Dan Harper | Sermons

  • What About the Afterlife?

    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.

    Moment for All Ages

    The great philosopher Socrates, who lived two thousand five hundred years ago, once had a long conversation with another philosopher named Gorgias. During that long conversation, Socrates told a story about what happens to human beings after we die.

    “Listen, then (said Socrates), as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale, which I dare say that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only. But I believe this is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth.

    “Since the days when the god Cronos ruled the universe, there has been a law about what happens to human beings after death: human beings who have lived their whole lives in justice and holiness shall go to the Islands of the Blessed, to dwell in perfect happiness; while human beings who have lived unjust and irreverent lives go to Tartaros, the house of punishment.

    “In the time of Cronos, judgement was given on the very day on which people were to die. The judges were alive, and the people had not yet died. But the judgements were not well given. So Hades came from Tartaros, and the authorities from the Islands of the Blessed came to Zeus. They said some people were sent to the wrong places after they died.

    “Zeus came up with a plan. “First of all,’ he said, ‘we must put a stop to human beings knowing the time of their death.
    Next, human beings must be fully dead when they are judged — not alive as is currently true — and being dead, they will be stripped of their their bodies, and stripped of everything else that might bias the judge either for them or against them. Then the judges themselves must also be dead, so that the judge’s naked soul will be able to perceive the truth of the other naked souls.” Zeus said only in this way could the judgement of the dead be truly just.

    “Zeus then decreed that three of his own human children, who were already dead, should become the judges. These three were assigned to stay in the ‘meadow at the parting of the ways.’ Two roads left this meadow: one way went to the Islands of the Blessed, and the other to Tartaros. Rhadamanthus judged all the humans who died in Asia. Aeacus judged all the humans who died in Europe. And if these two had any doubt about a human being, Minos served as the final court of appeal.”

    So ends the story that the philosopher Socrates told about the afterlife. Although this story sounds a little bit like the story that some Christians tell about what happens to humans after we die, it is a very different story, and Socrates told his story hundreds of years before the Christian era.

    You probably noticed some problems with the story. For example, if Rhadamanthus judges those who died in Asia, and Aeacus judges those who died in Europe, who judges those who died in Africa? With such obvious problems with the story, why did Socrates tell Gorgias that he was speaking the truth? You must remember that Socrates spoke a different language from us, and his word for truth — aletheia — meant revealing and disclosing, it meant the opposite of forgetfulness. In other words, there is more than one way to define the word “truth.”

    Readings

    The first reading comes from Mark Twain’s book “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” In this passage, Captain Stormfield has arrived in heaven, received a robe and a harp, and sets off to enjoy himself:

    “When I found myself perched on a cloud, with a million other people, I never felt so good in my life. Says I, ‘Now this is according to the promises; I’ve been having my doubts, but now I am in heaven, sure enough.’ I gave my palm branch a wave or two, for luck, and then I tautened up my harp-strings and struck in. Well, Peters, you can’t imagine anything like the row we made. It was grand to listen to, and made a body thrill all over, but there was considerable many tunes going on at once, and that was a drawback to the harmony, you understand…. By and by I quit performing, and judged I’d take a rest. There was quite a nice mild old gentleman sitting next me, and I noticed he didn’t take a hand; I encouraged him, but he said he was naturally bashful, and was afraid to try before so many people. By and by the old gentleman said he never could seem to enjoy music somehow. The fact was, I was beginning to feel the same way; but I didn’t say anything. … After about sixteen or seventeen hours, during which I played and sung a little, now and then — always the same tune, because I didn’t know any other — I laid down my harp and begun to fan myself with my palm branch. … Finally, says he, “Don’t you know any tune but the one you’ve been pegging at all day?”

    “Not another blessed one,” says I.

    “Don’t you reckon you could learn another one?” says he.

    “Never,” says I; “I’ve tried to, but I couldn’t manage it.”

    “It’s a long time to hang to the one — eternity, you know.”

    “Don’t break my heart,” says I; “I’m getting low-spirited enough already.”

    After another long silence, says he — “Are you glad to be here?”

    Says I, “Old man, I’ll be frank with you. This ain’t just as near my idea of bliss as I thought it was going to be, when I used to go to church.”

    Says he, “What do you say to knocking off and calling it half a day?”

    “That’s me,” says I. “I never wanted to get off watch so bad in my life.”

