Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.
Readings
The first reading was from a 2018 BBC interview with Claudette Colvin, who died last week. On March 2, 1955, when she was fifteen years old, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. According to the BBC, “Colvin was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation policies….” It would be another nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. In the 2018 interview, Colvin said:
“We walked downtown and my friends and I saw the bus and decided to get on. It was right across the road from Dr Martin Luther King’s church. The white people were always seated at the front of the bus and the black people were seated at the back of the bus. The bus driver had the authority to assign the seats, so when more white passengers got on the bus, he asked for the seats. He wanted me to give up my seat for a white person and I would have done it for an elderly person but this was a young white woman. Three of the students had got up reluctantly and I remained sitting next to the window. Whenever people ask me: ‘Why didn’t you get up when the bus driver asked you?’ I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail. I wasn’t frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.”
The second reading was the poem “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou. The pome is not included here due to copyright.
Sermon
Tomorrow is the national holiday celebrating the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, fifty-eight years after he was murdered, Dr. King has become something of a larger-than-life figure in American culture. All these years later, we’ve finally reached something of a national consensus that King is an important figure in our national history. I’d even say he’s become something of a secular saint, though then we’d have to figure out what we mean by the phrase “secular saint.”
There are religious groups — Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans and some Lutherans — who have fairly well-defined definitions of sainthood. The Benedictine Monks of St. Augustine’s Abbey in Ramsgate, England, offer a definition of sainthood in their 1921 book “The Book of Saints: A Dictionary of Servants of God Canonized by the Catholic Church” back in 1921 (London: A.C. Black). The monks begin by pointing out that their religion has a strict and rigorous process for determining who is a saint. This process begins after the proposed saint has died with a careful investigation into that person’s life. The monks summarize this long process thus:
“It consists in the first place of a thorough investigation into all the particulars that can be ascertained of the life and death of the alleged Saint, all facts connected with whose career, both public and private, together with all his utterances and writings, are tested in every way. He must be shown to have been God-fearing, pious, just in his dealings, patient, self-denying, charitable, and so on, far above the average of ordinary good men….particular stress is put upon the popular verdict concerning the alleged Saint, that is, upon the repute in which he was held by those who may have had dealings with him or had opportunities of forming an opinion about him.”
While this process is for Catholic saints, you can see that something similar applies to the process of determining who gets to be a secular saint. In Dr. King’s case, it wasn’t until the year 2000, 42 years after his death, that all 50 states recognized the federal holiday honoring him.
The monks also point out that there is an exception to this lengthy process of determining sainthood, which would not apply to Dr. King:
“The above official enquiry into the conduct in life and virtues of the deceased Christian for whom the supreme honor of [sainthood] is claimed is deemed unnecessary only in the case of a Martyr, that is, of one of the Faithful who has deliberately laid down his life rather than deny Christ. In his case, it has to be fully proved that he was put to death on account of his religion, and not because he was guilty of some political or other crime….”
In American popular culture, martyrdom — the fact that someone gave their life for some great cause — may sometimes, but not always, be a part of secular sainthood. I’ll return to the question of martyrdom later on.
Now, I have greatly shortened what the monks say about the criteria for sainthood, and they themselves say they are merely summarizing the complicated laws of sainthood in the Roman Catholic church. So we can see that some Christians have a lengthy process and strict criteria for determining who is a saint. For other Christians, however, sainthood doesn’t involve some complicated legal procedure; a saint is simply someone who leads a good Christian life. In these less strict Christian traditions, a saint is recognized as a saint when enough people agree that that person is a saint — this is sainthood by popular acclaim, rather than sainthood by formal church laws.
Nor is it just Christians who recognize moral exemplars. Many other religious traditions venerate figures who are roughly equivalent to Christian saints. In Buddhism, a bodhisatva, someone who is striving towards Buddhahood, may be understood to be something like a saint. In Sikhism, the ten gurus who served from the founding of the religion until 1708 are considered to be roughly equivalent to saints. The Daoist immortals, people whose mastery of that religion have allowed them to overcome death, are somewhat saintlike.
What about us Unitarian Universalists? We tend to be a skeptical group of people. We’re likely to be skeptical of the miracles attributed to the Christian saints. We’re likely to be skeptical that Daoist immortals really live forever. We may have doubts about the endless cycle of rebirth from which Buddhist bodhisattvas release themselves. We also get skeptical about sainthood because we see how the different religious traditions define sainthood differently: the Christian saints have a special connection to God; the Buddhist bodhisattvas achieve nirvana; the Daoist immortal works with alchemy; and so on.
