Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: Everett Hoagland

  • Gardens, not Walls

    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 the poem “Set the Garden on Fire” by Chen Chen. (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    Homily for the annual Water Ritual

    Every year, when we have this water ritual, we talk about how we are all connected. Or more precisely, how all human beings are connected to each other, and how all human beings are connected with all other living beings and indeed with the non-human world as well. We are literally, physically connected by the water cycle (as Kate and I pointed out during the moment for all ages), and we are also connected by ethical concerns, concerns that may not be physical but are just as literal as the water cycle.

    In the first reading, we heard a poem by Chen Chen, a now-middle-aged poet who was born in China and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. This is a poem about a suburban community. It could be a poem about Newton, or it could equally well be a poem about Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived and worked for the first forty years of my life, or it could just as well be a poem about Cohasset or Scituate or any South Shore suburban community. Here in the suburbs, we are both good at nurturing human community, and we are bad at nurturing human community.

    We are good at nurturing human community when we keep our communities safe so that we don’t have to fear interactions with strangers. We are good at nurturing human community when we support local organizations like parent-teacher groups, and elder affairs councils, and congregations, and scouting groups, and community aid groups like food pantries and the Cohasset Community Assistance Fund, and so on. Indeed, many of us move to the suburbs precisely because we think it will be easier to be part of human community here.

    On the other hand, suburbs can also be places that are actually destructive of human community. I’ll tell you a couple of stories to show what I mean, both taken from my home town of Concord. First story: A friend of mine had a new family move in next door, and when she saw her new neighbor getting his mail at the mailbox, she ventured to go up and say hello. He retrieved his mail from the mailbox, and then said into the air — not looking at her — “One of the things that I like about the suburbs is that you don’t have to talk to people.” Second story: When I was in my thirties, I was talking with an older friend about an affordable housing project that the town proposed building near her house. She was vehemently opposed, because, she said, “Black people might move in.” (She was so vehement I decided not to tell her that it was much more likely that I’d move in, because as a current town resident in the right income bracket, I’d get preference.) From these two stories, you can see that sometimes people in suburban towns do not nurture human connections.

    Of course this is true of people everywhere, not just in the suburbs. In the current political environment, we have two political parties whose primary vision for the future seems to be the eradication of the other political party. I have friends who are Democrats who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate Trump, and I have friends who are Republicans who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate liberals. Neither party are exemplars of nurturing human connection. Similarly, in the current ethical environment, too many of our thought leaders are people like the former CEO of Steward Health Care, who received hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, while at the same time the hospital chain didn’t have enough money to pay for critical supplies, or to pay staff salaries. Again, this man is not an exemplar of nurturing human connection.

    I’m reminded of a story in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath 31a. A man approached the famous Rabbi Hillel. “I would like to convert to Judaism and become a Jew,” he said. “I know I have to learn the Torah, but I’m a busy man. You must teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot.”

    “Certainly,” said Rabbi Hillel. “Stand on one foot.”

    The man balanced on one foot.

    “Repeat after me,” said Rabbi Hillel. “What is hateful to you, don’t do that to someone else.”

    The man repeated after Rabbi Hillel, “What is hateful to me, I won’t do that to someone else.”

    “That is the whole law,” said Rabbi Hillel. “All the rest of the Torah, all the rest of the oral teaching, is there to help explain this simple law. Now, go and learn it so it is a part of you.”

    Of course we all know that we shouldn’t do to someone else what is hateful to ourselves; as another rabbi put it, we all know that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. But notice that Rabbi Hillel adds the instruction: “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” (1) When Rabbi Hillel tells the man to go and study, he’s not talking about some academic kind of study; he’s talking about study as a sacred act; he’s talking about knowing something so well that it becomes a central part of who you are. An implicit part of this kind of study is that it must happen in community. This isn’t the kind of studying where you sit down alone somewhere and memorize a bunch of stuff. This is the kind of study where you engage with the biggest possible moral and ethical questions by talking and arguing with other people. Indeed, I’d argue that serious moral and ethical study can only be done in community, can only be done with other people.

