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.
A three part series about free will — first sermon in this series — second sermon in this series
Readings
The first reading was a poem titled “Money” by Philip Larkin” (not included here due to copyright restrictions).
The second reading was a poem titled “Grace” by Orlando Ricardo Menes (not included here due to copyright restrictions).
Sermon
This is the third sermon in a three-part series. The series began with a question one of you asked during last spring’s question box sermon: What’s the theological history of our congregation? It turned out that one thread running through all three centuries of our history is a belief that human beings have some control over their own destinies; that is, we argue that we have at least some free will. The second sermon in the series explored how our choices affect us; specifically, how the decisions we make about sexuality help define who we are. This week, I’m going to look at how the choices we make around money can affect who we are; and I feel choices around money go far beyond how I choose to spend my pocket money.
In our society, like it or not, money is tied to what we do for work — or money can be tied to what we don’t do for work, as for example if your parents give you so much money that you don’t have to work, or conversely if you can’t work or can’t find a job. And this brings up an interesting point: once we start thinking about work and jobs, we quickly discover that our freedom is limited and directed by several things: the people around us, by random chance, and by our own personal strengths and limitations. I’ll give you an example of how this works, taken from my own life — not because I’m especially interesting, but because I can tell you about my own life without violating someone else’s confidence.
I entered the workforce in the middle of the 1982 recession. Although I had just finished college, the best job I found did not require a college degree, and that was working as a salesman in a lumberyard (it was a great job, by the way, and I enjoyed the seven years I worked there). By contrast, one of my college classmates, a guy named Howie Lutnick, immediately found a job working in finance, and he quickly became rich. Now of course some of this was due to natural abilities — Howie Lutnick had skills and abilities that I lacked, which shows that your personal choices and decisions are limited by your personal skills and abilities. Some of this was also due to personal inclination — I had no desire to work in finance, and really couldn’t even conceive of having such a job (so much the worse for me). Some of this was also due to pure luck — Howie Lutnick lucked out, but overall statistics show that those of us who entered the workforce in the middle of the 1982 recession have had on average significantly lower salaries than the people a few years older or younger than us; these lower salaries persisted for many years, and perhaps they still do today.
Thus you can see that my choices were limited when it came to choosing my first job. Howie Lutnick’s choices were also limited, but in a different direction; so that now one of us is the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and the other is a small town minister. As it has turned out, I’m perfectly happy with the direction my life has taken. Howie Lutnick — now known as Howard Lutnick — is in the Epstein files, and I am not. It would be easy for me to be smug and say that if I had been the one to go into finance, I would never have appeared in the Epstein files. But I’m not going to say that, because I don’t know that it’s true. Jeffery Epstein was a convincing and accomplished con man, and one of the things I learned while working as a salesman is that all of us are susceptible to con artists, salespeople, or anyone who know how to play on people’s feelings. I’m actually making a different point here: when Howie Lutnick took a job in finance, that decision eventually opened up choices for him that I never had to think about; and at the same time, when I took a job selling lumber, that decision eventually opened up choices for me that Howie Lutnick never had to think about.
This shows that when we make a decision about what job to take, that decision can open some new choices for us and close off other choices for us, effectually putting limits on our freedom to act. Oftentimes when we make decisions about jobs or work, we cannot foresee how that’s going to limit our future choices. When he took the job in finance, Howie Lutnick never thought he’d be in the Epstein files. When I chose to work as a salesman in a lumberyard, I never thought I’d wind up as the minister here in Cohasset. So even while we have great freedom to make decisions about our jobs and our worklife, those decisions ultimately place limits on our freedom to act.
I want to be sure to acknowledge how not having a job affects your freedom of action. Instead of telling you about unemployment, I’ll give you a less obvious example: I spent five years working for a carpenter, and he and I were both active in conservation and environmental activities. One of the people we both knew was a man whom I’ll call Fred. Fred was rich, and he didn’t have to work for a living. One day Fred asked to have coffee with both of us (as I recall, we did not let him buy our coffee), and he bared his soul to us. He felt guilty about not having a job. He felt like he wanted to work at something. I realize now that he probably wanted to work as a carpenter (which seems like romantic work until the first time you get hurt on the job), but we never let him get to that point. We both stared at him, dumbfounded, and then my boss said, “Look Fred, you’re the backbone of every major conservation organization in town. You spend, what, thirty or forty hours a week doing that? You already have a job.” And then we both told Fred how it was far more important that he kept working at his volunteer jobs. So you see, not having paid employment also limits your freedom of choice — in Fred’s case, our town did not need another carpenter, but we did need Fred to continue his volunteer work in environmental organizations. We can also see from this story that unpaid work can be just as important as paid work — not just for rich people like Fred, but any stay-at-home parent is doing unpaid work that is far more important for the human race than anything Howie Lutnick has done in his finance jobs.