Indeed, our skepticism tends to push us towards doing away with saints altogether. However, I’d like to suggest that we probably don’t want to completely do away with saints. On the one hand, doing away with saints might cause us to view all moral exemplars with skepticism, which in turn can make it difficult to learn from anyone’s moral example. On the other hand, doing away with our skepticism might cause us to stop thinking critically about our moral exemplars. It’s good to have people we can look up to, and good to have people who serve as moral exemplars. It’s also good to remain aware that all persons, even saint-like people, have limitations. We Unitarian Universalists can steer a middle path between completely giving in to skepticism and doing away with saints on the one hand — and on the other hand, completely ignoring our skepticism about saints so that we can no longer think critically about them.
This is how I got wondering whether Dr. King might be considered a saint: I wanted to keep him as a moral exemplar, but there were some things I wanted to think critically about. First, I wasn’t sure if he should be a religious saint. If he were a religious saint, he’d of course be a Christian saint. But then people who aren’t Christian might not find him especially inspiring, which would limit his reach as a moral exemplar. But even for Christians, since Dr. King was a Baptist I suppose he’d be a Baptist saint; except the Baptists don’t really spend much time venerating saints. So since Dr. King had become a saintlike moral exemplar, valued by Christians and non-Christians alike, that implies he had become a secular saint. As a secular saint, he wouldn’t be restricted to one Christian denomination; he could be claimed more widely by Christians, by people of other religions, and by people of no religion at all.
This raises two questions for me. First, why have saints at all, even secular ones? Second, who gets to determine who becomes a secular saint?
I’ve come to believe that it’s good to have secular saints. I spent twenty-five years working as a religious educator, and a big part of Unitarian Universalist religious education is moral education. We want to help each other to lead a good life. And when we do moral education, it works best to show what a moral life looks like, rather than decreeing that there are certain rules that you must live by. Thus, the best moral educators find people who can serve as moral examples, about whom they can say: This person did many good things in their life, and you might consider following their example.
I think back to my own Unitarian Universalist upbringing, and remember how I was offered several examples of Unitarian Universalists who lived good lives, and whose example I might wish to follow. One of those Unitarian Universalist saint-like people was Louisa May Alcott, who not only wrote books about the importance of family, she also helped support her own family both financially and emotionally. Another of those Unitarian Universalist saint-like people was Henry Thoreau, who lived a life of simplicity, who was an anti-slavery activist, and who also helped to support his family financially.
As I got older, I learned about other Unitarian Universalist saint-like people; people like James Reeb, a White minister who answered Martin Luther King’s plea for clergy to come to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and march for voting rights. Reeb was murdered by White segregationists, and so became a kind of martyr. But he wasn’t a martyr in the formal Roman Catholic definition of the term: he did not die because of refusing to deny Christ, he died for a political cause. If we think of him as a secular saint, then we can say that he was a secular martyr, because he died for a higher purpose. Not that we think everyone should become a martyr to a higher purpose; we can retain enough of our skepticism to question when martyrdom is justified. Reeb didn’t seek out martyrdom; instead, he was simply following his highest principles.
The question of martyrdom brings us back to the question of who gets to determine who becomes a secular saint. Just because someone gets killed, they do not automatically become a secular saint. Malcolm X was assassinated at about the same time as Martin Luther King, but Malcolm X has not become a secular saint in the same way that Dr. King has. I have great admiration for Malcom X, particularly the last year of his life, after he went to Mecca and came to a deep understanding of how all humanity was closely interconnected. But I admire Dr. King more, because of his principled stand for nonviolence. I understand why Malcolm X felt it necessary to advise all Black families to own guns in case they had to defend themselves against White supremacists. But I admire Dr. King for being able to take a broader view when he said, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” Dr. King’s principle of nonviolence helps explain why he has become more widely recognized as a secular saint.
