The Problem with Grief

Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon text may contain typographical errors. The sermon as preached included a significant amount of improvisation.

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from the poem “Two Dreams” by Margaret Atwood:

Sitting at noon over the carrot salad
my sister and I compare dreams.

She says, Father was there
in some kind of very strange nightgown
covered with bristles, like a hair shirt.
He was blind, he was stumbling around
bumping into things, and I couldn’t stop crying.

I say, Mine was close.
He was still alive, and all of it
was a mistake, but it was our fault..
He couldn’t talk, but it was clear
he wanted everything back, the shoes, the binoculars
we’d given away or thrown out.
He was wearing stripes, like a prisoner.
We were trying to be cheerful,
but I wasn’t happy to see him:
now we would have to do the whole thing over again….

The second reading is from a book by Elaine Pagels titled Why Religion?: A Personal Memoir. In this book, she tells about her son Mark’s death, followed by the death of her husband a year later, and how she made sense of their deaths.

“Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random. During those dark, interminable days of Mark’s illness, I couldn’t help imagining that somehow I’d caused it If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us were willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.”

Sermon: “The Problem with Grief”

The sermon this morning is titled “The Problem with Grief.” So there is no suspense, I’ll tell you right up front what the problem is with grief: Grief seems to be cumulative. That is, all the individual instances of grief we happen to experience in life seem to add up. And a lot of times the total sum of grief seems to add up to more than all the individual instances of grief. The memoir by Elaine Pagels, from which came the second reading this morning, is a perfect example of what I mean. In that memoir, Elaine Pagels tells about how her son died, and then a year later her husband died. As you read her memoir, it becomes clear that these two overwhelming experiences of grief, happening so close together, added up to something more than each experience of grief on its own. And this tallies with my own less intense experiences of grief: when I was grieving one thing, I seemed to be extra sensitive to other feeling of grief.

So why is this a problem? Grieving has been a fact of life for human beings as long as there have been human beings. Surely we should be accustomed to it by now. Except that this has becomm a problem because there are at least two major sources of societal grief right now.

First of all, there’s the grief that we’re all feeling as climate change and other environmental problems become more pronounced. Lack of ice in the Arctic, too much plastic in the oceans, diminishing natural habitats near us: there are so many environmental changes to grieve. A field biologist friend calls this “eco-grief,” the grief that comes from the knowledge of the looming ecological disaster.

In addition to that, most of us are experiencing pandemic grief. This is the grief that most of society continues to experience every time people remember what we lost during the pandemic. Of course there are people for whom the pandemic went smoothly, and they don’t have any personal pandemic grief. But even if you’re not experiencing pandemic grief yourself, you’re surrounded by people who are. It is endemic in our society right now.

Thus nearly all of us are experiencing the effects of both eco-grief and pandemic grief. These add up with whatever individual grief we happen to be experiencing. The sum total is a lot of grief.

That’s it. Now you’ve heard the whole point of this sermon. Now there’s no more suspense, and you know the worst. If you want to check out now and stare out the window, I’ll try to talk softly.

Now that you know the problem with grief, I’d like to devote the rest of the sermon to talking about how we can manage grief — how we can manage it both individually, and as a community. What can we do to make ourselves feel better?

First of all, let’s talk about guilt. Grief and guilt often seem to come hand-in-hand. In the second reading, Elaine Pagels talks about the guilt she felt while she was grieving. She felt tremendous guilt after the death of her son. Surely she could have done more for him. Surely she could have fought more aggressively for treatment for him. Looking back, knowing his medical problems, she worried about what choices she made that might have made his situation worse. She felt guilty that she didn’t do more for him. She felt guilty that she didn’t advocate more aggressively for him. She felt guilty about choices she made that she thought might have made him worse. The guilt was dragging her down, and she had to find a way to deal with it.

This mixture of grief and guilt happens to all of us. A friend dies, and we think: I should have reached out more, I should have been there for them. We think about the state of the environment, and we think: I should have gotten rid of that gas-guzzling car sooner. A parent or a spouse dies, and we think: I should have done more for them. I should have done this. I should not have done that. Those feelings of “should-have-done” are what lead us into guilt.

