Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: James Luther Adams

  • When Our Actions Define Us, pt. 2

    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.

    A three part series about free will — first sermon in this series — second sermon in this series

    Readings

    The first reading was a poem titled “Money” by Philip Larkin” (not included here due to copyright restrictions).

    The second reading was a poem titled “Grace” by Orlando Ricardo Menes (not included here due to copyright restrictions).

    Sermon

    This is the third sermon in a three-part series. The series began with a question one of you asked during last spring’s question box sermon: What’s the theological history of our congregation? It turned out that one thread running through all three centuries of our history is a belief that human beings have some control over their own destinies; that is, we argue that we have at least some free will. The second sermon in the series explored how our choices affect us; specifically, how the decisions we make about sexuality help define who we are. This week, I’m going to look at how the choices we make around money can affect who we are; and I feel choices around money go far beyond how I choose to spend my pocket money.

    In our society, like it or not, money is tied to what we do for work — or money can be tied to what we don’t do for work, as for example if your parents give you so much money that you don’t have to work, or conversely if you can’t work or can’t find a job. And this brings up an interesting point: once we start thinking about work and jobs, we quickly discover that our freedom is limited and directed by several things: the people around us, by random chance, and by our own personal strengths and limitations. I’ll give you an example of how this works, taken from my own life — not because I’m especially interesting, but because I can tell you about my own life without violating someone else’s confidence.

    I entered the workforce in the middle of the 1982 recession. Although I had just finished college, the best job I found did not require a college degree, and that was working as a salesman in a lumberyard (it was a great job, by the way, and I enjoyed the seven years I worked there). By contrast, one of my college classmates, a guy named Howie Lutnick, immediately found a job working in finance, and he quickly became rich. Now of course some of this was due to natural abilities — Howie Lutnick had skills and abilities that I lacked, which shows that your personal choices and decisions are limited by your personal skills and abilities. Some of this was also due to personal inclination — I had no desire to work in finance, and really couldn’t even conceive of having such a job (so much the worse for me). Some of this was also due to pure luck — Howie Lutnick lucked out, but overall statistics show that those of us who entered the workforce in the middle of the 1982 recession have had on average significantly lower salaries than the people a few years older or younger than us; these lower salaries persisted for many years, and perhaps they still do today.

    Thus you can see that my choices were limited when it came to choosing my first job. Howie Lutnick’s choices were also limited, but in a different direction; so that now one of us is the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and the other is a small town minister. As it has turned out, I’m perfectly happy with the direction my life has taken. Howie Lutnick — now known as Howard Lutnick — is in the Epstein files, and I am not. It would be easy for me to be smug and say that if I had been the one to go into finance, I would never have appeared in the Epstein files. But I’m not going to say that, because I don’t know that it’s true. Jeffery Epstein was a convincing and accomplished con man, and one of the things I learned while working as a salesman is that all of us are susceptible to con artists, salespeople, or anyone who know how to play on people’s feelings. I’m actually making a different point here: when Howie Lutnick took a job in finance, that decision eventually opened up choices for him that I never had to think about; and at the same time, when I took a job selling lumber, that decision eventually opened up choices for me that Howie Lutnick never had to think about.

    This shows that when we make a decision about what job to take, that decision can open some new choices for us and close off other choices for us, effectually putting limits on our freedom to act. Oftentimes when we make decisions about jobs or work, we cannot foresee how that’s going to limit our future choices. When he took the job in finance, Howie Lutnick never thought he’d be in the Epstein files. When I chose to work as a salesman in a lumberyard, I never thought I’d wind up as the minister here in Cohasset. So even while we have great freedom to make decisions about our jobs and our worklife, those decisions ultimately place limits on our freedom to act.

    I want to be sure to acknowledge how not having a job affects your freedom of action. Instead of telling you about unemployment, I’ll give you a less obvious example: I spent five years working for a carpenter, and he and I were both active in conservation and environmental activities. One of the people we both knew was a man whom I’ll call Fred. Fred was rich, and he didn’t have to work for a living. One day Fred asked to have coffee with both of us (as I recall, we did not let him buy our coffee), and he bared his soul to us. He felt guilty about not having a job. He felt like he wanted to work at something. I realize now that he probably wanted to work as a carpenter (which seems like romantic work until the first time you get hurt on the job), but we never let him get to that point. We both stared at him, dumbfounded, and then my boss said, “Look Fred, you’re the backbone of every major conservation organization in town. You spend, what, thirty or forty hours a week doing that? You already have a job.” And then we both told Fred how it was far more important that he kept working at his volunteer jobs. So you see, not having paid employment also limits your freedom of choice — in Fred’s case, our town did not need another carpenter, but we did need Fred to continue his volunteer work in environmental organizations. We can also see from this story that unpaid work can be just as important as paid work — not just for rich people like Fred, but any stay-at-home parent is doing unpaid work that is far more important for the human race than anything Howie Lutnick has done in his finance jobs.

