Dan Harper | Sermons

  • What Do We Tell Children about God, Death, etc.?

    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.

    Reading

    The reading was from an essay titled “Home-grown Unitarian Universalism” by William J. Doherty. Dr. Doherty recently retired as professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota and has worked with couples and families as a therapist since 1977. This essay was published in UU World magazine in 2008.

    “It was 1980. I had been a Unitarian Universalist for about two years when my seven-year-old son Eric said to me, ‘Dad, what happens to us after we die? Is there a heaven?’

    “‘Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven where we live forever,’ I replied, ‘and other people believe that when we die, our life is over and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.’

    “‘What do you believe?’ said Eric.

    “‘Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven, and other people believe….’

    “‘But what do you believe?’

    “‘OK,’ I said. ‘I believe that when we die we live on through other people but not in a heaven.’

    “Eric took this in and responded with words I will never forget: ‘I’ll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up I’ll make up my own mind.’

    “My seven-year-old was teaching me something. He was being a developmentally appropriate UU child, but I was not being a developmentally appropriate UU parent. He knew he needed answers, for now, to an important religious question, and he also knew that he could seek his own answers when he was ready. For my part, being a former Roman Catholic still fleeing dogmatism, I was afraid of imposing my beliefs on my child. So I responded to him as if he were a 20-year-old taking a course on world religions. I had a better sense of what not to do as a UU parent — don’t impose my beliefs — than of what to do, namely, give him religious guidance.”

    Sermon

    Here’s the question I’d like to consider with you: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious and existential questions? In many religious traditions, I’d answer that question by giving you scripted answers to all the most important religious questions. But Unitarian Universalism has no dogma — no scripted answers to life’s big questions. This complicates matters somewhat. If we don’t tell other people what to believe, then what are we supposed to say to children when they ask these big questions?

    Yet as we heard in the first reading, sometimes Unitarian Universalist kids want a firm and definite answer. When professor William J. Doherty’s seven year old child Eric asked, “Dad, what happens to us after we die? Is there a heaven?” Doherty reacted as a good Unitarian Universalist. Doherty gave his son a college professor’s lecture: “Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven where we live forever … and other people believe that when we die, our life is over and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.” This was not the reply Eric wanted, and he demanded to know what his father believed. And when Doherty finally told him, Eric said: “I’ll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up I’ll make up my own mind.”

    So if you’re a parent, and like Bill Doherty you have a child who has not yet reached puberty, often there will be a fairly simple answer to the question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious and existential questions? You tell your child what your answers to those questions are, assuming they will accept your answers for now. Sometimes you may find it challenging to provide ready answers to questions of what you believe, but for the most part children will be more or less content with the answers given by their parents.

    However, if a child asks you one of those questions, and you are not their parent, then you have to give a different kind of answer. If the child is not your own child, you cannot simply say, “What we believe is this.” If you did that, you’d be stepping into the role of their parent; not even grandparents can get away with that. That leaves you with three options. First, you can give an answer that sounds like the first answer Bill Doherty gave to his son Eric, something to the effect of: “Well, some people think, thus and so, while other people think something else.” Second, you could tell the child what your personal answer to that question might be. And the third option is to combine those two — so if, for example, a child asks you, “What happens after we die?” you can reply something like this: “Different people have different answers to that question; some people believe that you go to a place called heaven after you die; some people believe that you are reborn as another person or animal after you die; some people believe that you when die you can live on in other people’s memories; and what I believe is….” Thus in the third option, you first tell the child some of the answers that other people give, and you conclude by stating what you believe.