But Elaine Pagels points out that when you’re feeling guilty, it is because you have convinced yourself that you have a great deal of control over your life, and that you have a great deal of control over the lives of those close to you. After my father went into his final illness, my sisters and I talked a lot about what we should have done differently:– we should have talked Dad out of thus-and-so, we should have told him to get a second opinion… there were many things we felt we should have done differently. But after his death, when we could think more calmly, it became clear to us that we had done the best we could with what we knew at the time. It’s easy to look back on the past and say, “I should have known.” But the fact of the matter is that we didn’t know, nor could we have known.

This gets at a fundamental theological point. We human beings do not have a lot of control over our lives. We like to think we have a lot of control over our lives. We almost have to live our lives as though we have a lot of control. But in reality, we really don’t have as much control as we’d like to believe.

This is one area where the conservative Christians maybe have an advantage over us. For them, God controls absolutely everything, and once they die they feel fairly secure that they’re going to go up to heaven and everything will be fine. We Unitarian Universalists live in a more complex reality. We acknowledge the possibility of random events; that is, God does not control absolutely everything. We acknowledge the possibility that well-intentioned actions can have unanticipated consequences; that is, even when we are doing out best to do what is right, things can go wrong. As for an afterlife, some of us believe a pleasant afterlife, and since we are Universalists we know we all get to go to heaven. Some of us, like Socrates, see death as the most perfect night of sleep you could ever have, untroubled by dreams or fitfulness. Some of us are quite content with oblivion. But nearly all of us tend to focus on this world, not the next world. We worry less about what happens after death, and more about what happens here in this life. We want to make this world better. We believe that we have the ability, and the free will, to make this life better. In short, we are perfect candidates for guilt.

Back in the 1970s, the Unitarian Universalist theologian William R. Jones pointed out that within Unitarian Universalism, while the theists among us believe in God, and the humanists among us don’t believe in God, both parties believe in “radical [human] freedom and autonomy.” We are all existentialists. We have been thrown into an absurd world, and it is up to us to make meaning out of that world. The way we make meaning is through our actions. We cannot know all possible results of our actions, and fairly often our actions result in unforeseen consequences — because it is simply impossible for us to foresee every consequence of each action we take.

If we can seriously acknowledge this, we have taken the first step towards releasing ourselves from some of the burden of guilt that we might carry around. We do the best we can, knowing that oftentimes things are not going to turn out as we had hoped. There will always be things we could not anticipate. Of course we’ll still feel guilty about decisions we made that didn’t turn out well. But once we can accept that we have less control than we’d like to think, guilt will have a lot less power over us.

Once guilt has less power over us, then grief becomes a lot more manageable. If we’re not spending all our time thinking: “I should’ve done this,” or “I should’ve done that” — once we relieve ourselves of some of the burden of guilt, then we can actually do something with our grief.

Which brings me to the next point. Grieving is usually a fairly lengthy process, and there’s no good way to speed it up. I’ve learned a lot about the grieving process from hospice workers. They typically tell us that after someone close to you dies, the most intense grieving will take about a year, often with a moment of intense grief on the first anniversary of that person’s death. Then, so they tell us, we can expect another year of somewhat less intense grief. After the second anniversary of that person’s death, the grief tapers off to a much more manageable level. Of course everyone is different, but the general experience of hospice nurses and hospice chaplains tells us that after someone close to us dies, most of us can expect about two years of grief.

However, our society expects us to be done with grieving in a few weeks. As a minister, I’ve noticed this again and again. I’ll watch as someone loses a spouse, or a parent, and they get a lot of support from their workplace for about two weeks, and from their friends for about two months. Then they’re expected to be back to normal. Yet what I’ve seen again and again — and what I’ve experienced myself after the death of each of my parents — is that the worst of time grief seems to come about three months in, give or take a month. It’s at about three months in when the numbness wears off, and suddenly the feelings of grief become most acute. And three months is past the time when our society expects us to be done with grieving, when everyone expects us to be “back to normal.”