    So far I’ve been talking about jobs, because for many of us our jobs — whether those jobs are paid or unpaid — provide our most important, most consequential relationship with money. Obviously, there is more to money than just your worklife. We should also consider the choices we all make about how and where to spend our money. Generally, when we think about how we spend our money, we think about how we choose to spend our discretionary income. We think about the person who refuses to buy their coffee at a chain store like Starbucks, and instead buys their coffee at a locally-owned coffee shop. Or the person who buys whatever they can from Amazon, because between work and family responsibilities they just don’t have the time to shop at brick and mortar stores.

    But I’d like to focus in on another choice that we all have when it comes to money. Recently, Carol and I have been reading the book The Righteous Mind: How Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. Carol is reading the book for her book group, and when she left it on the kitchen table, I started reading it too. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist, and in this book he explores the psychology of morals and morality. In the chapter titled “Religion Is a Team Sport,” Haidt cites statistics about religion and money:

    “Studies of charitable giving in the United States show that people in the least religious fifth of the population give just 1.5 percent of their money to charity. People in the most religious fifth (based on church attendance, not belief) give a whopping 7 percent of their income to charity, and the majority of that is to religious organizations.” (p. 265)

    (I have to interject a critical comment here: Haidt used the term “church attendance,” when he really means “attendance at religious services.” He grew up Jewish, he should know better.)

    Because these religious people give more to their religious organization than to other charities, Haidt first uses this statistic to show that religions prompt us to become what he calls “parochial altruists”; that is, people who are “generous toward members of their own moral communities.” Then he goes on to cite further studies showing that people who regularly attend religious services turn out to be more generous and charitable across the board. Haidt goes so far as to say that religious people make “better neighbors and citizens” (p. 267). Nor do specific beliefs have much to do with how religion makes us more generous and more charitable. Instead, it’s belonging to a community that makes us more generous and charitable. Haidt puts it this way:

    “The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.” (p. 267)

    This remind me of Wynne Furth, who was the chair of the board of trustees for a number of years at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto while I worked there. Wynne was a pretty remarkable person. She was an extremely successful lawyer, though she was part of a generation that still discouraged women from becoming lawyers. She could have made more money in private practice, but spent much of her career as a municipal employee, in public service jobs. When I knew her, Wynne was the city attorney for one of the more conflict-ridden cities in the San Francisco Bay Area; her name regularly appeared in news stories when she had to tell that city that what they were about to do was illegal. To say that she had a strong moral compass would be an understatement.

    One year during the Palo Alto congregation’s annual fundraising drive, Wynne stood up at a public meeting to talk about her charitable giving. She told the people at the meeting that she and her husband Don had decided to give ten percent of their gross income to charity; and half of that, or five percent of their gross income, would go to the Palo Alto congregation. What particularly struck me was how happy and cheerful she seemed when she said this. It seemed to me that charitable giving actually made her feel better about herself, and better about the world.

    That inspired me; I wanted some of those feelings. I also knew that giving ten percent of our gross income was out of reach for us at that point, because the wickedly high rents of the Bay Area meant that we were officially rent-burdened, spending more than a third of our income on housing. Besides, Wynne had made it clear that her level of charitable giving was simply not possible for everyone. She was not trying to convince everyone that there is some magic percentage of charitable giving that we all must reach. Instead, her real point was that we all have choices about what we do with our money. In her case, after she and Don had taken care of their ordinary living expenses, they looked at what was left over, thought about what they wanted to do with it, and made the choice to increase their charitable giving. This in turn seemed to affect their emotional well-being; both Wynne and Don seemed happy and content in choosing to give so much to their congregation.

    Now I have to take you on another slight digression, to tell you about what James Luther Adams said about voluntary associations. A voluntary association is any organized group where you freely join together with other people to accomplish some shared purpose. These are groups that are outside the family, outside or governments, and outside of businesses. Our congregation is a voluntary association; the Rotary club is a voluntary association; a community choir is a voluntary association.