    Actually, this is more or less what we do here each week on Sunday morning. Unlike some Christian traditions where the minister’s job is to preach from on high, telling the congregation what is right and what is wrong, our tradition is supposed to engender argument. (At least, that’s what I’d say, though it’s open to argument.) I would say that in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, oftentimes the role of the preacher is merely to articulate a problem or concern currently facing the congregational community, and to propose a preliminary resolution of that problem or concern. Then it is up to the members of the congregation to further think about and discuss the problem or concern, and to decide for themselves how this might affect their own lives.

    And when the preacher is wrong or inaccurate, it’s up to the elders of a Unitarian Universalist congregation to let the preacher know. When I was the minister at the New Bedford Unitarian church, Everett Hoagland, a poet and college professor, used to sit in the back pew in the center, and listen carefully to what I said in the sermon. He would tell me when something I said seemed particularly accurate or true; and when I got something wrong, he’d gently tell me where I went wrong. In that same congregation, Ken Peirce, a retired schoolteacher, sat in the center about a third of the way back. He would take notes during the sermon, and after the service hand me the notes as he greeted me on his way to social hour. His notes would often prompt a follow-up sermon.

    Now, not everyone is a college professor or retired schoolteacher. Most people are not going to take notes during a sermon and correct errors the way Ken and Everett did. I remember the old Universalist in one congregation who worked as the butcher at a local supermarket. What she wanted from a Sunday service, she said, was something to think about while she was at work during the week, something to turn over in her mind, something that might help her to live her life better. Or I think about Gladys, who was dying of cancer when I knew her; she had little interest in intellectual exercises, but she was facing the biggest possible human questions about life and death and mortality, and she came each Sunday to be part of a community where it normal and acceptable to talk about such big issues. Or I think about Nancy, who was in her seventies and homeless when I knew her; she came to Sunday services to have a time when she could think about something more than basic survival.

    To my mind, these people exemplify, each in their own way, what Rabbi Hillel meant when he said, “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” None of these people was Jewish, none of them read the actual Torah; but each of them, in their own way studied what it mean to be part of a community and a tradition that dealt with the highest moral and ethical and religious questions. For some of these people, study took the form of notes and verbal discussions. For others, study too the form of mulling over thoughts and ideas that might help one to lead a better life. Still others were confronting pressing questions of survival and life and death, and they needed a community where they could confront those questions openly and without shame.

    Because of this, I sometimes think the most important part of our Sunday services is social hour. That’s when you get a chance to have conversations with other people about life’s big issues. In our tradition, those conversations might not take the form of formal religious and theological discussion and argument; instead, those conversations are more likely to take the form of conversations about life and job and volunteer commitments and political actions and of course family (which includes both biological family and chosen family). Rabbi Hillel said that studying Torah was important, not for the sake of abstract religious and theological arguments, but rather for the sake of determining how to live by the dictum: “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” For Rabbi Hillel, study was not merely an academic matter, but a matter of the highest ethical values and concerns; study was not something you do in your head, study is something that affects your entire life.

    Socrates said something similar when he was facing the death penalty. According to Plato, Socrates told his accusers, “I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of [humanity], and that the unexamined life is not worth living.” (2) This, too, is what it means to study. To talk about virtue and other big questions is to lead a life that is well worth living.

    And now let me return to the suburbs, and to the poem by Chen Chen. In the poem, a Chinese family buys a house in the suburbs. At this point, the people living in the house next door have a couple of options. On the one hand, they could get to know this new family (and if they felt some resistance to getting to know the new family, they’d engage in a little self-examination to figure out why). On the other hand, they could plant a hedge of rose bushes, and begin to whisper rumors of drub money and illegals and so on. In the poem, the neighbors choose the second option. And in response, the poet says:

    “Friend, let’s really move in, let’s
    plunge our hands into the soil.
    Plant cilantro & strong tomatoes,
    watermelon & honey-hearted cantaloupe,
    good things, sweeter than any rose.
    Let’s build the community garden
    that never was. Let’s call the neighbors
    out, call for an orchard, not a wall.
    Trees with arms free, flaming
    into apple, peach, pear — every imaginable,
    edible fire.” (3)

    While the poet doesn’t talk about Torah study, I think he’s saying much the same thing as Rabbi Hillel. Both of them are teaching us the importance of nurturing human community. Whether you choose to use the metaphor of study, as Rabbi Hillel did; or the metaphor of discourse and conversation, as Socrates did; or the metaphor of planting a community garden, as Chen Chen does — the end result is the same. All these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” At the same time, all these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “that the unexamined life is not worth living.” And finally, all these are ways to call for an orchard, rather than a wall; to nurture human community, and further to nurture human community that is also a part of a community of all living beings.