But if you try to get “back to normal” too quickly, you can actually prolong your grief. During those two years of more intense grief, you have to take the time to allow yourself to grieve. If your life if filled with busy activity, allowing you no time to grieve, what seems to happen is that it takes longer than two years to get through the worst of grief. This, by the way, is one reason some people come here to attend Sunday services. Quite a few people start coming to Sunday services in the aftermath of the death of someone close to them. They come here to have some time for themselves, where they can grieve without being interrupted. Because you can sit here, going through the motions — pretending that you’re listening to the sermon, standing up and mouthing the words to the hymns — but what you’re really doing is dealing with grief. We need places like this, where we are allowed to sit and grieve if we need to.

Our society doesn’t allow much space for grieving. Yes, we have developed grief support groups, and you can go see a therapist. You can install a grief app on your phone to help you grieve. Unfortunately, our society wants us to use grief groups and therapy and grief apps to hasten the grieving process, so that people can become more productive. That’s what our society wants us to do — be more productive. Whereas actually what we need is time to just be — we need to spend less time doing, less time doing therapy and doing grief group and doing our grief app — we need to spend more time just being human.

Trying to hurry through grief doesn’t work. Of course you should use a grief app if that works for you. Of course you should see a therapist if you can afford it and if that will help you in your grieving. Of course you should participate in a grief support group if that’s going to help you. But don’t expect these things are going to make the grieving end more quickly. If you try to hurry through your grief, it will come back later to haunt you — just like a ghost in those old ghost stories. When we try to hurry through grief, what we are actually doing is ignoring our essential humanity. We are trying to pretend that we are machines that just need a little metaphorical oil to function more smoothly. We are trying to pretend that we are computers that happen to have a software bug called grief, and if we just get the right app, or if we just update our operating system, we can get rid of this bug. As a minister, I see this happening again and again. People try to hurry through grief, they try to hack their grief, they try to fix their grief as if grief is something that is broken — and it doesn’t work. You can’t hurry grief. You can’t hack grief. You can’t fix grief.

Grief happens when someone we love, or something we love, is gone. If you want to get rid of grief, the only way to do that is by getting rid of love. If you don’t love anything, then you won’t grieve; you will be nothing more than a machine. Once you open your heart to love, you open yourself to the possibility of grief.

This brings me to the final point I’d like to make about grief. Grief happens when something or someone you love is gone. From this, a logical consequence follows: When we are surrounded by love, then we will be supported in times of grief. Family, friends, and/or communities like First Parish can surround us with love. Love is what we need as we move through grief.

Because of this, it makes sense to strengthen our ties with those groups where we can be surrounded by love. For many of us, our immediate families will be one of the most important groups to surround us with love. (However, I do want to acknowledge that not everyone’s immediate family has the possibility of being filled with love, and sometimes some of us have to get out of our immediate families.) But even those of us with immediate families that are filled with love need something beyond our immediate families. To that end, we might cultivate circles of friends and acquaintances. Even more important, in my opinion, are communities like First Parish, organized communities of friends and acquaintances where we share common values and where there are mechanisms in place the help us reach out to one another. We need communities like First Parish where people know what it is to grieve, and where people know what it is to love.

All this takes time. Strengthening our families takes time. Building networks of friends and acquaintances takes time. Making caring communities like First Parish takes time. Yet we are pressured by society to spend less and less time on these things. We are pressured by society to spend more and more time being busy and productive.

I’d like to suggest that this is where we want to be counter-cultural. Let’s resist that pressure to be busy and productive all the time. Let’s strengthen our families, nurture our friendships, be part of communities like First Parish. These are the things that allow us to be fully human.

To grieve is to be human. To love is to be human. And maybe this is the real problem with grief these days, and the problem with love — our society does not value the time we need to spend in being human. But I would suggest to you that you will find it to be worth your while to become more human, even if that means you are less productive. Become more human. Fill your life with love. That is what we are meant to do.

Sleep

Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon text may contain typographical errors. The sermon as preached included a significant amount of improvisation. The poems were read by Carol Martin, worship associate.