    James Luther Adams got interested with voluntary associations when he visited Nazi Germany during the 1930s. He saw that one of the first things a totalitarian government does is to get rid of all the voluntary associations — either that, or make them a part of the totalitarian government itself. Why is this so? In a mass industrialized society, it is very easy for people to become separated individuals. So for example, here is Cohasset we are part of a huge industrialized society where it is very easy for us to lead entirely separate lives; we don’t even have to go out of our houses any more to go shopping, because we can get everything delivered. This means we do not have the strong social ties that people in Cohasset had three hundred years ago, when you were dependent on help from your neighbors for food and shelter. Today, we’re dependent, not on our neighbors, but on how much money we have; and the more money you have, the more of an isolated individual you are allowed to be. We can avoid this kind of isolation by joining voluntary associations. And James Luther Adams saw that it is much easier for a totalitarian government to control us when there are no vountary associations, when we are nothing but isolated individuals. Thus, voluntary associations are crucial for maintaining a free democratic government; and a free democratic government is crucial for maintaining our individual freedom.

    No wonder then that we Unitarian Universalists place such importance on democracy. For a religion like ours that places such importance in free will — the freedom to make moral decisions about our lives, so we can become better people — a free democratic government is crucial for giving us the latitude we need to make better choices for ourselves. In a totalitarian society, we would have very little choice about what we do with our lives; under a totalitarian regime, Wynne Furth would not have been allowed to give ten percent of her income to charitable organizations, because there would be no charitable organizations, there would only be the totalitarian government.

    I sometimes hear people say that they could never belong to an organized religion, because if they did they would have to submit themselves to some kind of religious authority. Presumably, these people would say the same thing about any other group as well Although if this is your attitude, then don’t join any voluntary association: don’t join a sports team, because you’ll have to submit to the authority of the team captain and the umpires; don’t join a community choir or a band because sometimes you have to do what other musicians tell you to do; and so on. I can partially understand this attitude, because you do have to draw the line somewhere; I refuse to give money to college I graduated from because in my opinion they’ve failed to live up to the high moral ideals of their Quaker founders. But if we disassociate ourselves from every single voluntary association, then we leave ourselves vulnerable to totalitarianism.

    And this all comes back to money. Voluntary associations require money to survive. When we give no money to any voluntary association, we are in effect starving voluntary associations of what they need to stay viable; so if we give no money to any voluntary associations, then we have no one to blame but ourselves when totalitarianism takes over. Conversely, when we money to voluntary associations — when we, in effect, submit ourselves to the moral authority of some charitable group — we paradoxically gain more individual freedom for ourselves. This year I plan to make a substantial gift (substantial for me, anyway) to the Cohasset Community Aid Fund; it might seem like I have more freedom if I simply gave that money away directly, but by joining with other people my gift will have a greater impact on the community, and it also serves as an expression of loyalty to the town I live in. I plan on giving another substantial gift (again, substantial by my standards) to the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; to me this feels like a patriotic gift, because while I don’t agree with everything the NAACP does, overall they uphold the highest American values of democracy. And yes, I’m planning to give a substantial gift to First Parish, too, although this is partly for selfish reasons; this is the friendliest place I know of anywhere on the South Shore, and I like being here. I’m also giving to First Parish for non-selfish reasons, because I think the South Shore benefits from our moral example.

    As I talk about giving away money to these organizations, I start to have feelings that are a little bit like what I saw in Wynne Furth when she talked about her charitable giving. I feel more cheerful and happier (and Lord knows, given the news these days I can stand some more cheerfulness and happiness). I can’t afford to give at the level Wynne Furth was able to give; but it’s not the dollar amount, nor the percentage amount, that counts: what counts is giving so that it feels good. And while it would seem that giving more to charitable organizations (which means spending less on myself) is going to lead to a loss of freedom for me (because now I can’t buy as much stuff), that’s not what I find. That happiness and cheerfulness that I saw in Wynne Furth — those are feelings that actually give me psychic freedom. That psychic freedom in turn allows me more psychic space to make better choices in my life, thus further increasing my freedom to choose the good.

    So it is that we come to find out that our freedom to make decisions does not happen in isolation. Our decisions are always influenced by the wider human community, and our decisions in turn have a significant impact on that wider human community. We have free will, but our freedom of choice is really the freedom to strengthen or weaken our relationships with other people, and with the wider human community. Oftentimes, we feel that selflessness restricts our freedom of action. Yet when we choose selflessness over selfishness, we feel better, and ultimately that seems to allow us greater freedom to chose the good.

    Once again, it all seems to boil down to what we tell preschoolers: Be kind. Help other people. And that will make you feel good about yourself.

