we pay great attention to the story of Abraham and Isaac. When we commit ourselves to a course of action, we might discover that if we look up from the task in front of us, and turn around, we might see a ram caught in the thicket behind us. We listen for the promptings of ultimate truth and justice, knowing that we can never perceive them with absolute clarity, but also knowing that by relying on other people we can overcome some of our human fallibility.

    Notes

    (1) Omri Boehm, Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity (New York Review Books, 2025), pp. 143-144. I do not agree with everything Boehm says in this book, but his interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac is similar to that of William R. Jones, while offering more detail than Jones’s brief discussion.
    (2) Story of Abraham adapted from NRSV and NIV, Genesis 22:1-19.
    (3) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Greatness,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), v.8, pp. 309-310. In an endnote, the editors state, “These were the words of Miss Mary Rotch of New Bedford, and they made deep impression on Mr. Emerson, when in 1834 he was invited to preach for a time in that city.”

  • A Secular Saint

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 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 a 2018 BBC interview with Claudette Colvin, who died last week. On March 2, 1955, when she was fifteen years old, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. According to the BBC, “Colvin was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation policies….” It would be another nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. In the 2018 interview, Colvin said:

    “We walked downtown and my friends and I saw the bus and decided to get on. It was right across the road from Dr Martin Luther King’s church. The white people were always seated at the front of the bus and the black people were seated at the back of the bus. The bus driver had the authority to assign the seats, so when more white passengers got on the bus, he asked for the seats. He wanted me to give up my seat for a white person and I would have done it for an elderly person but this was a young white woman. Three of the students had got up reluctantly and I remained sitting next to the window. Whenever people ask me: ‘Why didn’t you get up when the bus driver asked you?’ I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail. I wasn’t frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.”

    The second reading was the poem “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou. The pome is not included here due to copyright.

    Sermon

    Tomorrow is the national holiday celebrating the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, fifty-eight years after he was murdered, Dr. King has become something of a larger-than-life figure in American culture. All these years later, we’ve finally reached something of a national consensus that King is an important figure in our national history. I’d even say he’s become something of a secular saint, though then we’d have to figure out what we mean by the phrase “secular saint.”

    There are religious groups — Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans and some Lutherans — who have fairly well-defined definitions of sainthood. The Benedictine Monks of St. Augustine’s Abbey in Ramsgate, England, offer a definition of sainthood in their 1921 book “The Book of Saints: A Dictionary of Servants of God Canonized by the Catholic Church” back in 1921 (London: A.C. Black). The monks begin by pointing out that their religion has a strict and rigorous process for determining who is a saint. This process begins after the proposed saint has died with a careful investigation into that person’s life. The monks summarize this long process thus:

    “It consists in the first place of a thorough investigation into all the particulars that can be ascertained of the life and death of the alleged Saint, all facts connected with whose career, both public and private, together with all his utterances and writings, are tested in every way. He must be shown to have been God-fearing, pious, just in his dealings, patient, self-denying, charitable, and so on, far above the average of ordinary good men….particular stress is put upon the popular verdict concerning the alleged Saint, that is, upon the repute in which he was held by those who may have had dealings with him or had opportunities of forming an opinion about him.”

    While this process is for Catholic saints, you can see that something similar applies to the process of determining who gets to be a secular saint. In Dr. King’s case, it wasn’t until the year 2000, 42 years after his death, that all 50 states recognized the federal holiday honoring him.

    The monks also point out that there is an exception to this lengthy process of determining sainthood, which would not apply to Dr. King:

    “The above official enquiry into the conduct in life and virtues of the deceased Christian for whom the supreme honor of [sainthood] is claimed is deemed unnecessary only in the case of a Martyr, that is, of one of the Faithful who has deliberately laid down his life rather than deny Christ. In his case, it has to be fully proved that he was put to death on account of his religion, and not because he was guilty of some political or other crime….”

    In American popular culture, martyrdom — the fact that someone gave their life for some great cause — may sometimes, but not always, be a part of secular sainthood. I’ll return to the question of martyrdom later on.

    Now, I have greatly shortened what the monks say about the criteria for sainthood, and they themselves say they are merely summarizing the complicated laws of sainthood in the Roman Catholic church. So we can see that some Christians have a lengthy process and strict criteria for determining who is a saint. For other Christians, however, sainthood doesn’t involve some complicated legal procedure; a saint is simply someone who leads a good Christian life. In these less strict Christian traditions, a saint is recognized as a saint when enough people agree that that person is a saint — this is sainthood by popular acclaim, rather than sainthood by formal church laws.