There are those who find sleep to be a waste of time. Sometimes these are the same people who find night to be wasteful or fearful or something to be avoided. They may be the people who say that dreams are delusions and snares. The only good time, so they say, is the day time, the time of bright sunshine, and at night we turn on all the lights so that it looks like daytime. Day time is the good time, the pragmatic work time, the time for getting things done and working towards your goals.

But where do your goals come from? The least of our goals come from the pragmatic work time. These are the incremental goals: we make a thousand dollars and next we want to make ten thousand dollars, then a hundred thousand dollars, then a million dollars. It all seems very grand, but what does it mean?

In the time of the ancient Hebrew prophet named Joel, the nation of Israel had fallen on hard times, and they longed for a time when “the threshing floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil” — the ancient equivalent of having a million dollars. But simply to have an abundance of physical pleasures was not enough, said Joel; beyond that, God would pour down God’s spirit upon all the people, and…

“Your children will prophesy.
Your elders will dream dreams,
and your young people will see visions.”

Dreams and visions…like the Langston Hughes poem “Dream Variations”…

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me—
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Langston Hughes praises rest and night and dreaming in his poem, and he adds something of vital interest to those of us in the United States: he connects these things to race and racism. Western culture has traditionally thought of darkness and night and sleep as being less than brightness and daylight and wakefulness. Beginning in the fifteenth century or so, Western culture went further and began equating skin color with things like daylight and darkness. Westerners started saying that people with darker skin colors were like darkness, night, and sleep. This meant (so they said) that darker skin colors were not as good as light skin colors, which were like daylight and wakefulness. Westerners started calling Africa the ”dark continent,” and this meant several things: that Africa was populated by people with black skin, that Africa was a dangerous “heart of darkness,” that Africa was not as enlightened as Europe, that Europe had the right to send its soldiers and warships to “enlighten” Africa.

Langston Hughes turns this Western imagery upside down. Night is gentle and tender, he says, and then goes on to say that night is “black like me.” This one short poem challenges a metaphor that many in the West carry around inside ourselves: the metaphor that night and darkness and blackness are somehow bad, while day and light and whiteness are somehow good. Langston Hughes makes us ask ourselves: Why set up a hierarchy like that? Why not allow day and night to be equally good? And furthermore…why not allow White people and Black people (and all other skin colors) to be equal?

Which brings us to a poem by Emily Dickinson…

Sleep is supposed to be
By souls of sanity
The shutting of the eye.

Sleep is the station grand
Down which, on either hand
The hosts of witness stand!

Morn is supposed to be
By people of degree
The breaking of the Day.

Morning has not occurred!
That shall Aurora be —
East of Eternity —

One with the banner gay —
One in the red array —
That is the break of Day!

Now the stereotype is that every time Emily Dickinson writes about “sleep,” she is actually writing about death. Therefore, many people will simply assum this is a poem about death, and leave it at that. But you can’t reduce Emily Dickinson’s poetry to a single simple logical explanation. There is more to this poem than meets the eye.

Emily Dickinson tells us what “Sleep is supposed to be,” a mere mechanical “shutting of the eye.” But, she says, sleep is more than that: sleep is the “station grand / Where a host of witnesses stand.” Emily Dickinson knew the Hebrew Bible well, so it’s reasonable to hear echoes of the Bible in her poems. I think I hear echoes of the prophet Joel when he prophesied about how the elders will dreams dreams, and the children will prophesy, and the young people will have visions: a host of witnesses dreaming and making prophecies for the future. Sleep is more than the mechanics of shutting your eyes; day break is more than the sun rising. First come the dreams and visions. After that, we act on those dreams and visions. Day cannot exist without night. Night cannot exist without day.

Emily Dickinson wrote this poem during the Civil War. With that in mind, we might say this is, in fact, a poem about death: the death of the many soldiers who died in that brutal war. But I also hear this as Emily Dickinson’s statement of hope for the future. When the Civil War ended in a victory for the North, when there was a victory over the forces wanting to maintain slavery, then would the dreams and visions for racial justice begin to be fulfilled. Well, here we are, a century and a half later, still trying to complete the work of the Civil War — still trying to bring complete equality and freedom to all people. Emily Dickinson’s poem is still topical.