  • Global Problems, Local Actions

    Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading is from an essay titled “The Evolution of My Social Concern” by James Luther Adams. Adams was a Unitarian Universalist minister and professor at Harvard. In the 1930s, he studied in Germany where he experienced the rise of Naziism. In a 1977 essay, he reflected on those experiences:

    “The German universities, supposedly independent entities, had been fairly easily Nazified…. Hitler has also liquidated the trade unions…. The Masons were forbidden to hold meetings. Repeatedly, I heard anti-Nazis say, If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler. I noticed the stubborn resistance of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I observed also the lack of religious pluralism in a country that had no significant Nonconformist movement in the Christian churches. Gradually I came to the conviction that a decisive institution of the viable democratic society is the voluntary association as a medium for the assumption of civic responsibility.”

    [Essay dated 1977, reprinted in Voluntary Associations: Socio-cultural Analyses and Theological Interpretation, ed. J. Ronald Engel (Chicago: Exploration Press of the Chicago Theological Seminary, 1986).]

    The second reading is from “You Are Responsible,” in the book Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principle and Practices by Peter Drucker.

    “Self-development is very deeply meshed in with the mission of the nonprofit organization, with commitment and belief that the work done in this church or this school matters. You cannot allow the lack of resources, of money, of people, and of time (always the scarcest) to overwhelm you…. Paying serious attention to self-development — your own and that of everyone in the nonprofit organization — is not a luxury. Most people don’t continue to work for a nonprofit organization if they don’t share, at least in part, the vision of the organization. Volunteers, particularly, who don’t get a great deal out of working for the organization aren’t going to be around very long. They don’t get a check, so they have to get even more out of the organization’s work. In fact, you don’t want people who stay on with the organization just because that’s what they’ve always done but who don’t believe in the organization any more. … You want constructive discontent. That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on respond, ‘But it’s so important!’

    “The key to building an organization with such a spirit is organizing the work so everyone feels essential to a goal they believe in.”

    Sermon: Global Problems, Local Actions

    James Luther Adams, probably the greatest Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century, spent most of his brilliant career studying voluntary associations. A voluntary association is a group of people who have freely joined together, with no profit motive, to pursue a shared goal or interest.

    The stereotype of the theologian is someone who writes unreadable books on how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin. Thus it might seem odd for a theologian to study something practical like voluntary associations. But that’s where James Luther Adams’s brilliance comes in. He realized that here in the United States, the primary location for religion was in local congregations, which were voluntary associations.

    Another of Adams’s great insights was that one of the first things authoritarian governments do is to weaken, destroy, or take over all voluntary associations. Adams came to this realization during the 1930s while he was studying in Nazi Germany. One of the first things the Nazis did when they got into power was to take control of voluntary associations. The Nazis abolished many groups, from the trade unions to the Masons. They got rid of any youth movements such as Scouting that were already in existence, and instead imposed their own Nazi youth movements. They took over the churches, and ran the churches as a part of the Nazi state. Obviously, then, voluntary associations are crucial to a functioning democracy, and a critical bulwark against the authoritarian governments that would abolish them.

    By combining these two insights, Adams helped us understand that here in the United States, religious congregations help support democracy. In fact, religious congregations are more important than some other voluntary associations, because congregations are groups that aspire to make a better society. The local soccer club is a voluntary association, but it has no aspirations beyond providing soccer games for its members. There are many such groups which exist primarily for the pleasure of their members. By contrast, a religious congregation is a voluntary association which exists not just for the pleasure of its members, but which also has higher goals: a vision of the earth made fair and all her people one.

    When Adams returned from studying in Germany, he confronted an unpleasant realization about himself. Everyone in a democracy has a role in supporting that democracy. But after living for a time in an authoritarian state, Adams felt that he wasn’t doing enough to support democracy. In a 1966 essay titled “The Indispensable Discipline of Social Responsibility,” Adams wrote:

    “…I had to confront a rather embarrassing question. I had to ask myself, ‘What in your typical behavior as an American citizen have you done that would help to prevent the rise of authoritarian government in your own country? What disciplines of democracy (except voting) have you habitually undertaken with other people which could serve in any way to directly affect public policy?’ More bluntly stated: I asked myself, ‘What precisely is the difference between you and a political idiot?’”

    His answer, of course, was to increase his participation in voluntary associations. He participated in a number of racial integration movements in the 1940s and 1950s. He was active for many years with the American Civil Liberties Union. He participated in a number of professional associations. And he was always active in his local Unitarian Universalist congregation. He not only studied voluntary associations, he lived voluntary associations.