    These strategies work fairly well for children. Once a child hits puberty, though, everything changes. Developmental psychologist tell us that in the middle school years, young people begin for the first time to have the ability to reason abstractly; developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called this the formal operational stage of cognitive development. When young people achieve the ability to reason abstractly, this new stage of cognitive development gives them the ability to question everything. While this can be exhausting for their parents, for the young people themselves it can be an incredibly exciting time. When you’re in your middle school years, your cognitive horizons begin to expand rapidly: all of a sudden, you can understand things that you couldn’t understand before; entire new worlds open up before you. And while this can be an exhausting developmental stage for their parents, those of us who teach or mentor young adolescents can also find this an incredibly exciting time. Personally, I love talking with young adolescents as they use their new ability to reason abstractly to tackle big existential questions; I love their fearlessness and excitement as they begin to think hard about life’s biggest questions for the first time.

    Once people get to the age where they can reason abstractly, you can’t respond in the same way you respond to children. When a young adolescent asks, “What happens after we die?” they don’t want the same kind of response that a child wants. In fact, if a young adolescent asks you a question like that, the best way to answer is to respond in exactly the same way you’d respond if one of your age peers asked you that same question. Most especially, it’s important not to be condescending or patronizing — no more than you would condescend or patronize someone your own age who asked a serious question. This is true no matter what age you are; I’ve actually seen older teens condescend to younger teens, and not surprisingly, it didn’t go well. I’ve also seen middle aged adults patronize their elders — once again, it didn’t go well.

    I actually have a couple of theories that explain why some people are condescending or patronizing when asked one of life’s biggest questions like what happens after we die, or is there a deity, or is there any meaning to life. First theory: If someone asks you a big question like that, and you haven’t really thought it through, you may try to avoid answering the question by being condescending or patronizing. Second theory: Some people turn condescending or patronizing because they don’t want to have to talk about that subject to that person. So, for example, when your aging parent who’s in poor health asks you, “What happens after we die?” — and you know they’re asking that question because they’re thinking about their own imminent death — you might try to dodge the whole subject by saying something like, “Now let’s not talk about such things right now. Let’s make sure we feel all comfy and cosy” — which while well-meaning sounds a bit patronizing or condescending.

    Let’s dwell for a moment on that particular situation of someone who’s in ill health and who is probably already thinking about their own death. If someone in that situation asks you “What happens when we die?” — you may find it emotionally difficult to give your own answer. If so, you can simply turn the question back to them, and say: “Well, I’d have to think about it. But what do YOU think happens after we die?” And then all you have to do is listen carefully to what they say.

    Indeed, it’s always a good idea to be prepared to listen carefully to the other person whenever someone brings up one of life’s biggest questions. Even when you’re talking to your own child, you can give them your answer to whatever big question they raised, then check to make sure what you said makes sense to them — did you use words they could understand, and did they follow what you said? If you’re talking with a child, it’s also important to remember that children can have profound spiritual experiences at a very young age, experiences that they might not be able to articulate well. The author Dan Wakefield, in his 1985 memoir “Returning,” described a profound spiritual experience he had when he was a child:

    “On an ordinary school night I went to bed, turned out the light, said the Lord’s prayer as I always did, and prepared to go to sleep. I lay there for only a few moments, not long enough to go to sleep (I was clearly and vividly awake during this whole experience) when I had the sensation that my whole body was filled with light. It was a white light of such brightness and intensity that it seemed almost alive. It was neither hot nor cold, neither burning nor soothing, it was simply there, filling every part of my body from my head to my feet.”

    Dan Wakefield’s parents were nominally Christian, and so of course he understood this experience in Christian terms, as the light of Christ. Now Wakefield wrote that he didn’t tell anyone about his experience for some years. But when finally he did tell an adult about this experience, I hope that adult would not be dismissive of something that felt like a very real experience to him. Sometimes when children ask a parent one of life’s big questions, they not only want to know what they parent thinks; sometimes they also want the parent to listen to something they have to say.

    Whether it’s an aging parent confronting their own mortality, or a child who’s had a profound spiritual experience, sometimes when people ask one of life’s big questions, they’re using that question as an opening to tell you about something they’ve experienced, or something they’ve thought hard about. So when one of these big questions arises, you have to be prepared both to give an answer, and to listen carefully.