Let us consider another pair, one of whom became a secular saint, and the other of whom did not. Rosa Parks has achieved secular sainthood through her act of refusing to give up her seat to a White person on a segregated city bus. Yet as we heard in the first reading this morning, Rosa Parks was not the first Black person to refuse to give up her seat on a city bus; Rosa parks was not even the first Black woman to go to jail for refusing to give up her seat. Claudette Colvin, who just died this past week, was one of several Black people who refused to give up their bus seats before Rosa Parks did. Claudette Colvin was fifteen years old when she was arrested, and it is astonishing to think that a high schooler had the courage to risk arrest as a protest against segregation laws. So why did Rosa Parks become a secular saint, but not Claudette Colvin? One answer to that question is that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat as a part of a larger strategy to mount a legal challenge to the segregation laws. Although Claudette Colvin later became one of the plaintiffs in the legal challenge to segregated buses, her refusal was an individual decision made on the spur of the moment. Furthermore, when she was arrested, Colvin was pregnant, which by the standards of the time made her ineffective as a moral exemplar; she also had darker skin than Parks did, which in that place and time would have worked against her. Indeed, her mother reportedly advised her to stay out of the spotlight. None of this diminishes what Claudette Colvin did; but it does help us better understand what makes a secular saint. Both women helped create lasting change by participating in the law suit challenging segregated buses; both women were members of the NAACP, both were already participating in the struggle for civil rights; but because Rosa Parks would be more acceptable to more people, she was the one who became a secular saint.
Can you see how I’m trying to think critically about secular sainthood? A healthy amount of skepticism allows us to sort through the strengths and weaknesses of our secular saints. By sorting through their strengths and weaknesses, we can make careful judgements about what they did best, and what they might have done better. We can judge that both Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks did something amazing, while at the same time understanding why Rosa Parks got all the publicity. We can judge that both Malcolm X and Dr. King had admirable qualities, while at the same time acknowledging that Dr. King’s philosophy, with his broad vision for united humanity, would be valued by a wider segment of the population.
We can also use our healthy skepticism to make judgements about individual secular saints. As skeptics, we are pretty sure that no individual human being is infallible — not even secular saints. And so we can acknowledge that it is important to use our judgement as we strive to follow the examples of secular saints. Dr. King allegedly had extra-martial affairs. As healthy skeptics, we can recognize his very real faults and imperfections, while also valuing the good things he did. We do not require uncritical acceptance of our saints; we accept them for who they really were, as complex and fallible human beings, recognizing their faults while valuing their moral accomplishments.
And now we can consider why we might want to have secular saints at all. I’ve already said that I found secular saints were useful when doing moral education with children. But I think we adults also benefit from having secular saints. I’ll give myself as an example. I’ve already told you about one of the secular saints I was introduced to as a child, Henry Thoreau. As children, mostly what we knew about Thoreau was that he lived in a cabin out at Walden Pond, which seemed like fun; but we also got some small inkling of Thoreau’s principles of simplicity. Then in the summer after my senior year in high school, I actually sat down and read Walden. I found it slow going, but I learned something new: Thoreau was a mystic who found God everywhere, and his notions of simplicity were part and parcel of that vision of God. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I finally realized that Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond was a station on the Underground Railroad; and it wasn’t until I was middle-aged that I learned how Thoreau was dedicated to his family. As my own moral capacity grew, I was better able to understand Thoreau as a complex moral exemplar.
A good moral exemplar, someone truly worth emulating, is not going to be a simplistic goody two-shoes one-dimensional figure. Those simplistic figures don’t have to confront difficult moral choices, so there is little to learn from them. When Dr. King is portrayed merely as someone who advocated for Civil Rights for Black people, he is little better than a goody two-shoes. Then when you recall that gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 during a march for jobs, a march that included both Black and White organizers because the issue of jobs is an issue for all races — then Dr. King gains more complexity; then he becomes more worthy of our emulation. Finally, when you realize all his actions were rooted in his deep spiritual practices, he gains further complexity — and he challenges us to deepen our own spiritual practices, so that our own actions are rooted in our own spiritual practices.
And so you see, finding out about secular saints is not just an intellectual exercise. We can (and should) maintain a healthy skepticism about secular saints. But we also long for people to serve as examples of how our own lives can be more spiritually grounded. Contemplating the lives of secular saints can help go deeper into our own spiritual centers.
This, in fact, is how we learn to be human: we are taught to be human by the examples of other humans. And part of our moral growth is learning that every human being has flaws, even our moral examples; then if we’re honest with ourselves we admit that we too have flaws, and we can learn how a seep spiritual grounding can help us overcome our own flaws. And so it is that we learn how we can our best possible selves by considering the examples of the best possible humans we know. And this learning continues our whole live, helping our spirits grow ever stronger, and helping our selves to grow into ever greater goodness.