    Adams died in 1994. Six years later, in the year 2000, the sociologist Robert Putnam published a book titled “Bowling Alone” in which he detailed how Americans were less and less involved in voluntary associations. That trend has continued to the present day: we Americans no longer join bowling leagues, we have stopped attending religious services, we don’t belong to the Masons or the Order of the Eastern Star. Putnam concluded that the two primary reasons for Americans’ decreasing involvement in voluntary associations were electronic entertainment — primarily television in those days — and generational change.

    A quarter of a century later, the decline in voluntary associations seems to be continuing. In 2019, researchers at the University of Maryland wrote a report titled “A Less Charitable Nation” in which they said: “Immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, the volunteer rate surged to a peak level and stayed there for three straight years. After this record high in volunteering, the national rate of American volunteering declined and continued to slide throughout the decade from 2004 to 2015….” (1)

    In my limited observation, this trend may have grown more pronounced during the pandemic, as people stayed safely at home with their electronic entertainment. Nor has the end of lockdown done much to change lure us Americans back into the public sphere. We continue to prefer staying at home with our electronic entertainment.

    Not surprisingly, this trend of staying at home — this trend of becoming disengaged from face-to-face groups and voluntary associations — has been accompanied by a surge in loneliness, depression, and anxiety disorders. The evolutionary development of human beings did not include an adaptation to sit at home in relative isolation while staring at screens. This epidemic of loneliness and depression has become the major spiritual crisis of our time. I’ll say more about this spiritual crisis in a moment.

    Also not surprising: this is combined with an increase in demagoguery across the political spectrum. Civic engagement through voluntary associations remains a critical part of democracy. As we Americans spend more and more time with electronic entertainment, and less and less time in face-to-face groups and voluntary associations, we’re actually weakening our democracy. Indeed, it feels like we’re facing a major crisis in our democracy.

    These two crises — the spiritual crisis of loneliness, and the democratic crisis of demagoguery — both have at least some roots in the American withdrawal from voluntary associations. Robert Putnam called it “electronic entertainment,” and today we might call it “screen time,” but it amounts to the same thing. We all do a lot of staring at screens. And it appears that all that staring at screens isn’t very good for us, and it isn’t very good for democracy.

    I say this as someone who has spent a good part of his life happily staring at screens. Since the days of Usenet, back in the 1990s, I’ve lived way too much of my life online, and enjoyed almost all of it. But this summer I started noticing how much time I spent staring at screens. I didn’t count time at work, since I have to use email and videoconferencing for my job. But I realized I might spend 8 hours a day, outside of work time, staring at a screen. As a spiritual experiment, I decided to reduce my screen time by (say) twenty-five percent, and see what happened.

    Not surprisingly, I found I had more time to do other things, like taking walks, or engaging in face-to-face activities, or practicing the ‘ukulele (and I was pleasantly surprised at how much better my ‘ukulele playing got). But the real surprise was on the spiritual side of things. I felt better. Cutting twenty-five percent of my screen time meant cutting out almost every social media outlet. I stopped reading Facebook and the like. I stopped doomscrolling through the endless clickbait bad-news stories that dominate online news sites. The result was that I felt happier and more hopeful. To put it spiritually, with less screen time, I was no longer bogged down in minutiae and details. This seemed to strengthen my connection with something larger than myself.

    And here’s another thing I noticed: now that I’m not obsessively tracking every last detail of the presidential election, I can pay more attention to local issues. We have quite an array of local issues that need attention paid to them. The local issues on the South Shore include food insecurity, housing insecurity, an epidemic of mental illness, and maybe even a decline in good governance in our local governments.

    These local problems sometimes get put to one side when we spend most of our time worrying about the clash between the two national presidential candidates. This is coupled with a tendency to believe that if only our political candidate wins the presidential election, all our local problems will be solved.

    This brings me to the famous saying, “Think globally and act locally.” This saying is often attributed to the biologist René Dubos, but people were saying similar things long before Dubos said it in 1977. I’d argue that Jesus of Nazareth lived out that saying in everything he did: he always considered the big picture, up to and including God; but at the same time he was always focused on the needs and concerns of the individual people immediately in front of him. We could say the same of the Buddha and other great spiritual thinkers.

    I’d also argue that this is exactly what our congregation has been doing for the past three centuries. We consider the big picture, up to and including whatever each of us call the universal. But we also focus on the needs and concerns of the people in this congregation, and the people in our immediate community. We continue to do that today. We take care of each other, as best we can. We address food insecurity in the wider community by maintaining a drop box for the Cohasset Food Pantry. We’re in the process of addressing housing insecurity here in Cohasset, as some of us work to establish a community fund that can help people with short term needs, such as meeting a sudden rent increase. We address the epidemic of mental illness in children and teens by supporting the families who come here, and by providing religious education programs that nurture our children and teens and build their social-emotional skills.