    It’s even more important to be prepared to listen carefully if you’re talking to someone who has reached the age where they can reason abstractly, whether that person is a teen or an adult. I’ll give a couple of examples of what I mean. When someone asks, “What happens after we die?” — it might be that they’re simply curious to know, it might mean that one of their friends brought the subject up, or the question might be prompted by a health scare they have had. Or when someone asks, “is there a God?” — it might be they have a straightforward intellectual interest in the question, it might be they’ve heard something in popular culture the piqued their interest, or it might be that they’ve had some kind of transcendent experience (like the one Dan Wakefield had) which they’re trying to make sense of. In other words, sometimes what seems to be a simple question has other layers of meaning — and of course at other times, what seems to be a simple question actually is a simple question.

    It might seem that you’ll have the easiest time when someone asks you a simple question that really is nothing more than a simple question. But a simple question that is nothing more than a simple question might actually be the hardest one to answer, because then you have to give an answer that is honest and genuine. If your aging parent starts talking about what happens after you die, and you figure out that what they really want to talk about is their own feelings about their own approaching death (which once happened to me), then all you have to do is listen to their their feelings and concerns; you don’t have to try to articulate your own half-formed answer to the question. If, on the other hand, another adult asks you what happens after we die and you realize they sincerely want to know, I feel we have a duty to do the best we can to answer that question; and this is true whether the person asking the question is a child, a teen, or an adult. We have a duty to take other people seriously.

    This implies that we should spend some time thinking through some of life’s biggest questions, so that when we are asked one of those questions, we can give a more or less coherent answer. Because of my job, I actually have these conversations fairly often, and I’ve come up with five basic questions that cover most — not all, but most — of life’s big questions. I’ve found it helpful to think through these questions on my own, so that when someone springs a big life question, I won’t be completely at a loss. I offer these questions hoping they might be useful to you in the same way.

    Here’s the first big question: What should I do with my life? — or you might ask: What’s the purpose of my life? For most Unitarian Universalists, this question is the most important of all religious questions. We are a pragmatic people, and this question forces us to think about our own ethics and morality, to think about what we want to prioritize in our lives.

    Second big question: Who am I? — which goes with several related questions, including: What am I capable of? What kind of being am I? This question often comes up after you’ve tried to think through the first question. Because if you want to figure out what you should do with your life, maybe first you have to figure out who you are.

    Third big question: What’s the nature of goodness? — and there are other questions related to this, like: Where does goodness come from? Where do suffering and evil come from? The question of goodness is also a major concern for most Unitarian Universalists. As a pragmatic people, we want to make the world a better place. And if you want to make the world a better place, then it’s probably a good idea to figure out what you man by “better.”

    Fourth big question: What can I know? — which goes along with related questions like: How do I know what I know? How do I know what is true? For many Unitarian Universalists, questions about truth encompass many of the traditional religious questions like: Is there a God? and: What happens after death? Thus if a Unitarian Universalist says that they do not believe in God, their Unitarian Universalist friends may treat this as a question of how we know what is true, saying: How do you know that God does not exist? Or if a Unitarian Universalist says that they do believe in God, their Unitarian Universalist friends are going to ask the same question: How do you know? There’s a reason why we tend to lump these traditional religious questions together and treat them as questions about truth. Most of us know people who hold a vast range of beliefs. Thinking just of the people I happen to know, my acquaintances include people who are atheists, agnostics, New Age-ers, Pagans, many different varieties of Christian, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, even a Zoroastrian. Each of these people has a worldview that claims to be true, yet they disagree in fundamental ways. So how can I know which of them is right; how can I know what is true?

    Fifth, and finally: Does my life have any meaning? (And if so, where does that meaning come from?) For many Unitarian Universalists, the question about what happens after death often resolves to the deeper question of whether an individual human life has any meaning or not. And many of us are existentialist who believe that there is no pre-existing meaning but that we create meaning through our actions; so to ask if my life has meaning is to inquire into the meaning I’m already making through the way I’m living right now.

