Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.
Readings
The first reading is from an essay by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi titled “Two Cheers for Symbolic Capitalists”:
“Referring to homeless people as ‘unsheltered individuals’… [is a] discursive maneuver that often obscures the brutal realities that others must confront in their day-to-day lives. If the intent of these language shifts is to avoid stigma, the reality is that these populations are still heavily stigmatized….
“Critically, however, pointing out unfortunate consequences of [this] approach to language and social justice does not invalidate the idea that language matters. In fact, it powerfully illustrates that how we choose to talk and think about society, alongside the ways we try to influence others’ thoughts and discourse, actually can have important social consequences — for better and for worse.” [https://musaalgharbi.com/2024/09/30/two-cheers-symbolic-capitalists/]
The second reading is from the recent book “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission To Bring Healing to Homeless People,” by Tracey Kidder:
“The modern era of homelessness began in the 1980s, when the size and visibility of the problem began to rise dramatically. Driving south on I-93, Jim O’Connell tried to draw me a picture of what had gone wrong in Boston. Coming out of the tunnel in the center of the city, he gestured to a portion of the South End. ‘Just look at this. Look at these new buildings, all along here. All those are apartments and all the ones behind them. There’s got to be, by my calculation, at least four thousand new units there, right next to the Pine Street Inn. But no a single one for homeless people.”… Back in the 1920s, Boston had 35,000 single room occupancy units for rent. They had served as homes for immigrants and low-wage workers, elderly people on fixed incomes, and, more recently, for struggling Vietnam veterans. In 1965, the city and South End residents had overwhelmingly approved a plan to turn the neighborhood into ‘an economically, socially and racially integrated community’ with rental housing for ‘all displaced low-income residents wishing to remain.’ The destruction of the old buildings, with their inexpensive … rooms was widely praised as an act of civic virtue, and it might have been, if anything like that plan had been followed….
“A severe recession in 1980 had inaugurated the era of rising homelessness. But the problem was driven and sustained by many long-brewing problems: the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans; … the grossly inadequate provisions made for mentally ill people;… the continuation of racist housing policies…. Also the arcana of applying for Social Security disability — a process so complex that anyone who could figure out how to get assistance probably didn’t need it.
Sermon — “The Experience of Homelessness”
Today is the date of the annual Winter Walk for the Homeless, sponsored by Boston Health Care for the Homeless. This is a fundraising walk to raise money to help fund healthcare for people who are homeless. First Parish has a history of supporting both this annual walk, and Boston Health Care for the Homeless. We most recently supported Boston Health Care for the Homeless by donating the entire collection from our Christmas Eve candlelight service. And this year, quite a few of us from First Parish planned to go on the walk, though because of the snow it’s not clear how many will be able to make the drive up to Boston.
Two things are especially notable about the Winter Walk for the Homeless: first, it takes place outdoors, regardless of the weather; and second, it includes both housed and unhoused people walking together. Thus it’s more than just another fundraising walk. It’s also a chance to experience the conditions that people who live on the street have to cope with twenty four hours a day, seven days a week; and to be out in the weather with some folks who live outdoors all the time.
Now — there are quite a few of us who cannot participate in the Winter Walk for the Homeless, for a wide variety of reasons. But I thought it might be worthwhile to talk with you about the experience of homelessness, as a way for us to participate at a distance (as it were) in the Winter Walk. I’m not going to try to explain the causes of homelessness and housing insecurity. At the end of the sermon I’ll make a couple of ethical observations. But I’m not going to suggest policies to end homelessness, or tell you what we should be doing about homelessness. I’m just going to talk about the experience of being homeless.
The last two congregations I served had members who were homeless, and both those congregations were in places where there were significant numbers of people who were homeless. As a result, I got to know people who were homeless, and I got to hear some of their stories. Since I’m a minister, I do need to protect people’s confidentiality. So the stories I’m going to tell you will provide no details that can be used to identify individuals; you won’t even know whether they lived on the East Coast or the West Coast. To further protect privacy, I’ll be combining elements from different people’s stories. All this means that the stories I’m going to tell you are, in a sense, fictionalized; at the same time, they’re entirely true.
I’ll start by telling you about someone who came close to being homeless, though he ultimately managed to avoid it. Harry had started his career as a computer programmer. Then there was one of those sudden changes in technology, and suddenly his skills were no longer in demand. He tried to pivot in the new job market by learning new computer skills. Unfortunately, he guessed wrong: just when he had spent six months becoming proficient in the new skills, all the jobs using those skills dried up. By this time, he had used up all his savings, so he didn’t have the money to start yet another training program. Then too, he was well over fifty, and the high tech industry is notorious for its age discrimination. In order to pay the rent and put food on the table, his only viable option was to take any job that he could. He wound up working at Walmart. It was supposed to be a full-time job, but (as was typical with Walmart jobs) after he’d been there a couple of months, they cut his hours to about twenty-five hours a week, and gave him an irregular schedule so it was impossible for him to pick up another part-time job.