    So those are the kinds of things that arise for me when I consider the imagery of the annual water ritual; that’s what arises for me when I ask myself how it is that all of us human beings are interconnected, and how it is that all human beings are connected with the rest of the universe. This is not to say that what comes up for me is any better than what comes up for you; you and I are both fallible beings, and it is only by talking together that we have a hope of coming closer to the ultimate truth.

    Notes

    (1) The William Davidson Talmud (Koren-Steinsaltz), www.sefaria.org/Shabbat.31a
    (2) Plato, The Apology, 38a; trans. Benjamin Jowett.
    (3) Chen Chen, “Set the Garden on Fire,” Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, ed. Melissa Tuckey (Univ of Georgia Press, 2018).

  • African Time

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading, an excerpt from the poem “Of the African Eve” by Everett Hoagland, is not included here due to copyright restrictions. Mr. Hoagland is the former Poet Laureate of New Bedford and member of this congregation.

    The second reading this morning is from an essay titled “African Indigenous Religions” by James Cox:

    “African indigenous religions can be called a form of humanism, because religious activity focuses on how positive benefits for society can be enhanced…. This humanism is a communal humanism and is not individualistic. Fulfillment comes for individuals as they participate in family and community relationships.

    “Because religions focuses on communal wellbeing, Africans are concerned with the present moment and not with a future existence after death. There is no sense of the past moving through the present to some future event; the past and the future find their menaing in the present. Hence, distance from the present is more important than the direction time takes…. The fundamental concerns of African societies with health and well-being are expressed primarily through ritual activity. Festivals, feasts, dances, and artistic expressions celebrate communal existence, both of the living and the dead.” [pp. 127-128]

    SERMON — “African Time”

    For the past three months, I’ve been exploring our Western religious tradition in my sermons on Sunday morning. That is to say, I’ve been talking about the religious heritage of Judaism, Christianity, and the indigenous European traditions currently being revived as paganism. Now I’d like to turn our attention on Sunday mornings to a broader field, and spend a little time engaging in conversations with non-Western religious traditions.

    I say we “engage in conversations with” other religious traditions, and I am careful to use exactly that phrase. In the last century, Unitarians and Universalists occasionally tried to adopt liturgies and other practices from other religious traditions. We have come to recognize that that sort of thing is wrong; we now have a term for it, “cultural misappropriation.” Rather than trying to steal the religious traditions of other peoples, we instead are coming to re-evaluate our own religious tradition, and we are finding great richness within our Unitarian and Universalist traditions; in short, we are becoming more comfortable with who we are, and we’re not trying to pretend we’re something else. Yet we also recognize that there are non-Western religious traditions out there, and we recognize how important it is to engage those religious traditions, not in the sense of trying to adopt them wholesale, or trying to co-opt them, but in the sense of engaging in conversations with equals.

    In honor of Black History Month, I thought I’d start us off by engaging in conversations with traditional African religions. I have been fascinated by traditional African religion and philosophy since 1983 when, as a philosophy student in college, I was introduced to this tradition by Lucius Outlaw, a philosopher and one of my mentors. I still remember when Lou had us read a book titled African Religions and Philosophy by John S. Mbiti. Mbiti was trained as a theologian, and I suppose you could say this was the very first book of theology I ever read.

    Mbiti was a Christian; he went to seminary and served as an Anglican priest, and only later became a scholar. As a Christian, he was of course concerned to a certain extent with missionary work, and if you read his work carefully, you get the sense that one of his motivations for his scholarly work was how to communicate Christianity to persons embedded in a traditional African framework. Coming from that perspective, he believed the way people look at time, the way Westerners and traditional Africans experience time, was the fundamental problem for the Western tradition as we try to understand Africans.