    Now let’s circle back to my opening question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious questions? One partial answer I’ve given is that we parents are going to provides answers those questions for their own children, at least until their children develop the ability to reason abstractly. Another partial answer: when someone asks one of those questions, we should listen carefully, because sometimes when people ask you those big questions they’re really saying something else. Another partial answer: because we are part of the human community, we have the responsibility to take such questions seriously, and not try to dodge them or dismiss them. So those are some partial answers to the opening question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious questions?

    And the ultimate answer is this: The only way to provide answers to the big questions about life, the universe, and everything — is to spend time thinking about those questions yourself. That’s actually why I keep coming here every week, to keep myself in practice at answering these big questions — because this congregation is a place where people do ask those big questions, where people do think seriously about them.

  • What Are Our Visions for the Future?

    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.

  • White Poverty

    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.

    Story: How To Feed Five Thousand People

    Once upon a time, Jesus and his disciples (that is, his closest followers) were trying to take a day off. Jesus had become very popular, and people just wouldn’t leave him alone. Jesus and the disciples wanted a little time away from the crowds that followed them everywhere, so they rented a boat and went to a lonely place, far from any village.

    But his fans figured out where they were going. By the time Jesus and his friends landed the boat, there were five thousand people waiting there for them. So Jesus started to teach them, and he talked to them for hours.

    It started getting late, and the disciples of Jesus pulled him aside and said, “We need to send these people to one of the nearby villages to get some food.”

    “No,” said Jesus. “The villages around here are too small to feed five thousand people. You will have to get them something to eat.”

    “What do you mean?” his disciples said. “We don’t have enough money to go buy enough bread for all these people, and even if we did, how would we bring it all back here?”

    “No, no,” said Jesus. “I don’t want you to go buy bread. Look, how many loaves of bread have we got right here?”

    The disciples looked at the food they had brought with them. “We’ve got five loaves of bread, and a couple of fried fish. That’s it.”

    “That’ll be enough,” said Jesus.

    His disciples looked at him as if he were crazy. There was no way that would be enough food for five thousand people!

    Now, Jesus had spent the whole day teaching people about the Kingdom of God, teaching them that everyone is dependent on someone else. And while he was sitting up in front of the crowd teaching, he looked out and saw that many of the five thousand people had brought their own food with them. He watched them as they surreptitiously nibbled away at their own food, ignoring the fact that many of the people around them had no food at all.

    Jesus brought out the five loaves of bread. Being a good Jew, he blessed the bread using the traditional Jewish blessing: “Blessed are you, O Holy One, Creator of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” Then he broke the bread, cut up the fish, and gave it to the disciples so they could hand it around.

    Everyone saw that even though Jesus and his disciples had barely enough food for themselves, they were going to share it with everyone. The truth began dawning in people’s eyes. All day long, Jesus had been teaching them that the Kingdom of Heaven existed here and now, if only people would recognize it. Now Jesus was giving them a chance to show they understood, and to act as if the Kingdom of Heaven truly existed.

    The disciples began to pass around the bread and the fried fish, shaking their heads because they knew there wasn’t going to be enough food for everyone. Yet, miracle of miracles, there was plenty of food to go around. People who had brought their own food put some of theat food into the baskets so it could be shared. People who hadn’t brought food with them took some food from the baskets. By the time the followers of Jesus had passed the baskets to all five thousand people, everyone had gotten enough to eat, and there was so much food left over that it filled twelve baskets.

    Today, many people tell this story differently. They believe that Jesus performed some kind of magic when he blessed the bread and fish, so that somehow Jesus and/or God turned a dozen loaves of bread and two fish into thousands of loaves of bread and thousands of fried fish. To my mind, that’s easier to believe than to believe that humans could perform the same miracle by simply sharing. Why is it easier to believe? Because if humans could perform this miracle back then, we could do the same thing today: to share with those who need it, and to live as if the Kingdom of Heaven existed here and now. (1)

    Readings

    The first reading was from an essay by Andrew Tait titled “Living in the Shadow of the American Dream,” published on August 1 on DailyYonder.com. The author is White.