    Nor is it just Christians who recognize moral exemplars. Many other religious traditions venerate figures who are roughly equivalent to Christian saints. In Buddhism, a bodhisatva, someone who is striving towards Buddhahood, may be understood to be something like a saint. In Sikhism, the ten gurus who served from the founding of the religion until 1708 are considered to be roughly equivalent to saints. The Daoist immortals, people whose mastery of that religion have allowed them to overcome death, are somewhat saintlike.

    What about us Unitarian Universalists? We tend to be a skeptical group of people. We’re likely to be skeptical of the miracles attributed to the Christian saints. We’re likely to be skeptical that Daoist immortals really live forever. We may have doubts about the endless cycle of rebirth from which Buddhist bodhisattvas release themselves. We also get skeptical about sainthood because we see how the different religious traditions define sainthood differently: the Christian saints have a special connection to God; the Buddhist bodhisattvas achieve nirvana; the Daoist immortal works with alchemy; and so on.

    Indeed, our skepticism tends to push us towards doing away with saints altogether. However, I’d like to suggest that we probably don’t want to completely do away with saints. On the one hand, doing away with saints might cause us to view all moral exemplars with skepticism, which in turn can make it difficult to learn from anyone’s moral example. On the other hand, doing away with our skepticism might cause us to stop thinking critically about our moral exemplars. It’s good to have people we can look up to, and good to have people who serve as moral exemplars. It’s also good to remain aware that all persons, even saint-like people, have limitations. We Unitarian Universalists can steer a middle path between completely giving in to skepticism and doing away with saints on the one hand — and on the other hand, completely ignoring our skepticism about saints so that we can no longer think critically about them.

    This is how I got wondering whether Dr. King might be considered a saint: I wanted to keep him as a moral exemplar, but there were some things I wanted to think critically about. First, I wasn’t sure if he should be a religious saint. If he were a religious saint, he’d of course be a Christian saint. But then people who aren’t Christian might not find him especially inspiring, which would limit his reach as a moral exemplar. But even for Christians, since Dr. King was a Baptist I suppose he’d be a Baptist saint; except the Baptists don’t really spend much time venerating saints. So since Dr. King had become a saintlike moral exemplar, valued by Christians and non-Christians alike, that implies he had become a secular saint. As a secular saint, he wouldn’t be restricted to one Christian denomination; he could be claimed more widely by Christians, by people of other religions, and by people of no religion at all.

    This raises two questions for me. First, why have saints at all, even secular ones? Second, who gets to determine who becomes a secular saint?

    I’ve come to believe that it’s good to have secular saints. I spent twenty-five years working as a religious educator, and a big part of Unitarian Universalist religious education is moral education. We want to help each other to lead a good life. And when we do moral education, it works best to show what a moral life looks like, rather than decreeing that there are certain rules that you must live by. Thus, the best moral educators find people who can serve as moral examples, about whom they can say: This person did many good things in their life, and you might consider following their example.

    I think back to my own Unitarian Universalist upbringing, and remember how I was offered several examples of Unitarian Universalists who lived good lives, and whose example I might wish to follow. One of those Unitarian Universalist saint-like people was Louisa May Alcott, who not only wrote books about the importance of family, she also helped support her own family both financially and emotionally. Another of those Unitarian Universalist saint-like people was Henry Thoreau, who lived a life of simplicity, who was an anti-slavery activist, and who also helped to support his family financially.

    As I got older, I learned about other Unitarian Universalist saint-like people; people like James Reeb, a White minister who answered Martin Luther King’s plea for clergy to come to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and march for voting rights. Reeb was murdered by White segregationists, and so became a kind of martyr. But he wasn’t a martyr in the formal Roman Catholic definition of the term: he did not die because of refusing to deny Christ, he died for a political cause. If we think of him as a secular saint, then we can say that he was a secular martyr, because he died for a higher purpose. Not that we think everyone should become a martyr to a higher purpose; we can retain enough of our skepticism to question when martyrdom is justified. Reeb didn’t seek out martyrdom; instead, he was simply following his highest principles.

    The question of martyrdom brings us back to the question of who gets to determine who becomes a secular saint. Just because someone gets killed, they do not automatically become a secular saint. Malcolm X was assassinated at about the same time as Martin Luther King, but Malcolm X has not become a secular saint in the same way that Dr. King has. I have great admiration for Malcom X, particularly the last year of his life, after he went to Mecca and came to a deep understanding of how all humanity was closely interconnected. But I admire Dr. King more, because of his principled stand for nonviolence. I understand why Malcolm X felt it necessary to advise all Black families to own guns in case they had to defend themselves against White supremacists. But I admire Dr. King for being able to take a broader view when he said, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” Dr. King’s principle of nonviolence helps explain why he has become more widely recognized as a secular saint.