    You see, we Westerners believe that time is like a line. For us, time begins at some point — maybe with the Big Bang, or maybe with God creating the world. After that, everything moves forward in time. But one day, time will end — maybe time will end when entropy overtakes the universe, or maybe time will end with God’s last judgment. The specifics may differ, but whether you’re a traditional Christian, or a Jew or a Muslim; or whether you follow the insights of Western science; either way, we Westerners believe that time has a beginning and an end.

    Time considered as a line is so fundamental to our culture that we don’t even question it. We assume that’s the way things are, that there can be no other way of thinking about time. I mean, what could be more basic than a timeline? It’s so basic that we learn about timelines as children.

    But if you’ve ever taught younger children, you quickly realize that thinking of time as a line is a fairly sophisticated concept. If you show a timeline to a preschooler, he or she will simply not get what you’re taking about; preschoolers like timelines, they think they’re pretty, but they don’t really understand them. And when children start to learn how timelines work — really learn about timelines, to the point where they can create their own timeline without outside help — you can see the pride they take in this accomplishment. I can remember when I first learned how to make a timeline as a child; I remember feeling a sense of wonder at this fascinating new concept; it was something I quite literally had never thought of when I was younger.

    So we Westerners train our children to think of time as a line. But John S. Mbiti tells us that traditional Africans think of time differently. Mbiti says in traditional Africa

    “…time is a two-dimensional phenomenon, with a long past, a present, and virtually no future. The linear concept of time in Western thought, with an indefinite past, present, and infinite future, is practically foreign to African thinking…. What is taking place now no doubt unfolds in the future, but once an event has taken place, it is no longer in the future but in the present and the past. Actual time [as opposed to potential time] is therefore what is present and what is past. It moves ‘backward’ rather than ‘forward’; and people set their minds not on future things, but chiefly on what has taken place.” [pp. 21-23]

    Since I first read this passage, twenty-some years ago, I have been fascinated by this idea that there could be a very different way of understanding time.

    It should be obvious that a linear notion of time is essential to Western religions. For Christians and Jews, time begins when God created the universe, time unfold in a linear fashion, and one day God will bring about an end to time. All the indigenous European pagan traditions I’m familiar with have a similar understanding of time: time begins when the universe is created, and it flows in a line from that point to the present, and an many European pagan traditions the universe will someday end — think of Norse myths for one example. And non-theistic humanists are pretty sure that the universe started with the Big Bang, time proceeds in a linear fashion from there, and the universe will end when everything cools down from entropy.

    It’s my guess that most of us here this morning think of time as a line, and for most of us, religion is unthinkable without linear time. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing to think about time as linear. Unitarians of a hundred years ago used to say they believed in salvation by character and progress onwards and upwards forever — progress onwards and upwards forever requires us to think of time as a line headed in one direction. At some level, we still retain that belief, which is why we are so dedicated to social justice work: we know, given time, that we can overcome injustice and make the world a better place. The good side of thinking of time as a line means that the Western tradition holds out the possibility of working towards greater justice in the world.

    However, the traditional African concept of time challenges us to understand things in a new way. And this brings me to the first reading this morning, the poem by Everett Hoagland.

    In the poem, Everett Hoagland points out the great irony of Westerners who claim to have discovered certain things. Christopher Columbus claimed to have discovered the Americas, while ignoring the native peoples who discovered the land thousands of years earlier. Livingston claimed to have discovered a waterfall in Africa, which he named after a British queen “to keep it from going native.” And now, says Everett Hoagland, based on the analysis of mitochondria in human DNA, there are scientists who claim to have discovered an ancient African woman who is the ancestor of all, and these scientists have named this hypothetical woman “Eve.” She was an “African Eve,” says Everett Hoagland, and these scientists who discovered and named her, “they acknowledge eden was/ and mother africa is.” And then later in the poem, we hear: “she is more than isis aphrodite madonna/ even more than eve.”