    We also serve as a crucial training ground for democracy, and the skills associated with democracy. Democracy — especially local democracy — needs people who can speak in public, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy requires an understanding of how to work with others towards common goals, even when you disagree, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy needs people who see the big picture but who can focus on the immediate needs of the people right in front of them, and we all practice that skill here in our congregation.

    I also believe that a functioning democracy needs people who are spiritually grounded. By “spiritually grounded,” I mean people who think deeply about the human condition, people who consider who they are in relation to the universe and to universal values, people who ponder how to make the world a better place. Spiritually grounded people are also people who have a community where they can feel grounded, such that they don’t sink into despair or disperse their energies in unwonted optimism.

    This turns out to be one of the key functions of a good congregation. The brilliant management theorist Peter Drucker said that nonprofits can make everyone feel in the organization feel essential to a shared goal they all believe in. Drucker gives a perfect example of how that can play out, which we heard in the second reading: “That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on, respond, ‘But it’s so important!’” The strength of a shared vision carries us through the inevitable frustrations of working together with fallible human beings who have come together in an imperfect community.

    We tend to feel most spiritually grounded when we find ourselves working together with others towards a shared vision for a better world. This is the greatest of spiritual practices: to come together in community to shape a better world. May we each contribute to this great spiritual project in whatever way we can; and in so doing may we each find ourselves spiritually grounded.

    Note:

    (1) “A Less Charitable Nation: The Decline of Volunteering and Giving in the United States,” Nathan Dietz, Senior Researcher, Do Good Institute, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Robert T. Grimm, Jr., Levenson Family Chair in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland

  • The Importance of Community

    Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon text may contain typographical errors. The sermon as preached included a significant amount of improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading is a tale titled “The Strength of Community,” from the book Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber, translated by Olga Marx.

    It is told:

    Once, on the evening after the Day of Atonement, the moon was hidden behind the clouds and the Baal Shem could not go out to say the Blessing of the New Moon. This weighed so heavily on his spirit, for now, as often before, he felt that destiny too great to be gauged depended on the work of his lips. In vain he concentrated his intrinsic power on the light of the wandering star, to help it throw off the heavy sheath: whenever he sent some out, he was told that the clouds had grown even more lowering. Finally he gave up hope.

    In the meantime, the hasidim who knew nothing of the Baal Shem’s grief, had gathered in the front room of the house and begun to dance, for on this evening that was their way of celebrating with festal joy the atonement for the year, brought about the the zaddik’s priestly service. When their holy delight mounted higher and higher, they invaded the Baal Shem’s chamber, still dancing. Overwhelmed by their own frenzy of happiness they took him by the hands, as he sat there sunk in gloom, and drew him into the round. At this moment, someone called outside. The night had suddenly grown light; in greater radiance than ever before, the moon curved on a flawless sky. [Book 1, p. 54]

    The second reading is from Keeping Heart on Pine Ridge: Family Ties, Warrior Culture, Commodity Foods, Rez Dogs, and the Sacred by Vic Glover [Summertown, Tenn.: Native Voices, 2004, pp. 83-83]. In this book, Glover writes about living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, keeping alive the Lakota Sioux ways, including the sacred ceremonies of weekly sweat lodges and the annual Sun Dance.

    Had a house full of people again today…. We got a load of wood [for the sweat lodge] and then met back up here, where Lupe made some bean and cheese burritos. Tom came up from base camp, the Old Man stopped by, and some other Sun Dancers came through….

    While sitting around the table and drinking coffee, talk led to the Sun Dance, now only four and a half months away. A number of things were discussed, including the presumptuousness of some people who circumvented the protocols of the invitation process and thought they could just show up and start dancing, without speaking to the sponsor, Tom, or the lead dancer, also Tom.

    While the discussion shifted to the preparations, the same sentiments were expressed. One of the dancers remarked about his eleven years of preparing before entering the arbor, and now, ‘after three sweat lodges, they think they’re ready to dance,’ he said….

    “Overnight Indians,” said another of the men seated around the table. “Everybody wants it to happen right now, and they don’t know how to go about it. They think they’re ready, but they’re not.”…

    Maybe it’s the planetary alignment. Maybe it’s the Age of Aquarius. Maybe it don’t take as long as it used to. Maybe there’s a sense of urgency now…. At this Sun Dance we’ve seen more than one person come and dance one year, never to return. “Those people don’t understand,” said Loretta, one day in her kitchen. “They don’t know what commitment means, and their lives are gonna be like that. They didn’t know how hard it was going to be.”