    I live in Shenandoah County, Virginia. I’m a factory worker. A farmer. A father of two girls, one still in diapers. I get up before the sun, and most days I don’t sit down until after it’s gone. My partner Hannah and I raise our girls on a small farm in the Valley. She works full-time too — though nobody calls it that. She’s a caregiver, a homemaker, a livestock handler, and a mother. She doesn’t get a paycheck….

    …We heat with firewood I cut myself. We raise animals for milk, eggs, and meat because the grocery bill outpaces my paycheck. We’ve stayed unmarried — not because we don’t love each other, but because getting married would kick my partner and our daughters off the Medicaid that keeps them healthy. My employer offers insurance, sure — but only if I pay nearly as much as our mortgage. I can’t, so we stay as we are; in love but locked out.

    I’m not ashamed of our life. It’s honest work, and it’s full of love. However, I am ashamed that in a country as wealthy as ours, people like us are left out in the cold….

    I’m not writing this as a Democrat or a Republican. I’m writing this as a man watching families like mine wear themselves thin; working hard, doing the right things, and still falling behind. This isn’t about Red or Blue. It’s about the fact that we’re being divided against each other while both sides forget that real Americans bleed the same when the cost of insulin triples or the cost of groceries goes up again.

    The second reading was one of the most famous scenes in the book “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens.

    The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his cook’s uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long grace was said over the short commons. The gruel disappeared; the boys whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:

    “Please, sir, I want some more.”

    The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with wonder; the boys with fear.

    “What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.

    “Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.”

    The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.

    The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high chair, said,

    “Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more!”

    There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance.

    “For more!” said Mr. Limbkins. “Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?”

    “He did, sir,” replied Bumble.

    “That boy will be hung,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. “I know that boy will be hung.”

    Sermon

    I’d like to speak with you this morning about White poverty; that is, about poor people who happen to be White. This may sound like a political topic, but there’s a spiritual reason behind this. I’ve borrowed the phrase “White poverty” from another minister, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, who used this phrase in the title of a book he wrote last year: “White Poverty: How Exposing the Myths about Race and Class and Reconstruct American Democracy.”

    Barber is a minister, but he is probably best known for his “Moral Mondays,” which he started in his home state of North Carolina. Now we have to touch upon politics for just a moment. The state of North Carolina is dominated by Republican politicians, and because William Barber’s Moral Mondays were protests aimed at state government, it would be easy to assume that Barber is a Democrat. I know I assumed he was a Democrat. But reading his book, I realized that he is motivated not by partisan politics, but by religion and spirituality. I’ve come to feel that both the Democrats and the Republicans have lost their religion and spirituality, so while I may not agree with everything Barber says, I feel he is well worth listening to as we try to find a way out of the mess that partisan politics has gotten us into.

    Barber in fact claims that the battles between the two parties hide a basic fact that we should not ignore. He says: “While these same [political] fights are regularly recycled for our public consumption, nearly half of Americans — people of every race, creed, and region — are united by the experience of being poor. They share the hardship, but they do not share a name because our formal definition of poverty has left tens of millions of Americans in the shadows. Even when we hear reports about poverty, they are based on numbers that severely undercount Americans who are living with their backs against the wall, unsure of how they are going to make it.” So writes William Barber.

    We heard the story of one of those people in the first reading this morning, a White man named Andrew Tait living in the South. Tait and his family just about manage to keep their heads above water. But you can hear in his story that just one crisis — unforeseen medical expenses, for example, or getting laid off — could put his family over the edge.