So far I’ve been talking about jobs, because for many of us our jobs — whether those jobs are paid or unpaid — provide our most important, most consequential relationship with money. Obviously, there is more to money than just your worklife. We should also consider the choices we all make about how and where to spend our money. Generally, when we think about how we spend our money, we think about how we choose to spend our discretionary income. We think about the person who refuses to buy their coffee at a chain store like Starbucks, and instead buys their coffee at a locally-owned coffee shop. Or the person who buys whatever they can from Amazon, because between work and family responsibilities they just don’t have the time to shop at brick and mortar stores.
But I’d like to focus in on another choice that we all have when it comes to money. Recently, Carol and I have been reading the book The Righteous Mind: How Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. Carol is reading the book for her book group, and when she left it on the kitchen table, I started reading it too. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist, and in this book he explores the psychology of morals and morality. In the chapter titled “Religion Is a Team Sport,” Haidt cites statistics about religion and money:
“Studies of charitable giving in the United States show that people in the least religious fifth of the population give just 1.5 percent of their money to charity. People in the most religious fifth (based on church attendance, not belief) give a whopping 7 percent of their income to charity, and the majority of that is to religious organizations.” (p. 265)
(I have to interject a critical comment here: Haidt used the term “church attendance,” when he really means “attendance at religious services.” He grew up Jewish, he should know better.)
Because these religious people give more to their religious organization than to other charities, Haidt first uses this statistic to show that religions prompt us to become what he calls “parochial altruists”; that is, people who are “generous toward members of their own moral communities.” Then he goes on to cite further studies showing that people who regularly attend religious services turn out to be more generous and charitable across the board. Haidt goes so far as to say that religious people make “better neighbors and citizens” (p. 267). Nor do specific beliefs have much to do with how religion makes us more generous and more charitable. Instead, it’s belonging to a community that makes us more generous and charitable. Haidt puts it this way:
“The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.” (p. 267)
This remind me of Wynne Furth, who was the chair of the board of trustees for a number of years at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto while I worked there. Wynne was a pretty remarkable person. She was an extremely successful lawyer, though she was part of a generation that still discouraged women from becoming lawyers. She could have made more money in private practice, but spent much of her career as a municipal employee, in public service jobs. When I knew her, Wynne was the city attorney for one of the more conflict-ridden cities in the San Francisco Bay Area; her name regularly appeared in news stories when she had to tell that city that what they were about to do was illegal. To say that she had a strong moral compass would be an understatement.
One year during the Palo Alto congregation’s annual fundraising drive, Wynne stood up at a public meeting to talk about her charitable giving. She told the people at the meeting that she and her husband Don had decided to give ten percent of their gross income to charity; and half of that, or five percent of their gross income, would go to the Palo Alto congregation. What particularly struck me was how happy and cheerful she seemed when she said this. It seemed to me that charitable giving actually made her feel better about herself, and better about the world.
That inspired me; I wanted some of those feelings. I also knew that giving ten percent of our gross income was out of reach for us at that point, because the wickedly high rents of the Bay Area meant that we were officially rent-burdened, spending more than a third of our income on housing. Besides, Wynne had made it clear that her level of charitable giving was simply not possible for everyone. She was not trying to convince everyone that there is some magic percentage of charitable giving that we all must reach. Instead, her real point was that we all have choices about what we do with our money. In her case, after she and Don had taken care of their ordinary living expenses, they looked at what was left over, thought about what they wanted to do with it, and made the choice to increase their charitable giving. This in turn seemed to affect their emotional well-being; both Wynne and Don seemed happy and content in choosing to give so much to their congregation.
Now I have to take you on another slight digression, to tell you about what James Luther Adams said about voluntary associations. A voluntary association is any organized group where you freely join together with other people to accomplish some shared purpose. These are groups that are outside the family, outside or governments, and outside of businesses. Our congregation is a voluntary association; the Rotary club is a voluntary association; a community choir is a voluntary association.