    Sermon: “The Importance of Community”

    You know the phrase “kumbayah moment.” It’s a derogatory, cynical phrase. When management tells employees they all have to come to some stupid group activity in order to build community, management is trying to create a “kumbayah moment.” During the 2008 elections, conservatives made fun of Barack Obama’s calls for unity, accusing Obama of giving “kumbayah speeches.” Liberals have balked at calls to make common cause with conservatives by saying “Stop the kumbayah.”(1) “Kumbayah” has become synonymous with sappy, manipulative platitudes calling on everyone to just get along. It comes from the folk song “Kumbayah,” which was introduced into popular culture in the 1950s by white singers of the Folk Revival. Then the song became a staple of day camps, overnight camps, and church camps: the song evokes images of camp counselors telling campers to sit around a campfire and hold hands while singing this song.

    Originally, the song had an entirely different meaning. A folklorist for the Library of Congress recorded the earliest version of the song in 1926, as sung by Henry Wylie. Wylie begins the song with: “Somebody need you Lord, come by here / Oh Lord, come by here.” And he ends the song with: “In the morning, morning, won’t you come by here / Oh Lord, come by here.” According to the Library of Congress, this song was widely known in the American South. When White northern folksingers discovered the song in the Library of Congress archives, they misinterpreted the Southern Black dialect of Henry Wylie, and turned “Come by here” into “Kumbayah.” (2) In so doing, they unintentionally obscured the original meaning of the song. “Come by Here” is not a feel-good, let’s-all-get-along song. On the surface, it’s a song about hard times, and asking the Lord for comfort. Knowing that it’s an African American song reveals a deeper meaning: it’s a song about oppression and the potential for relief from oppression, and it’s a song of hope that a new day will dawn when oppression will end.

    The word “community” has started to become a lot like the word “Kumbayah.” Some corporations tell their workers about the importance of community in the workplace. Some public figures talk about the importance of community in the United States, though often their notion of community only extends as far as their political allies. We give our children vague instructions to “build community,” whatever that means in practice. Like “kumbayah,” the term “community” is beginning to evoke images of camp counselors telling campers to sit around a campfire and hold hands while singing this song, whether they want to or not.

    That is a serious misunderstanding of what “community” means. As we heard in the first reading, community can enable you to do things that you could not do on your own. At its best, community allows us to work with others to stop or to prevent oppression. Let me tell you two brief stories that illustrate this point.

    The first story is about a young Unitarian minister named James Luther Adams; he later became the greatest Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century. But in 1927 he was in Nuremberg, Germany, watching a parade during a mass rally of the Nazi Party. Partway into this four-hour long parade, Adams asked some of the people watching the parade about the significance of the swastika symbol. He soon found himself in the middle of a heated discussion, when suddenly he was grabbed from behind and marched down a side street. The person who grabbed him, however, was not a Nazi, but an unemployed merchant marine sailor. This friendly sailor told Adams in no uncertain terms that he was a fool, that in another five minutes he would have been beaten up by the people he was in a heated discussion with, that in Germany in 1927 (six years before the Nazis officially seized power), you learned to keep your mouth shut in public. The sailor then invited Adams to his tenement apartment in the slums of Nuremberg to join his family for dinner.

    During that dinner conversation, Adams learned how (to quote him) “one organization after another that refused to bow to the Nazis was being threatened with compulsion. The totalitarian process had begun. Freedom of association was being abolished.” Adams felt this last point was key: freedom of association was being abolished. Nearly a decade later, when he returned to Germany, he witnessed how churches had finally begun to offer what he called “belated resistance” to the Nazi regime; and in this resistance, Adams saw the power of free association. Adams later wrote: “At this juncture I had to confront a rather embarrassing question. I had to ask myself, ‘What in your typical behavior as an American citizen have you done [aside from voting] that would help prevent the rise of authoritarian government in your own country?… More bluntly stated: I asked myself, ‘What precisely is the difference between you and a political idiot?’”(3) So ends the first story about the importance of community.

    The second story happened in New York City sometime around 1784. A group of enslaved and free people of African descent gathered together to found an organization called the New-York African Society. They formed this organization for at least three main purposes: to “promote a sense of common purpose”; to promote Christianity among people of African descent; and to provide aid and assistance to each other, and to all people of African descent. This organization was the first voluntary association organized and run by African Americans; it was organized during the early Federal period when many Americans were forming voluntary associations throughout the new country, in order to promote social welfare.