    There are many families in this same situation right here on the South Shore. A year or so ago, the town social worker here in Cohasset asked to meet with the Cohasset clergy. The town social worker wanted to talk with us, because she kept encountering situations where people in crisis who needed immediate financial assistance. She was adept at finding sources of assistance for Cohasset residents with long term needs — home heating assistance, food assistance, and so on. But she had no source for immediate one-time crises — such as a landlord who doubled the rent for a family who just couldn’t move before the end of the month. We clergy had been helping such people in an ad hoc manner with one-time gifts; we tried to help out the town social worker when we could, but sometimes that involved one of us writing a personal check to the town social worker and getting reimbursed later. But there was no other source for these kinds of one-time grants here in Cohasset. There are groups that can provide grants to organizations, but not to individuals. The town social worker urged us to get together and start a fund similar to Scituate’s “Christmas Fund” (which actually has nothing to do with Christmas, it’s just the name of a fund that provides one-time financial assistance). So began the Cohasset Community Assistance Fund, a fund which grew out of the needs of a town that’s 96% White. Poverty exists in towns like Cohasset, it’s mostly White poverty, and it’s mostly invisible.

    To return to partisan politics for just a moment: Neither of the two major political parties is very good at addressing White poverty. The Democrats, for some very good reasons, have focused on the financial needs of historically marginalized groups, such as African Americans, Native Americans, and so on. The Republicans, for some very good reasons, have focused on fostering a pro-business environment that will in the long term create jobs. But what if you’re White and poor right now? Then it can feel as though both political parties have abandoned you, as Andrew Tait said in the first reading.

    We don’t have to go as far away as Andrew Tait in ?Virginia to find example of how White poverty I’m going to cite four figures on the Cohasset Community Assistance Fund website. One: 21% of Cohasset households are considered low income, because they earn less that 80% of the area’s median income of $187,060. Two: 34% of Cohasset households experience what’s known as housing cost burden, where the housing cost is too high for income; 15% of Cohasset households are severely cost burdened. Three: Nearly 1 in 5 town residents use public health insurance (Medicare and Medicaid). Four: 142 people in town get Snap benefits, or food stamps; and the Cohasset Food Pantry gives crucial support to 80 Cohasset families. These figures are for Cohasset, but nearby towns like Scituate and Hull and Hanover and Pembroke and Hingham all have similar figuresw.

    These are community portraits showing people, mostly White, who are more financially vulnerable than they should be. Most of these people would not be poor by standard political definitions of poverty. But as William Barber and others have pointed out, the political definition of poverty may be too restrictive. A better definition of poverty might be something like this — If your household had a sudden expense of $1200, such as a major car repair, could you pay it without a problem? Or would you have to choose between paying the rent, or buying food, and fixing the car? By this latter definition of poverty, nearly half of all Americans are poor or on the edge of being poor. If nearly half of all Americans are poor, we cannot avoid the issue of poverty. This also puts the lie to the myth that poverty just a Black issue; it’s an issue that all of us, no matter what race or political party, need to face head on.

    The prevalence of poverty in America today reminds me of the story I told this morning, about Jesus feeding the five thousand. This story comes from the Christian scriptures, the book of Mark, chapter 6, verses 32 through 44. This story is usually interpreted as recounting a miracle performed by Jesus with the help of God: after seeing the five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish that his disciples have, Jesus increases this meager store of food by supernatural means until there’s enough to feed everyone. However, from a religious perspective, I would say that this usual interpretation of the story completely underestimates divine power, turning a major miracle into a very meager miracle. If you magically produce enough bread and fish for everyone, that really doesn’t change anything, does it? A major miracle would be to actually change human hearts from selfishness to sharing. I interpret this as a story of a major miracle, not a meager miracle.

    On a smaller scale, by the way, this is a miracle that preschool teachers perform on a regular basis: they teach children how to share. Alas, by the time most Americans reach adulthood, they seem to have forgotten what they learned in preschool. As a result, we have the Democrats saying that there’s nothing to worry about, because they passed a big infrastructure bill that’s going to provide jobs five years from now; and yet Andrew Tait struggles to make ends meet right now. Then we have the Republicans saying that there’s nothing to worry about, because they’re going to get rid of immigrants and slap tariffs on overseas manufacturers which will produce jobs five years from now; and yet Andrew Tait struggles to make ends meet right now.