Perhaps we will always be striving for the perfect future that never quite arrives. Yet it is the dreams and visions that keep us moving towards that perfect future — it is sleep in the sense of the “station grand” surrounded by a host of witnesses that will bring us those dreams and visions of a perfect future.

Which brings us to the third poem, by James Weldon Johnson, titled “Mother Night.” The range of his writing was unusually broad: he wrote lyrics of hit Broadway songs, and published a well-received novel, three books of poetry, a non-fiction book, political essays, and finally perhaps the best American autobiography of the twentieth century. At the end of his autobiography, he gives a summary of his religious outlook, which makes him sound very much like a Unitarian. With that in mind, here is his poem, “Mother Night”…

Eternities before the first-born day,
Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame,
Calm Night, the everlasting and the same,
A brooding mother over chaos lay.
And whirling suns shall blaze and then decay,
Shall run their fiery courses and then claim
The haven of the darkness whence they came;
Back to Nirvanic peace shall grope their way.

So when my feeble sun of life burns out,
And sounded is the hour for my long sleep,
I shall, full weary of the feverish light,
Welcome the darkness without fear or doubt,
And heavy-lidded, I shall softly creep
Into the quiet bosom of the Night.

Now this is indeed a poem that equates sleep with death. But the poem says: death is not something fear; it’s something to be welcomed when the time is right. Now it was perhaps easier for him to say that when his time to die came along, he would, “full weary of the feverish light,” welcome the night of death. He wrote this poem when he was 51, by which age he had already lived a very full life: first African American to pass the Florida bar exam, hit songwriter on Broadway, successful poet and novelist, U.S. consul to Nicaragua during a revolution, and the first executive secretary of the National association for the Advancement of Colored People. If, like James Johnson, you’ve had a successful life full of major accomplishments, I think it’s easier to say that you might “welcome the darkness without fear or doubt.”

Yet there’s more going on here than the poet saying, “Hey, I’ve had a good run, when it comes time to die, I’ll be ready.” He makes a theological point: out of the chaos of darkness came the universe. (Today we might talk about the Big Bang, but that’s a scientific theory that wasn’t developed until after James Weldon Johnson died.) From the primordial Night came blazing suns, and from blazing suns came planets and life and eventually human beings. And at the end of time, human beings, planets, stars, will all return to primordial Night. From stardust we have come, and to stardust we shall return. If this is what we really believe, we too will “welcome the darkness without fear or doubt.” James Weldon Johnson is telling us that each human life is of utmost significance precisely because it participates in the great drama of the universe, from the Big Bang to the ultimate end of everything when entropy finally takes over. You may or may not agree with him, but you can see how such an attitude might reconcile him to death: like Socrates, he is a poetic rationalist who understands death as a long night of perfect sleep; not something to be feared, but something to be desired, when the time comes.

Each of these three poems tells us different things about sleep. Langston Hughes upends the old Western notions that nighttime and sleep are bad, that blackness is bad and whiteness is good, that dreams should be ignored: instead, he says that night and darkness and blackness and dreaming and sleep are things we should value. Emily Dickinson tells us that sleep need not be the mere shutting of the eye, for when we are guided by a host of witnesses it can guide us to a hopeful future. And finally, by placing our brief human lives in the context of the lifespan of the universe, James Weldon Johnson tells us that sleep is not something we need to fear.

On this day when we lose an hour of sleep, I hope I’ve convinced you that sleep is good. Sleep is more than merely good, it is cosmically good, it connects us with human striving for justice and with the life of stars and the universe. With that in mind, I think I’ll take a nap this afternoon to make up for the hour of sleep I lost last night.

The Importance of Community

Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon text may contain typographical errors. The sermon as preached included a significant amount of improvisation.

Readings

The first reading is a tale titled “The Strength of Community,” from the book Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber, translated by Olga Marx.

It is told:

Once, on the evening after the Day of Atonement, the moon was hidden behind the clouds and the Baal Shem could not go out to say the Blessing of the New Moon. This weighed so heavily on his spirit, for now, as often before, he felt that destiny too great to be gauged depended on the work of his lips. In vain he concentrated his intrinsic power on the light of the wandering star, to help it throw off the heavy sheath: whenever he sent some out, he was told that the clouds had grown even more lowering. Finally he gave up hope.