When I met Harry, he was living in studio apartment in a rough part of town, barely able to make the rent each month. After he paid the rent and bought food and gas, he couldn’t afford things like dental care. But between his siblings, and his friends in our Unitarian Universalist congregation, he just managed to stay in his apartment. What finally saved him was that he turned sixty-two and was able to taken Social Security; and because of his days of earning good salaries as a computer programmer, he received enough money to get by. So, by the skin of his teeth and with a lot of luck, Harry managed to stay housed. But though he was never homeless himself, he experienced the constant threat of homeleness.
In his recent book called White Poverty, the Rev. William Barber, organizer of the Poor People’s Campaign, argues for an improved definition of what it means to be poor. Barber argues that if you can not find the money to pay an emergency bill of four hundred dollars — that is, you could not borrow against home equity, you could not take it out of savings, you could not put it on a credit card — then you’re poor. By this measure, Harry was poor. Barber says that by this measure, about a quarter of all Americans are poor. And if you’re poor like Harry, it’s much easier to fall into homelessness.
This brings me to the next person I’d like you to meet, whom I’ll call Alice. Alice was in her late twenties when I knew her. She began attending our Unitarian Universalist congregation regularly. She was interesting, intelligent, and articulate; and I always enjoyed chatting with her at social hour. At one point I asked her if she wanted to be listed in the congregation’s directory. It became clear that she really didn’t have a home of her own. She was staying with friends and acquaintances for a couple of weeks at a time, with no set address. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was couch-surfing. Thus, even though she wasn’t living on the streets or in her car, she was homeless.
One of the big drawbacks to being homeless is that it can make it hard to stay connected with other people. The homeless people I’ve known all have had cell phones, but their phone plans have very limited minutes, so if you try to call them it’s likely you won’t get through. The homeless people I’ve known all have email addresses, but because they don’t have regular internet access they may not be able to respond to email right away. Being homeless can be isolating, and if you have a friend who’s homeless, it can be tough to stay in touch with them.
Alice was able to check email regularly because she had email access through her job. However, she didn’t like to receive personal email at work, and asked not to be listed in the congregation’s directory. She still showed up every week for Sunday services. I finally said to her, “Look, you’re here nearly every week, you’re obviously a Unitarian Universalist, why don’t you become a member of this congregation?” And then she told me her good news. She had managed to navigate the Byzantine application process for Section 8 housing. (From what I’ve heard almost requires a college degree to navigate successfully, and Alice did in fact have a college degree). There is so little Section 8 housing that actually getting into Section 8 housing is almost like hitting the lottery. But Alice hit the lottery, and got Section 8 housing. I congratulated her on her great good fortune, and then she told me the bad news — the Section 8 apartment she had gotten was an hour’s drive from our congregation. In fact that was the last Sunday she was going to be with us. Not surprisingly, we never heard from her again.
Here I’d like to interject a short description of the different kinds of homelessness.
First, there’s couch-surfing. Alice was a couch-surfer, doing short-term stays in other people’s homes. Couch surfing can feel relatively stable, if you have hosts who are willing to let you stay for long periods of time. But couch-surfing ranges all the way to very unstable, where you’re staying for short periods of time in homes where you don’t feel safe.
Next is car dwelling. In Silicon Valley where I was based for thirteen years, car dwellers included people who owned homes in the Central Valley, a three hour’s drive away, but who lived in their RVs during the week while working at Silicon Valley jobs. And all the local state colleges had students who were full-time car dwellers during the school year. At the other end of the car dwelling scale were people who lived full-time in their cars, and barely had enough money to keep the car insured and registered.
Next are the people who live in shelters. From talking with shelter dwellers, I learned that homeless shelters can be a mixed bag. At the upper end of the scale, there were the shelters like Heart and Home in Palo Alto. This is a women-only winter shelter housing its guests in churches in Palo Alto; volunteers bring meals, and sit with the guests to talk and share dinner together. At the lower end of the scale are the big city shelters, some of which can feel overcrowded and unsafe to the guests. Not everyone feels safe in a shelter, and some people would rather live on the street.
And that brings me to Anna. When I first met Anna, she was living in a shelter. She had heard about our Unitarian Universalist congregation, and decided to come check out a worship service. After the service, she found me and, like a typical newcomer, asked me a series of questions about Unitarian Universalism. She came back again the next week, and pretty soon she was calling herself a Unitarian Universalist. A couple of months later, she went through the formal process to become a member of the congregation, making an annual financial pledge; and she pledged a greater percentage of her disposable income than most of our middle class members.