    In the current political environment, it appears that divisive American politics have made our political leaders powerless to help people like Andrew Tait. But this was the same situation faced by Jesus in the Roman empire of two thousand years ago. Things were much worse in the ancient Roman empire than they are in America today, with even less political will to address the problem. Yet Jesus pointed out that the problem of poverty could be solved. A partial solution could come from a spiritual change emerging in the hearts of ordinary people. Of course that spiritual change would require a reduction in selfishness, and an increase in generosity; that is, it was a spiritual change which would require individual human beings to understand that they were connected to all other human beings.

    In my interpretation of the story, this is the real miracle of Jesus feeding the five thousand. When those five thousand people were gathered in front of him, listening to him teach, he was teaching about how we are all interconnected. Yet he saw that some people had no food while others had brought their own food. So he performed a miracle: he helped people understand that because of their essential interconnectedness, sharing was the normal, natural thing to do. He was teaching them: do not separate yourself from community, and one way that you separate yourself from community was by not sharing. What a great miracle this was! — such a great miracle that we really cannot believe it happened. We would prefer to believe that God somehow magicked enough food for all five thousand people. If it was just magic, then we don’t have to change our hearts. But if it was not magic, then we ourselves must change.

    And in fact the early Christian community did change their hearts. One of the earliest Christian liturgies we have record of says that during communion services, the communion table would have on it not just bread and wine, but cheese and fruit and enough food to make a full meal. Thus the earliest Christian communion services provided not just some kind of spiritual food, but actual literal food so that if you were poor and hungry, you were fed; and if you were rich, you could give of what you had and thus grow spiritually. No wonder the early Christian church spread so quickly, across racial and national and class divisions: the earliest church fed body and soul, erasing divisions and hatred.

    I want to be clear that this same spiritual impulse appears in all the great religious traditions. One of my favorite ethical thinkers, Rabbi Hillel, gave voice to the same spiritual impulse from within the Jewish tradition. Hillel taught that we cannot blind ourselves to the suffering of others, saying, “Do not separate yourself from the community” [Avot 2:4]; that is, in your over-confidence, do not think that you can live your life solely on your own, without needing the wider human community. And this same spiritual impulse is present in the Sikh tradition. When American Sikh communities build a gurdwara, or temple, they include a commercial kitchen capable of cooking meals for dozens or hundreds of people; then each week they offer a free meal to all want to join them.

    Sadly, this spiritual impulse seems to have mostly disappeared among our allegedly Christian political leaders. Too many American Christians believe that Jesus said that we’d get pie in the sky when we die; that we’ll all have enough to eat, not now, but in the sweet bye-and-bye. These political leaders seem to have forgotten that Jesus was talking about the here and now when he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” Jesus united the spiritual with the physical: when there are people who are poor, then the Kingdom of God is not truly present; when if there are people who are hungry, then none of us can be spiritually filled.

    This ancient spiritual impulse does live on in many of today’s Christians, people like Rev. William Barber. And this ancient spiritual impulse lives on in many of today’s Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Sikhs and atheists — anyone who understands that true spirituality means recognizing that all human beings are interconnected. This deep knowledge of human interconnectedness is a kind of Enlightenment, arising from our hearts when we realize we can never be an isolated individual; the spiritual promptings of our hearts teach us that we are always connected to all other human beings. Then we can begin to see how artificial divisions keep us from working together to create a world where there is no hunger or poverty.

    We can let go of those artificial divisions, like the myth that poverty is a Black problem; and we can recognize that half of us in America, including a great many White people, are either in poverty or close to poverty. While we have come to think of this as a political problem, it is also a spiritual problem, and to solve that spiritual problem we have to remember how to work together in harmony; beginning in our immediate neighborhoods, then extending out into our towns and the South Shore region and maybe eventually through the rest of our country, and even the rest of the world. The more we can work together across borders and across divisions, the easier it will be to ignore those who promote division and hatred and violence; and if we persist, this spiritual revolution could wind up changing the world.