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).