Anna was a regular at Sunday morning services, so we began to worry a bit when she missed two weeks in a row. Anna was in her mid-seventies, and we wondered if she had gotten ill or injured. I tried calling her, but not surprisingly was unable to get through — she paid by the minute on her phone plan, and didn’t pay for any minutes unless she needed to make a call. Fortunately, she showed up the next week, and I asked her if she had been ill. She told me it wasn’t illness, it was that she had decided to leave the shelter because it just didn’t feel safe any more. You have to understand that Anna was clean and sober, and that her mental health was excellent. But not everyone who stays in a shelter is sober or mentally healthy, and the staff in shelters are usually overworked and can’t monitor everyone adequately. What had really gotten to Anna was the drinking and drug use in the shelter where she had been staying; she had 35 years of sobriety, attended Alcoholics Anonymous regularly, and had little tolerance for people who wouldn’t deal with their addictions. She decided she preferred to live on the streets, rather than live with “a bunch of drunks and druggies” (using her words, as best I can remember them).
From then on, we only saw Anna at Sunday services about once a month. It all depended on where she wound up spending the night, and whether she could catch a bus that would get her to the church in time for services. Of course, the church offered to give her rides; but she didn’t know where she was going to be on any given Saturday night, nor could she afford the phone call to arrange rides. Nor would she accept money from the congregation’s fund for members in need. Anna felt it was her duty as a member to financially support the congregation, not to have the congregation financially support her.
When I talked with Anna at social hour, she was mostly interested in talking about the sermon, or about Unitarian Universalism. She kept saying that here she was in her mid-seventies, never knew about Unitarian Universalism before, but she realized now that she’d actually been a Unitarian Universalist all her life. So that’s mostly what we talked about. But sometimes she told me a little bit about her strategies for living on the street safely. Since her methods were so idiosyncratic and creative, I feel like talking about them would betray confidentiality; suffice it to say that she developed creative ways of navigating life on the streets.
As I was leaving that congregation, I heard that Anna had been finally put on the waiting list for permanent housing — not in a shelter this time, but in an actual apartment. I don’t know if that worked out. All too often, such permanent housing deals fall through for homeless people at the last minute. But I hope that she did get housing. I’d grown fond of Anna — a good conversationalist, an incisive observer of other people, smart and funny and independent — and like to think that she wound up living some place safe. I don’t like to think of her living on the streets into her eighties.
So there you have some suitably anonymized stories of a few people’s experiences of housing insecurity and homelessness. I’m reluctant to make generalizations based on these experiences. I told you about Harry, who was housing insecure and just missed being homeless. His experience was very different from Alice, the couch-surfer — not just because of their different situations, but because of their different ages, and their different personalities. And Anna had yet another completely different experience. Therefore, I’m not going to make any generalizations about the experience of homelessness.
But I would like to make a couple of ethical observations. First of all, despite what many politicians try to tell us, homelessness cannot always be blamed on the person who winds up being homeless. That is to say, homelessness and housing insecurity do not always result from some individual moral failing. The people I have told you about were all upright and moral people; they were all intelligent, none of them was mentally ill, none of them was an addict or an alcoholic. Based on the homeless people I’ve known, homelessness is just as likely to result from bad luck as from personal failings. I still remember the thirty-something man who arrived at a homeless shelter in Palo Alto who said he had grown up in Palo Alto, graduated from Palo Alto High School, returned to Palo Alto after college, and wound up homeless due to medical bills he couldn’t pay. He did everything right, and ended up homeless through bad luck. Unfortunately, one of the legacies of the Christian tradition that lies at the root of so much of American political culture is a strong tendency to say we are each individually responsible for our sins. Even though Jesus taught us to help those who are poor, Americans have a strong tendency to blame those who are poor. This is a theological position that we Unitarian Universalists categorically reject.
The second ethical observation about homelessness I’d like to make is related to the first. If we can’t blame the homeless person for being homeless, then that means that society is to blame. And society actually includes all of us. This, I believe, is why so many politicians prefer to blame homeless people for being homeless — because if homeless people are not to blame, then it’s within our power to do something about homelessness. This, by the way, helps explain why the American tradition tries to put the blame for being poor on those who are poor — because otherwise, the blame falls on the rest of us for allowing homelessness to occur. And that’s a very uncomfortable feeling.
So end my brief ethical observations. I hope we can get past our feeling of discomfort about all being responsible for homelessness. I would like it society changed so that a responsible sober women in her seventies no longer had to worry about living on the streets.
