Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below was rewritten, and differs in some respects from the original sermon text.
Readings
The first reading was a short poem titled “A Center” by Ha Jin.
The second reading was an excerpt from the long poem “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman.
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)…
Whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.
The earth never tires,
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell….
We must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,
However sheltered this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.
Sermon
During last spring’s “Question Box Sermon,” this congregation asked some difficult and challenging questions — about life, death, ethics, and more. One of the most challenging questions, however, was a question about the future of this congregation: What’s going to happen to First Parish when the current crop of lay leaders steps back? Who’s going to step forward to replace them? All of which raises another question: Will our congregation survive?
Let me start by giving you some good news. This congregation is in excellent shape. I see no reason why it should not continue as a healthy, vibrant congregation through the mid part of this century and beyond. But the good news comes with a caveat: First Parish in the year 2050 will not look much like First Parish in the year 1950. In fact, First Parish in the year 2050 will look significantly different from today’s congregation. And to help explain why I think this is so, I’d like to take you back two centuries in time, to the early nineteenth century.
In the year 1800, this congregation was in a relatively thriving state. Four years previously, they had gone through a major conflict where they had had to fire their minister, Josiah Crocker Shaw, for reasons that weren’t recorded at the time (but probably have to do with Shaw taking up with a woman who was married to someone else). Fortunately for them, they were able to dismiss Shaw quickly, before too much damage was done. Then the congregation brought in a new minister named Jacob Flint, who was by all accounts entirely ethical. Within two years of brining Jacob Flint, the congregation had recovered to such an extent that they could afford to add the steeple on the north side of the Meetinghouse. Completing a major building project seems to indicate both good financial health and a well-organized and happy congregation.
So in the year 1800, First Parish had settled in with their new minister, and completed a major building project. But it was a very different congregation from our congregation today, and very different from what it would be fifty years later. I’d like to consider some of the ways that 1800 congregation was different from today’s congregation.
First, in 1800 there was still quite a bit of social pressure to participate in organized religion. Furthermore, in a small rural town, which is what Cohasset was in those days, there wasn’t much to do for entertainment but go to Sunday services. Not only were there these compelling reasons to participate in organized religion, but in addition First Parish was the only organized religion available in town. Compare that with Cohasset today, where people have a wide variety of options for filling their leisure hours, including several different organized religions.
Second, in 1800 First Parish was organized on a very different basis. The congregation had three separate but intertwined governance structures — town, society, and church — each of which was funded separately. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had not yet separated church from state, and First Parish was a state-established church funded in part by tax dollars, and governed in part by town meeting and the selectmen (as they were then called); the town paid the minister’s salary. There were also the proprietors of the Meetinghouse, sometimes called the “society,” who governed the maintenance and improvements on the building; they raised money in large part through taxes on pews, which were formally owned by different families, and also through other assessments and fundraising efforts. Finally there was the “church,” a separate governance structure which governed the religious efforts of the congregation; the minister and the deacons were the officials in charge of the church, with the power to admit individuals into communion; and this governance structure required little funding, except perhaps for the purchase of communion silver.
While town, society, and church each had their own specific responsibilities, there was also overlap. One example of this overlap is the long battle over music during worship services, which began at least as early as 1760, with several town votes about whether to have a choir, and where to put the choir, and whether to have musical instruments, and so on. The battle over music shows that the church did not have sole jurisdiction over worship services; the society and the town also got involved at times.
In the year 1800, it probably felt like this state of affairs would last forever. But wider societal forces were beginning to make changes in organized religion in Massachusetts. In one notable change, the Massachusetts Universalists managed to get a court ruling that if they didn’t didn’t want to belong to the established church in town, they didn’t have to pay their tax dollars for its support. In another notable change, the religious divisions that had long been present in the established church of Massachusetts began to come to the surface. These religious divisions were mostly about whether or not to believe more in free will, or more in predestination; and also about whether to adhere to a more openly emotional religious feeling centered around the experience of individual conversion, what we’d now call being “born again.” Over the course of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, these broader religious differences were reduced in the public mind to a debate as to whether Jesus was God or not. The religious liberals, who believed that humans had the free will to do good or evil, and who didn’t have much to do with being born again, took up the Unitarian banner, saying that Jesus was not God.