In the meantime, the hasidim who knew nothing of the Baal Shem’s grief, had gathered in the front room of the house and begun to dance, for on this evening that was their way of celebrating with festal joy the atonement for the year, brought about the the zaddik’s priestly service. When their holy delight mounted higher and higher, they invaded the Baal Shem’s chamber, still dancing. Overwhelmed by their own frenzy of happiness they took him by the hands, as he sat there sunk in gloom, and drew him into the round. At this moment, someone called outside. The night had suddenly grown light; in greater radiance than ever before, the moon curved on a flawless sky. [Book 1, p. 54]

The second reading is from Keeping Heart on Pine Ridge: Family Ties, Warrior Culture, Commodity Foods, Rez Dogs, and the Sacred by Vic Glover [Summertown, Tenn.: Native Voices, 2004, pp. 83-83]. In this book, Glover writes about living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, keeping alive the Lakota Sioux ways, including the sacred ceremonies of weekly sweat lodges and the annual Sun Dance.

Had a house full of people again today…. We got a load of wood [for the sweat lodge] and then met back up here, where Lupe made some bean and cheese burritos. Tom came up from base camp, the Old Man stopped by, and some other Sun Dancers came through….

While sitting around the table and drinking coffee, talk led to the Sun Dance, now only four and a half months away. A number of things were discussed, including the presumptuousness of some people who circumvented the protocols of the invitation process and thought they could just show up and start dancing, without speaking to the sponsor, Tom, or the lead dancer, also Tom.

While the discussion shifted to the preparations, the same sentiments were expressed. One of the dancers remarked about his eleven years of preparing before entering the arbor, and now, ‘after three sweat lodges, they think they’re ready to dance,’ he said….

“Overnight Indians,” said another of the men seated around the table. “Everybody wants it to happen right now, and they don’t know how to go about it. They think they’re ready, but they’re not.”…

Maybe it’s the planetary alignment. Maybe it’s the Age of Aquarius. Maybe it don’t take as long as it used to. Maybe there’s a sense of urgency now…. At this Sun Dance we’ve seen more than one person come and dance one year, never to return. “Those people don’t understand,” said Loretta, one day in her kitchen. “They don’t know what commitment means, and their lives are gonna be like that. They didn’t know how hard it was going to be.”

Sermon: “The Importance of Community”

You know the phrase “kumbayah moment.” It’s a derogatory, cynical phrase. When management tells employees they all have to come to some stupid group activity in order to build community, management is trying to create a “kumbayah moment.” During the 2008 elections, conservatives made fun of Barack Obama’s calls for unity, accusing Obama of giving “kumbayah speeches.” Liberals have balked at calls to make common cause with conservatives by saying “Stop the kumbayah.”(1) “Kumbayah” has become synonymous with sappy, manipulative platitudes calling on everyone to just get along. It comes from the folk song “Kumbayah,” which was introduced into popular culture in the 1950s by white singers of the Folk Revival. Then the song became a staple of day camps, overnight camps, and church camps: the song evokes images of camp counselors telling campers to sit around a campfire and hold hands while singing this song.

Originally, the song had an entirely different meaning. A folklorist for the Library of Congress recorded the earliest version of the song in 1926, as sung by Henry Wylie. Wylie begins the song with: “Somebody need you Lord, come by here / Oh Lord, come by here.” And he ends the song with: “In the morning, morning, won’t you come by here / Oh Lord, come by here.” According to the Library of Congress, this song was widely known in the American South. When White northern folksingers discovered the song in the Library of Congress archives, they misinterpreted the Southern Black dialect of Henry Wylie, and turned “Come by here” into “Kumbayah.” (2) In so doing, they unintentionally obscured the original meaning of the song. “Come by Here” is not a feel-good, let’s-all-get-along song. On the surface, it’s a song about hard times, and asking the Lord for comfort. Knowing that it’s an African American song reveals a deeper meaning: it’s a song about oppression and the potential for relief from oppression, and it’s a song of hope that a new day will dawn when oppression will end.