James Luther Adams got interested with voluntary associations when he visited Nazi Germany during the 1930s. He saw that one of the first things a totalitarian government does is to get rid of all the voluntary associations — either that, or make them a part of the totalitarian government itself. Why is this so? In a mass industrialized society, it is very easy for people to become separated individuals. So for example, here is Cohasset we are part of a huge industrialized society where it is very easy for us to lead entirely separate lives; we don’t even have to go out of our houses any more to go shopping, because we can get everything delivered. This means we do not have the strong social ties that people in Cohasset had three hundred years ago, when you were dependent on help from your neighbors for food and shelter. Today, we’re dependent, not on our neighbors, but on how much money we have; and the more money you have, the more of an isolated individual you are allowed to be. We can avoid this kind of isolation by joining voluntary associations. And James Luther Adams saw that it is much easier for a totalitarian government to control us when there are no vountary associations, when we are nothing but isolated individuals. Thus, voluntary associations are crucial for maintaining a free democratic government; and a free democratic government is crucial for maintaining our individual freedom.
No wonder then that we Unitarian Universalists place such importance on democracy. For a religion like ours that places such importance in free will — the freedom to make moral decisions about our lives, so we can become better people — a free democratic government is crucial for giving us the latitude we need to make better choices for ourselves. In a totalitarian society, we would have very little choice about what we do with our lives; under a totalitarian regime, Wynne Furth would not have been allowed to give ten percent of her income to charitable organizations, because there would be no charitable organizations, there would only be the totalitarian government.
I sometimes hear people say that they could never belong to an organized religion, because if they did they would have to submit themselves to some kind of religious authority. Presumably, these people would say the same thing about any other group as well Although if this is your attitude, then don’t join any voluntary association: don’t join a sports team, because you’ll have to submit to the authority of the team captain and the umpires; don’t join a community choir or a band because sometimes you have to do what other musicians tell you to do; and so on. I can partially understand this attitude, because you do have to draw the line somewhere; I refuse to give money to college I graduated from because in my opinion they’ve failed to live up to the high moral ideals of their Quaker founders. But if we disassociate ourselves from every single voluntary association, then we leave ourselves vulnerable to totalitarianism.
And this all comes back to money. Voluntary associations require money to survive. When we give no money to any voluntary association, we are in effect starving voluntary associations of what they need to stay viable; so if we give no money to any voluntary associations, then we have no one to blame but ourselves when totalitarianism takes over. Conversely, when we money to voluntary associations — when we, in effect, submit ourselves to the moral authority of some charitable group — we paradoxically gain more individual freedom for ourselves. This year I plan to make a substantial gift (substantial for me, anyway) to the Cohasset Community Aid Fund; it might seem like I have more freedom if I simply gave that money away directly, but by joining with other people my gift will have a greater impact on the community, and it also serves as an expression of loyalty to the town I live in. I plan on giving another substantial gift (again, substantial by my standards) to the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; to me this feels like a patriotic gift, because while I don’t agree with everything the NAACP does, overall they uphold the highest American values of democracy. And yes, I’m planning to give a substantial gift to First Parish, too, although this is partly for selfish reasons; this is the friendliest place I know of anywhere on the South Shore, and I like being here. I’m also giving to First Parish for non-selfish reasons, because I think the South Shore benefits from our moral example.
As I talk about giving away money to these organizations, I start to have feelings that are a little bit like what I saw in Wynne Furth when she talked about her charitable giving. I feel more cheerful and happier (and Lord knows, given the news these days I can stand some more cheerfulness and happiness). I can’t afford to give at the level Wynne Furth was able to give; but it’s not the dollar amount, nor the percentage amount, that counts: what counts is giving so that it feels good. And while it would seem that giving more to charitable organizations (which means spending less on myself) is going to lead to a loss of freedom for me (because now I can’t buy as much stuff), that’s not what I find. That happiness and cheerfulness that I saw in Wynne Furth — those are feelings that actually give me psychic freedom. That psychic freedom in turn allows me more psychic space to make better choices in my life, thus further increasing my freedom to choose the good.
So it is that we come to find out that our freedom to make decisions does not happen in isolation. Our decisions are always influenced by the wider human community, and our decisions in turn have a significant impact on that wider human community. We have free will, but our freedom of choice is really the freedom to strengthen or weaken our relationships with other people, and with the wider human community. Oftentimes, we feel that selflessness restricts our freedom of action. Yet when we choose selflessness over selfishness, we feel better, and ultimately that seems to allow us greater freedom to chose the good.
Once again, it all seems to boil down to what we tell preschoolers: Be kind. Help other people. And that will make you feel good about yourself.