    She was even more than Eve. And I’d like us to try to understand what the poet means when he says she is even more than Eve. For me, one way to understand how she is more than Eve is to understand time in a different way. So I’m going to ask you to bear with me for a moment — we’re going to go back to John S. Mbiti, get a little better understanding of how traditional Africans understand time, and then return to the African Eve.

    First, back to John Mbiti. Mbiti did research in East African languages, and discovered that in some ways these East African languages have a richer understanding of time than do many Western languages. Mbiti found nine verb tenses in these languages. There are three future tenses: East Africans can talk about a far future of perhaps two years worth of natural cycles; an immediate future of within the next short while; and then a future that places one event after another event. East Africans have three present tenses: what’s in the process of happening right now; what has happened in the past hour or so; and what has happened today since morning. Then there are three past tenses: one which speaks of yesterday; one which speaks of any day before yesterday but within living memory; and then a tense which refers to the deep past of no specific time.

    From a theological or religious point of view, I am especially fascinated by this last past-tense, which speaks of the deep past, a past of no specific time. If we had such a verb tense in English, it would solve lots of religious problems for us. In our Western languages, we are stuck on the timeline of historical time. When we speak of something in the past, we can only speak of it as if that event actually truly happened as history. This has caused us much confusion. For example, when we speak of God creating the world, we can only speak of that as if it actually happened, which confuses things badly. It confuses things so badly that there are people who are convinced that you can assign a historical date to God’s creation of the world: they say that God created the world in the year 4004 B.C.; so if you want to know exactly when the Biblical Eve was alive, it was 4,000 years ago. I was recently reading a news article about a Christian company that offers tours of the Grand Canyon, where they assume that the Grand Canyon is less than 6,000 years old, and they point out alleged evidence that the Grand Canyon was not carved out by the Colorado River over millions of years. These tours are very popular, but the only reason they exist is because in our Western tradition, we confuse the past-of-no-specific-time, and the actual historical past. Timelines are powerful, but they can be dangerous!

    And in his poem, Everett Hoagland points out another danger. Those scientists who say they discovered an African Eve are actually using their verb tenses incorrectly. They need to distinguish between the past-of-no-specific-time, and the past-of-scientific-inquiry. Eve, whether she is an African Eve or a biblical Eve, lives in the past-of-no-specific-time. Eve did not ever live in the historical past, the past that can be explored by scientific inquiry; Eve is no more real than Anasi the spider, and in fact Anasi and Eve live in exactly the same time. It is extraordinarily presumptuous for those scientists to presume to name that hypothetical woman, the source of all human mitochondrial DNA, to name her “Eve.” Worse yet, those scientists give her a Western name, straight out of the Western religious tradition. And that’s as bad as Christopher Columbus claiming to have discovered the Americas; that’s just as presumptuous as when Livingston decided he would name that African waterfall.

    Not only that, but once you call this hypothetical woman who was the source of all human DNA “Eve,” why that raises this funny possibility that the “African Eve” lived in some kind of “African Eden.” And from there, it would be easy to find ourselves right back in the same trap that certain fundamentalist Christians fall into, when those fundamentalist Christians try to tell us that when human beings lived in the Garden of Eden back in 4,004 B.C.E., the world was perfect and then woman sinned and it’s all been downhill from there. My friends, if we can just remember to distinguish between the past-of-no-specific time, and the actual past, we could save ourselves a lot of problems.

    We challenge ourselves by exploring other religious traditions. Traditional African religions can teach us something about ourselves: they can show us that our religious tradition has us understand time as a line. Traditional African religions can also help us see that we have to be careful with our religious understandings of time as a line. For if time is a line, that timeline will come to an end sometime in the future. From a religious point of view, we Westerners have to watch our for a deep-seated belief in the inevitable end of the world. This kind of thinking can be most destructive: if you believe the world is going to end someday, maybe sooner rather than later, you have less incentive to make this present world any better; if everything’s going to end and die anyway, why clean up the environment, why feed the hungry, why correct social injustice?

    So it is that by exploring other religious traditions, we learn more about ourselves than about those religious traditions.