The word “community” has started to become a lot like the word “Kumbayah.” Some corporations tell their workers about the importance of community in the workplace. Some public figures talk about the importance of community in the United States, though often their notion of community only extends as far as their political allies. We give our children vague instructions to “build community,” whatever that means in practice. Like “kumbayah,” the term “community” is beginning to evoke images of camp counselors telling campers to sit around a campfire and hold hands while singing this song, whether they want to or not.

That is a serious misunderstanding of what “community” means. As we heard in the first reading, community can enable you to do things that you could not do on your own. At its best, community allows us to work with others to stop or to prevent oppression. Let me tell you two brief stories that illustrate this point.

The first story is about a young Unitarian minister named James Luther Adams; he later became the greatest Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century. But in 1927 he was in Nuremberg, Germany, watching a parade during a mass rally of the Nazi Party. Partway into this four-hour long parade, Adams asked some of the people watching the parade about the significance of the swastika symbol. He soon found himself in the middle of a heated discussion, when suddenly he was grabbed from behind and marched down a side street. The person who grabbed him, however, was not a Nazi, but an unemployed merchant marine sailor. This friendly sailor told Adams in no uncertain terms that he was a fool, that in another five minutes he would have been beaten up by the people he was in a heated discussion with, that in Germany in 1927 (six years before the Nazis officially seized power), you learned to keep your mouth shut in public. The sailor then invited Adams to his tenement apartment in the slums of Nuremberg to join his family for dinner.

During that dinner conversation, Adams learned how (to quote him) “one organization after another that refused to bow to the Nazis was being threatened with compulsion. The totalitarian process had begun. Freedom of association was being abolished.” Adams felt this last point was key: freedom of association was being abolished. Nearly a decade later, when he returned to Germany, he witnessed how churches had finally begun to offer what he called “belated resistance” to the Nazi regime; and in this resistance, Adams saw the power of free association. Adams later wrote: “At this juncture I had to confront a rather embarrassing question. I had to ask myself, ‘What in your typical behavior as an American citizen have you done [aside from voting] that would help prevent the rise of authoritarian government in your own country?… More bluntly stated: I asked myself, ‘What precisely is the difference between you and a political idiot?’”(3) So ends the first story about the importance of community.

The second story happened in New York City sometime around 1784. A group of enslaved and free people of African descent gathered together to found an organization called the New-York African Society. They formed this organization for at least three main purposes: to “promote a sense of common purpose”; to promote Christianity among people of African descent; and to provide aid and assistance to each other, and to all people of African descent. This organization was the first voluntary association organized and run by African Americans; it was organized during the early Federal period when many Americans were forming voluntary associations throughout the new country, in order to promote social welfare.

Among its early activities, the New York African Society provided education for those who were still enslaved, and of course they began organizing to bring an end to slavery. The New York African Society also felt it was imperative to organize an all-Black church. New York churches that were run by White people were not especially welcoming to Black New Yorkers. The New York African Society founded its own church, which they called African Zion, though it soon came to be known as “Mother Zion.” This was not just an group of people who got together to pray and sing hymns. They wanted a church building and a paid minister, they wanted to create a strong social institution, and they organized themselves accordingly. According to historian David Hackett Fisher: “Four of the nine [original trustees] could not write, but they knew what they were about. The trustees issued subscription books, raised money for land and a building in 1800, and paid their debts on time. … Mother Zion [church] became a major presence in New York.” Fisher documents how the Mother Zion church served not just as a spiritual resource, but also as political force. In just one small example, when crowds of young White racists disrupted Sunday morning services, the church demanded — and received — police protection from the city council.(4) So ends the second story about the importance of community, and the power of community.

And now, since this is a sermon, I’m going to draw a couple of brief lessons from these two stories.

First lesson: Many people think the sole purpose of religious congregations in our society is to support the religious beliefs of individual people. That was definitely not the case in Nazi Germany. Those German churches that stood up against the Nazis were certainly sustained by their Christian beliefs, but one of their primary purposes was working against authoritarianism. We Unitarian Universalists remember that when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Unitarian congregation in Prague became one of those congregations resisting the Nazis; and because of that resistance, Norbert Capek, their minister, died in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.