    Let us consider another pair, one of whom became a secular saint, and the other of whom did not. Rosa Parks has achieved secular sainthood through her act of refusing to give up her seat to a White person on a segregated city bus. Yet as we heard in the first reading this morning, Rosa Parks was not the first Black person to refuse to give up her seat on a city bus; Rosa parks was not even the first Black woman to go to jail for refusing to give up her seat. Claudette Colvin, who just died this past week, was one of several Black people who refused to give up their bus seats before Rosa Parks did. Claudette Colvin was fifteen years old when she was arrested, and it is astonishing to think that a high schooler had the courage to risk arrest as a protest against segregation laws. So why did Rosa Parks become a secular saint, but not Claudette Colvin? One answer to that question is that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat as a part of a larger strategy to mount a legal challenge to the segregation laws. Although Claudette Colvin later became one of the plaintiffs in the legal challenge to segregated buses, her refusal was an individual decision made on the spur of the moment. Furthermore, when she was arrested, Colvin was pregnant, which by the standards of the time made her ineffective as a moral exemplar; she also had darker skin than Parks did, which in that place and time would have worked against her. Indeed, her mother reportedly advised her to stay out of the spotlight. None of this diminishes what Claudette Colvin did; but it does help us better understand what makes a secular saint. Both women helped create lasting change by participating in the law suit challenging segregated buses; both women were members of the NAACP, both were already participating in the struggle for civil rights; but because Rosa Parks would be more acceptable to more people, she was the one who became a secular saint.

    Can you see how I’m trying to think critically about secular sainthood? A healthy amount of skepticism allows us to sort through the strengths and weaknesses of our secular saints. By sorting through their strengths and weaknesses, we can make careful judgements about what they did best, and what they might have done better. We can judge that both Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks did something amazing, while at the same time understanding why Rosa Parks got all the publicity. We can judge that both Malcolm X and Dr. King had admirable qualities, while at the same time acknowledging that Dr. King’s philosophy, with his broad vision for united humanity, would be valued by a wider segment of the population.

    We can also use our healthy skepticism to make judgements about individual secular saints. As skeptics, we are pretty sure that no individual human being is infallible — not even secular saints. And so we can acknowledge that it is important to use our judgement as we strive to follow the examples of secular saints. Dr. King allegedly had extra-martial affairs. As healthy skeptics, we can recognize his very real faults and imperfections, while also valuing the good things he did. We do not require uncritical acceptance of our saints; we accept them for who they really were, as complex and fallible human beings, recognizing their faults while valuing their moral accomplishments.

    And now we can consider why we might want to have secular saints at all. I’ve already said that I found secular saints were useful when doing moral education with children. But I think we adults also benefit from having secular saints. I’ll give myself as an example. I’ve already told you about one of the secular saints I was introduced to as a child, Henry Thoreau. As children, mostly what we knew about Thoreau was that he lived in a cabin out at Walden Pond, which seemed like fun; but we also got some small inkling of Thoreau’s principles of simplicity. Then in the summer after my senior year in high school, I actually sat down and read Walden. I found it slow going, but I learned something new: Thoreau was a mystic who found God everywhere, and his notions of simplicity were part and parcel of that vision of God. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I finally realized that Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond was a station on the Underground Railroad; and it wasn’t until I was middle-aged that I learned how Thoreau was dedicated to his family. As my own moral capacity grew, I was better able to understand Thoreau as a complex moral exemplar.

    A good moral exemplar, someone truly worth emulating, is not going to be a simplistic goody two-shoes one-dimensional figure. Those simplistic figures don’t have to confront difficult moral choices, so there is little to learn from them. When Dr. King is portrayed merely as someone who advocated for Civil Rights for Black people, he is little better than a goody two-shoes. Then when you recall that gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 during a march for jobs, a march that included both Black and White organizers because the issue of jobs is an issue for all races — then Dr. King gains more complexity; then he becomes more worthy of our emulation. Finally, when you realize all his actions were rooted in his deep spiritual practices, he gains further complexity — and he challenges us to deepen our own spiritual practices, so that our own actions are rooted in our own spiritual practices.

    And so you see, finding out about secular saints is not just an intellectual exercise. We can (and should) maintain a healthy skepticism about secular saints. But we also long for people to serve as examples of how our own lives can be more spiritually grounded. Contemplating the lives of secular saints can help go deeper into our own spiritual centers.

    This, in fact, is how we learn to be human: we are taught to be human by the examples of other humans. And part of our moral growth is learning that every human being has flaws, even our moral examples; then if we’re honest with ourselves we admit that we too have flaws, and we can learn how a seep spiritual grounding can help us overcome our own flaws. And so it is that we learn how we can our best possible selves by considering the examples of the best possible humans we know. And this learning continues our whole live, helping our spirits grow ever stronger, and helping our selves to grow into ever greater goodness.