    So we started. Millions were coming to the cloud-bank all the time, happy and hosannahing; millions were leaving it all the time, looking mighty quiet, I tell you. We laid for the new-comers, and pretty soon I’d got them to hold all my things a minute, and then I was a free man again and most outrageously happy.

    The second reading comes from a small book published by the Buddhist Church of America. The book is titled “The Heart of the Buddha-Dharma” and it is by one of the great leaders of the late 20th century in the Buddhist Church of America, Kenryu T. Tsuji.

    “In the Jodo Shinsshu school of Buddhism, the spiritual development of the person is completed with their birth in what is known as the Pure Land…. ‘Birth in the Pure Land’ means the perfect growth and fulfillment one’s personality, to achieve a state of perfect selflessness whereupon one is able to realize the oneness of the whole universe; to become a Buddha and achieve oneness with Amida Buddha. While the human weaknesses of greed, anger, and ignorance are still functioning, this perfection of the personality is an impossibility.

    “Shinran Shonin and the teachers before him explained that the Pure Land was situated in the western corners of the universe, zillions of miles away. It was pictured as a very beautiful place, free of suffering, where everyone is happy. Philosophically speaking, however, the Pure Land does not refer to a specific location out there somewhere. Rather, the Pure Land is symbolic; it symbolizes the transcendence of relativity, of all limited qualities, of the finiteness of human life. In this transcendence, there is Compassion-Wisdom, an active moving, spiritual force. The Pure Land ideal is the culmination of the teaching of Wisdom and Compassion.”

    Sermon

    This is another in a series of sermons based on questions that were asked during last spring’s question-and-answer sermon: someone asked about the afterlife. I found this to be a difficult topic. My limited thinking about the afterlife is probably summed up in the following stupid Unitarian Universalist joke:

    Two Unitarian Universalists die, and next thing they know they find themselves standing in line in front of these large pearlescent gates. Somewhat to their surprise, they’re actually waiting in line to talk with St. Peter. When their turn finally comes, St. Pete asks them what religion they used to be, and they say, “Unitarian Universalists.”

    “Hmm. Unitarian Universalists,” replies St. Pete. “Well, even though you’re heretics, because you did so much good work on earth, you can go into heaven.”

    The two Unitarian Universalists look at each other, and one of them says, “You mean you actually send people to hell?”

    “Oh yes,” says St. Peter.

    On hearing that, they step out of line and start to picket the gates of heaven: one has a sign saying, “St. Peter Unfair to the Damned!” and the other’s sign says, “End Discrimination in Heaven!”

    This stupid joke represents about all the thinking I’ve done about the afterlife. Having the usual Unitarian Universalist preoccupation with the here-and-now, I tend to treat the afterlife as another social problem that needs fixing. Yet I’m also aware of how limited and narrow my thinking is, aware that much more can be said about the afterlife. Other people in our society do think about the afterlife, and some of them have come up with some pretty detailed descriptions of what it’s like. So let’s consider what the afterlife might be like. And I’d like to begin with the fable told by Socrates that we heard in the story for all ages this morning.

    According to Socrates’s fable, when Zeus took over from his father Cronos, he determined that admission to the afterlife was being poorly managed — some humans were being sent to the Islands of the Blessed after death when they really belonged in Tartaros. The humans were being judged before they had quite died, and their judges were also still alive, which meant that the judges could be impressed with the appearance or wealth of the people they were supposed to be judging impartially. So Zeus reformed the system, requiring that humans be judged after death, and also requiring that the judges themselves should be dead, which apparently removed the possibility of error or corruption from the whole process. This is a vivid description of what we might call the admissions process for the afterlife.

    Parts of this ancient Greek fable remind me of the story told by some Christians — the Christian story talks about heaven and hell rather than the Islands of the Blessed and Tartaros, and many Christians would say that it’s St. Peter who judges the dead, not Rhadamanthus — but in both cases, humans are judged after they die, and sent either to a good place or a bad place. Thus we can see that some people think of the afterlife as a place where humans will be judged based on our actions during our lifetimes; and furthermore, in the afterlife some humans will be condemned to punishment, while others will lead a delightful existence.

    And I’d like to consider a very specific story that was told about heaven and hell in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In these American stories, the Christian belief in heaven and hell takes on more details. If you went to heaven, so it was said, you’d receive a robe and a crown and a harp and wings, and you’d spend your days sitting on a cloud playing your harp. The American humorist Mark Twain decided to explore this nineteenth century American story more carefully, by telling about the adventures of one Captain Stormfield as he arrived in heaven; and as is so often the case with Mark Twain, underneath his humor lies some serious thinking and questioning.