Here in Cohasset, Jacob Flint declared himself to be one of the religious liberals. He grew concerned that some of his parishioners were adopting beliefs that he considered to be erroneous: the belief that Jesus was God, the belief in predestination, and the belief that emotionalism should be central to religion. As I read the old documents, it seems to me that Flint lived up to his name: he was flinty and stern. In December, 1823, in order to combat religious conservatism in his congregation, he delivered two sermons in which he did his best to demolish the arguments supporting the divinity of Jesus. I’ve read those sermons. They are not what I’d call pastoral sermons, where the preacher tries to minister to the feelings and needs of his congregation. Instead, they were uncompromising sermons, in which Flint all but tells his congregation that anyone who believes in the divinity of Jesus is a downright fool.
In response to these two uncompromising sermons, the small number of religious conservatives in town reached out to other religious conservatives elsewhere in the state. The Cohasset religious conservatives received financial support to help start up a Trinitarian congregation, build a new church building, and hire a more conservative minister. This small group of religious conservatives built Second Congregational Church right across Highland Avenue from the Meetinghouse, and the story goes that Jacob Flint would sit up in the high pulpit before the service, looking out the window behind the pulpit and writing down the names of the people who went in to Second Congregational Church.
The founding of Second Congregational Church led to big changes for our congregation. Within months, the town quietly reached a consensus that tax dollars would no longer go to the support of the congregation. Now First Parish had to pay for everything — minister’s salary, building upkeep, and so on — and it appears they turned to the owners of the pews to raise the additional money they now needed. Furthermore, town meeting no longer governed any aspect of First Parish, and so First Parish had to set up their own annual meeting, which they closely modeled after town meeting. But perhaps the biggest change of all was the fact that there were now two churches in town. Instead of being united on Sunday morning, the town was now divided.
This huge change in First Parish must have felt overwhelming at the time. From what I can gather, our congregation needed a few years to recover. But by 1837, thirteen years after the split with Second Congregational Church, our congregation had achieved enough financial stability that they were able to completely renovate the interior of the meetinghouse, including installing attractive new pews that were uniform in appearance — the pews we’re sitting on today — to replace the old pews each family had built for themselves.
In hindsight, these changes seem inevitable. Today, the separation of church and state is the norm, and we no longer believe tax dollars should support organized religion. Today, we appreciate the diversity of organized religion that’s now available to us. But as I say, at the time it must have felt overwhelming.
Fast forward another century, to the mid-twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, First Parish was once again facing huge changes. By the 1920s, a fair number of the pews were owned by people who no longer lived in Cohasset, or who no longer were active in the congregation. Yet they owned those pews, and therefore no one else could use them. On Sunday morning, the ushers would go around and close the doors of all the pews that were owned by someone. If you were a newcomer, just moved to town and deciding whether you wanted to belong to this congregation, imagine how off-putting that would be. You’d walk into the Meetinghouse, you’d see all these empty pews that no one could sit in. It appears that these absentee pew owners were also forcing changes in how First Parish received revenue. Pew rentals now accounted for only part of the congregation’s revenue stream; thus instead of relying on taxes on pews for our primary source of income, First Parish was beginning to move towards a new funding model, the funding model we now use, where instead of a fixed assessment, people could freely decide how much to donate each year.
Some key records from this era are missing, but we do know that First Parish consulted a lawyer about how to abolish pew ownership. This lawyer advised them to send letters to each absentee pew owner, asking them to donate their pew back to the congregation; if that failed, the congregation would have to purchase the pew back from the absentee owner. In the mean time, a new generation of church-goers, people who knew nothing about the old pew rental system, was joining First Parish; this new generation would have been less tolerant of the social stratification of pew ownership, where the rich people bought the most desirable pews. And as these societal changes were going on, the Great Depression hit; during the Depression, church attendance dropped to the lowest level ever seen in Massachusetts.
The challenges that First Parish faced a hundred years ago must have felt overwhelming. No doubt some people asked themselves: What will happen when the old guard die off or step back from their leadership positions? Who will carry on, and how will we pay for anything? About a third of all Unitarian congregations closed during the Great Depression, and we can be grateful for the lay leaders who managed to keep First Parish going during those challenging years.