Similarly, the African Zion church founded by the New York African Society was founded as a spiritual resource to Black New Yorkers. But that church also served as a moral and physical center where Black New Yorkers could work together against slavery, and organize themselves to influence the politics of the city of New York. In other words, religious congregations do serve as spiritual centers, but religious congregations also have long served as places where individuals join together in order to become a force for good in wider society. So ends the first lesson.

Second lesson: These days, I think many Americans have the tendency to think of congregations as a kind of leisure time activity. An American adult can spend time with Netflix and video games, or listening public radio, or indulging in sports and boating, or having fun with any number of fun hobbies. Americans with children have all the children’s activities on top of that: school plays, music lessons, Model U.N., sports, Scouting, and so on. Americans ration out their limited leisure time among all these attractive leisure activities. Americans also ration out their limited financial resources; so that, for example, a parent may tell our child that they cannot play hockey this year because they don’t have two thousand dollars to spend on equipment and rink time. With all these attractive leisure-time activities, it’s kind of hard for increasing numbers of Americans to justify spending time and money on old-fashioned religious congregations.

A new documentary film is coming out that provides an interesting response to all this. Brother and sister filmmakers Rebecca and Pete Davis have titled their new film “Join or Die.” In the film, they profile Robert Putnam, a professor of political science at Harvard, whose famous book Bowling Alone documented the demise of community organizations in America. Putnam concluded that civic organizations — everything from congregations, to Parent Teacher Associations, to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows — make major contributions to democracy and good governance. Putnam, and the fmilmmakers, argue that the demise of these organizations is one of the things contributing to the erosion of trust in America today. In a recent interview, filmmaker Pete Davis puts it this way:

“A lot of people think of religion theologically. One of the ways [Robert Putnam] thinks of it is sociologically. Religions are not just beliefs. They’re organizations where people meet. They’re places where you build relationships and develop leadership. They’re places where you meet people different from you and do a lot of volunteer work and political work. Religious spaces provide half of all social capital in the U.S.”(5)

I will make a stronger statement than that: When Americans play videogames at home instead of going to Sunday services, they are actually contributing to the erosion of trust and the weakening of democracy. When we are sitting here in our historic Meeting House, we are not engaging in another leisure time activity. We are not just exploring our personal spiritual beliefs. We are participating in democracy. We are making democracy stronger. Not to put too fine a point on it, we are resisting the growing trend towards authoritarianism.

To this you might respond: But what about those Christian evangelicals who espouse Christian nationalism? They go to church, but they’re using church as a means to promote authoritarianism. This is true, but at the same time, they’re doing exactly what I’m talking about: using the power of freedom of association to promote their own particular agenda. They get it. They understand the power of freedom of association. Yes, they’re using the power of freedom of association in order to restrict the freedom of association for others. What I’m telling you is that we need to use the power of freedom of association to stop them from taking over our country.

So it is that First Parish is not merely a leisure time activity, it is one of the bulwarks of democracy. To use Robert Putnam’s term, it’s where you build social capital. In today’s political climate, I would say that religious congregations and similar organizations are critical for maintaining our democracy. Those who prioritize leisure time activities over building social capital are acquiescing to the growth of authoritarianism.

In fact, if First Parish were just another leisure time activity, I wouldn’t be here. But over and over again, I’ve seen how our Unitarian Universalist congregations actually do make a difference in the world through building social capital. We actually do change society for the better.

I’ll conclude by noting that this is Stewardship Sunday. The Stewardship Committee wants me to make to talk about our fundraising campaign. I feel this whole sermon has been about why you should support First Parish with your presence and your money. But to keep the Stewardship Committee happy, I’ll add three short sentences. It’s a matter of public record what I earn each year. To show my commitment to my principles, I’m pledging three percent of my gross annual earnings to First Parish for the coming year. I wish it were more, because I believe strongly in the power of our congregation to be a force for good and a bulwark of democracy.