    In the story, Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven and receives a robe and crown and wings and harp just as he expected. But he quickly finds out that it isn’t much fun sitting on a cloud and playing a harp — especially when you can only play but one song over and over again, and when everyone around you plays a different song, mostly with the same low level of skill that you have. After a time, the Captain sneaks away from his cloud, dumps his robe and crown and wings and his harp, and heads off to explore heaven.

    In the course of his explorations, Captain Stormfield meets up with his old friend Sam, who has been in heaven for a while. Sam fills the Captain in on the realities of heaven. To the Captain’s surprise, Sam tells him that pain and suffering exist in heaven. “You see,” Sam tells him, “happiness ain’t a thing in itself — it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant. That’s all it is.” In other words, in order for there to be happiness in heaven, there must also be pain and suffering, to serve as a contrast. The difference is that in heaven pain causes no lasting harm, and suffering cannot last.

    Mark Twain is not making fun of heaven in this story. Instead, he’s thinking carefully and logically about the afterlife by asking serious questions. He asks: what age will we be in heaven? If you die as a baby, will you have to remain as a baby throughout eternity? — in other words, can those in heaven continue to grow and change and gain more wisdom? Another question Twain asks is this: If heaven is a place where we’ll meet up with those who have died before us, how will that work, exactly? — will you still have something in common with someone who died twenty or thirty or forty years before you did? Twain also brings up a point that would have been very challenging for some white people in his time (and maybe equally challenging for some white people in our time): the majority of people in heaven would not be white, because white people have been a minority throughout human history. Those white people who are expecting an all-white heaven are going to be sadly disappointed.

    There’s more that could be said about American conceptions of heaven. But I’d like to consider some other ideas of the afterlife that are floating around in today’s popular culture. The other great proselytizing religion in the United States today is Buddhism, so it feels important to consider some Buddhist conceptions of the afterlife.

    Traditional Buddhism holds that after we die, we get reborn as something else. The goal is to get off the endless cycle of rebirth. Ordinarily, we don’t remember our previous lives, so one of the remarkable things about Gotama Buddha was that after he became enlightened he could remember his previous lives, and told his disciples more than five hundred stories about those previous lives. These stories became the Kataka tales, which are now part of the Buddhist scriptures, and in these stories Buddha remembers previous lives in which he took on human forms, animal forms, even the form of a tree. According to traditional Buddhism, we’ve all had hundreds of previous lives. Our actions in this life determine in what form we shall be reborn in our next life. Furthermore, in many Mahayana Buddhist traditions, there is a place called naraka into which you can be reborn if you were extremely bad in your previous life. Naraka is roughly equivalent to the Christian hell, though you don’t arrive through by being judged by someone else; furthermore, and you don’t stay there for all eternity, but rather only for as long as it takes to work out your karma so that you can be reborn again into a higher world.

    Just as naraka is not the same as the Christian hell, Buddhists don’t have an exact equivalent for the Christian heaven. The goal is to break the endless cycle of rebirth, which you do by achieving nirvana; as I understand it, the word nirvana means in a literal sense something like extinction or nothingness. Gotama Buddha was able to achieve enlightenment, to reach nirvana, and what made him truly great was that he was then able to turn back from nirvana so that he could tell others how to be freed from the endless cycle of rebirth.

    You can see that traditional Buddhism doesn’t think about the afterlife in the same way as the ancient Greeks did, nor as nineteenth century American Christians did. Yet each of these three different religious traditions argues that if you live your life in the right way, you can be rewarded after death with something good. Interestingly, we find this same basic notion in some atheist traditions — or to speak more precisely, in the tradition of religious naturalism, a tradition that rejects any kind of supernaturalism in religion. Religious naturalists argue that the only way we can live on is in the thoughts and memories and actions of the people who survive us. If during your lifetime, you treat other people with kindness and compassion, then after you die you can live on in them whenever they act with whatever kindness and compassion they may have learned from you. So this is yet another kind of afterlife — and it’s not just a metaphorical afterlife, because your memory can have a very real and literal impact on the world. While there is no heaven or hell, no nirvana or endless rebirth, nevertheless your actions during you life affect what happens to you after death.