Now we fast forward another century, to the present day. We’re in the midst of more major changes. One of the biggest changes is that the influence of organized religion in American society has been declining for decades. It’s not entirely clear why this is so. The so-called secularization theory claims that the declining influence of organized religion has to do with the societal changes of modernization and the move away from agrarian to post-industrial society. However, professor Gina Zurlo of Harvard Divinity School attributes the decline of organized religion to the fact that religion is now more of a private matter. She says, “Our hyperindividualistic society has essentially granted people permission to be religious in their own way. They can pray, believe in God, read Scripture and engage in other spiritual practices completely on their own — without ever stepping foot in a house of worship — and still be considered a religious person.” And Landon Schnabel of Cornell University argues that we’re seeing a return to the way humans used to do religion: not in organized institutional religions, but in more local and fluid forms; he says religion may become “more personalized, syncretic and centered on individual authority rather than institutional power.”(1)
Regardless of the cause, the declining influence of organized religion is forcing changes on First Parish. On the one hand, there are now fewer people who want to participate in organized religion. On the other hand, the people who do choose to participate in organized religion are more passionate about it. And on top of this, among the people who choose to participate in organized religion, there’s a growing number with multiple religious affiliations — for example, you can be Unitarian Universalist and Buddhist at the same time. All these changes mean that we’re seeing fewer people wanting to join First Parish, but the people who do choose to participate are often more passionate about religion than they were fifty or a hundred years ago.
Based on my own experience, I feel that I’m seeing some other interesting changes. As our world becomes increasingly multicultural, it becomes more difficult to claim that your religion is the only true religion. I’ve seen three main responses to the challenge of multiculturalism: some people become dismissive of all religions; some people double down and claim that theirs is the only true religion; or some people develop an increasing openness to the wisdom that may be found other religions. The religious right dismiss all religions except their own. The hard-core secularists dismiss all religions, period. We Unitarian Universalists tend to respond in the third way: we are open to the wisdom contained in all the world’s religions.
I feel the real challenge for us lies in this last point. We are open to the wisdom in all the world’s religions; indeed, we’re open to the wisdom in all the world’s cultures. If we were dismissive of all religions except our own, we’d have an easy time raising money and finding leadership from among a fanatical core of believers. If we were dismissive of all religions, period, then we wouldn’t have to raise money or find leadership. Thus our openness creates some financial challenges for us.
Yet our openness is also one of our greatest strengths. The second reading this morning, the opening stanzas to Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” (a poem that has long been a favorite of Unitarian Universalists), seems to me to capture something of what we should now stand for — a feeling of being light-hearted as the path before us leads wherever we choose. Yet it’s not enough to be light-hearted and open; we also must have core values, a core philosophy. This is what the poet Ha Jin was telling us in the first reading this morning: Hold on to some enduring core values.
When we look back at our history, we can get a sense of what some of our enduring core values are.
In 1823, we were animated by a core value of not blindly accepting the teachings and doctrines of the past, but instead using our reason together to find out what is true and what is good. Jacob Flint may have thought at the time that he was arguing in favor of Unitarian theology, but he was really arguing in favor of the use of reason over unthinking acceptance.
In the 1920s, we were animated by a core value of making our community as open as possible to as many people as possible. The old traditional practice of ownership had become exclusionary. So we got rid of it, although it took quite some time before it was completely gone. And while it may have seemed that we were simply exchanging one funding model for another, what we were really doing was making sure our community remained as open as possible to anyone who wanted to join us.
In the 2020s, we are animated by our openness to the wisdom in all the world’s cultures. We’re still not sure where this openness will lead us, but we feel it to be an important value.
This is how we have always adapted to changing times. We stand by our core values; and we retain our sense of openness. This sounds simple in theory, but it does become complicated when we begin to confront the practical reality of making it happen. After Jacob Flint took a stand for our core value of the use of reason, back in 1823, it took years for us to adapt to the new financial reality that resulted. After we decided to open up our community by getting rid of pew ownership in the 1920s, it took more than a decade to figure out how to implement that as a practical reality.
And here we are in 2025, once again figuring out how to stand by our core values while retaining our sense of openness. We have not yet completely figured out how to bring our core values into this new era in which religion is “more personalized, syncretic, and centered on individual authority rather than institutional power” — though we have a head start over other religions, since we’ve always been more aligned with individual authority rather than institutional power.
To return to the original question: What will happen when today’s congregational leadership passes the baton to the rising generations? We will change the way we do things, as we’ve been changing for the past three centuries. We don’t yet know what that change will look like. But we do know that we will continue to hold fast to our core values. And I will end by repeating the words of Roscoe Trueblood, minister here in the 1950s and 1960s, who articulated our core values in this way:
“The first, best, and greatest aim we have may be to gather here … and remind ourselves that certain values exist in the universe and in human character; that the ultimate reality behind the reality is goodness of spirit; and that in some way, through the efforts of sincere people who give their best to the world and try to improve their best, goodness lives.”
So may it be.