    These are just a few of the more common ideas of the afterlife that are floating around in our culture today. But I find I don’t fully agree with any of these ideas of the afterlife. I’m a Universalist, as the result of which I demand an egalitarian afterlife. Universalism began as the Christian heresy of universal salvation: if God is indeed omnibenevolent or all good, then God would not damn anyone to eternal punishment; so everyone gets to go to heaven. By now, I think I’ve heard all the standard rebuttals of Universalism — from people who want to make sure their political opponents go to hell; from people who want to make sure someone they especially dislike, like an ex-spouse, doesn’t join them in heaven; from people who rebel at the idea that evil-doers get to go to heaven; and so on. But I remain a Universalist because I figure if there is an afterlife (a question I remain neutral on), then universal salvation is my only chance of getting to heaven. I’m a fallible human being, and like every other fallible human being, I’ve done plenty of things that were — to use Mark Twain’s phrase — “ornery and low down and mean.” If there really are pearly gates, and if I get there, St. Peter is going to open up his big book and remind me of the time when I was four years old and I bit my older sister — and that would be only the beginning of a very long list of low-down, mean, ornery things I’ve done.

    In my opinion, the problem with all these schemes of an afterlife is how exclusive they are. You have to be a far better human being than I’ll ever be to make it into the afterlife. Not only would I not be allowed into heaven, I’m no good as a Buddhist, either. I meditated for fifteen years, and finally gave it up because it was making me miserable; which means I have no doubt I’m accumulating all kinds of karma that will keep me on the endless cycle of rebirth forever. Nor am I comforted by the religious naturalists who tell me that I’ll live on in the memories of those who knew me: partly because that’s a pretty short afterlife, lasting maybe sixty or seventy years; and partly because (as is true of all of us) there are plenty of people who don’t like me, and honestly I don’t want to live on in their memories.

    If there’s going to be an afterlife, I want it to be an egalitarian afterlife — I want everyone to get in. If I were a Buddhist, I’d be a Pure Land Buddhist. As I understand it, the Pure Land Buddhists teach that anyone can gain access to the Pure Land after you die; you don’t have to go into seclusion, you don’t have to engage in difficult esoteric practices like mindfulness, you don’t have to achieve some higher spiritual state. Really, all you have to do is to chant, “I take refuge in Buddha.” There, I just did it — now I get to go to the Pure Land. That’s why I want everyone to get in — because if everyone can get in, then I know I can get in, too.

    And there are many other notions of the afterlife that are more or less current in our society today. We can see traces of traditional African cultures in which someone who’s dead remains with us as long as there’s someone who knew them when they were alive, and who can pour libations for them; after everyone who knew them is dead, then they merge into a broad group of the dead, a sort of collective unconscious. In traditional Navajo religion, once you die you’re supposed to fade into oblivion, but if there’s something to keep you tied to the world of the living, then you persist as a troubled ghost; this is not the kind of afterlife any of us would hope for. Among some religious naturalists, the afterlife is nothing but a metaphor, and we heard an echo of that in the second reading this morning: “The Pure Land is symbolic; it symbolizes the transcendence of relativity, of all limited qualities, of the finiteness of human life.” And to return to Socrates — Plato tells us that when Socrates was on his deathbed, he gave two possibilities for what happens to us after we die: either we all go to the Elysian fields, enjoying there a blessed existence for all eternity; or we slip into oblivion, which he describes as having the most perfect sleep possible, without the disturbance of dreams or nightmares. This last idea of the afterlife retains currency for some people in our society today.

    These are but a few of the possibilities for the afterlife. All these different possibilities remind me of another stupid joke, which goes like this:

    A Unitarian Universalist dies and, somewhat to her surprise, finds herself standing in a long line of people waiting along the road to heaven. Way up ahead, she catches sight of a fork in the road. When she gets up to the fork in the road, she sees there’s a signpost. One sign, which points to the right, say “This Way to Heaven.” The other sign, which points to the left, says “This Way to a Discussion about Heaven.” She takes the left-hand path, going to the discussion about heaven.

    It’s just a stupid joke, but I think it reveals something that’s true for me. If the afterlife is going to be a place of exquisite perfection, I’d be exquisitely bored — and I don’t want to be bored for all eternity. If I were confronted with the situation in the joke, I guess I too would go to the discussion about heaven. At least it wouldn’t be boring, and there’d always be the possibility of making some kind of progress.

  • 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.