    Among its early activities, the New York African Society provided education for those who were still enslaved, and of course they began organizing to bring an end to slavery. The New York African Society also felt it was imperative to organize an all-Black church. New York churches that were run by White people were not especially welcoming to Black New Yorkers. The New York African Society founded its own church, which they called African Zion, though it soon came to be known as “Mother Zion.” This was not just an group of people who got together to pray and sing hymns. They wanted a church building and a paid minister, they wanted to create a strong social institution, and they organized themselves accordingly. According to historian David Hackett Fisher: “Four of the nine [original trustees] could not write, but they knew what they were about. The trustees issued subscription books, raised money for land and a building in 1800, and paid their debts on time. … Mother Zion [church] became a major presence in New York.” Fisher documents how the Mother Zion church served not just as a spiritual resource, but also as political force. In just one small example, when crowds of young White racists disrupted Sunday morning services, the church demanded — and received — police protection from the city council.(4) So ends the second story about the importance of community, and the power of community.

    And now, since this is a sermon, I’m going to draw a couple of brief lessons from these two stories.

    First lesson: Many people think the sole purpose of religious congregations in our society is to support the religious beliefs of individual people. That was definitely not the case in Nazi Germany. Those German churches that stood up against the Nazis were certainly sustained by their Christian beliefs, but one of their primary purposes was working against authoritarianism. We Unitarian Universalists remember that when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Unitarian congregation in Prague became one of those congregations resisting the Nazis; and because of that resistance, Norbert Capek, their minister, died in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.

    Similarly, the African Zion church founded by the New York African Society was founded as a spiritual resource to Black New Yorkers. But that church also served as a moral and physical center where Black New Yorkers could work together against slavery, and organize themselves to influence the politics of the city of New York. In other words, religious congregations do serve as spiritual centers, but religious congregations also have long served as places where individuals join together in order to become a force for good in wider society. So ends the first lesson.

    Second lesson: These days, I think many Americans have the tendency to think of congregations as a kind of leisure time activity. An American adult can spend time with Netflix and video games, or listening public radio, or indulging in sports and boating, or having fun with any number of fun hobbies. Americans with children have all the children’s activities on top of that: school plays, music lessons, Model U.N., sports, Scouting, and so on. Americans ration out their limited leisure time among all these attractive leisure activities. Americans also ration out their limited financial resources; so that, for example, a parent may tell our child that they cannot play hockey this year because they don’t have two thousand dollars to spend on equipment and rink time. With all these attractive leisure-time activities, it’s kind of hard for increasing numbers of Americans to justify spending time and money on old-fashioned religious congregations.

    A new documentary film is coming out that provides an interesting response to all this. Brother and sister filmmakers Rebecca and Pete Davis have titled their new film “Join or Die.” In the film, they profile Robert Putnam, a professor of political science at Harvard, whose famous book Bowling Alone documented the demise of community organizations in America. Putnam concluded that civic organizations — everything from congregations, to Parent Teacher Associations, to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows — make major contributions to democracy and good governance. Putnam, and the fmilmmakers, argue that the demise of these organizations is one of the things contributing to the erosion of trust in America today. In a recent interview, filmmaker Pete Davis puts it this way:

    “A lot of people think of religion theologically. One of the ways [Robert Putnam] thinks of it is sociologically. Religions are not just beliefs. They’re organizations where people meet. They’re places where you build relationships and develop leadership. They’re places where you meet people different from you and do a lot of volunteer work and political work. Religious spaces provide half of all social capital in the U.S.”(5)

    I will make a stronger statement than that: When Americans play videogames at home instead of going to Sunday services, they are actually contributing to the erosion of trust and the weakening of democracy. When we are sitting here in our historic Meeting House, we are not engaging in another leisure time activity. We are not just exploring our personal spiritual beliefs. We are participating in democracy. We are making democracy stronger. Not to put too fine a point on it, we are resisting the growing trend towards authoritarianism.

    To this you might respond: But what about those Christian evangelicals who espouse Christian nationalism? They go to church, but they’re using church as a means to promote authoritarianism. This is true, but at the same time, they’re doing exactly what I’m talking about: using the power of freedom of association to promote their own particular agenda. They get it. They understand the power of freedom of association. Yes, they’re using the power of freedom of association in order to restrict the freedom of association for others. What I’m telling you is that we need to use the power of freedom of association to stop them from taking over our country.

    So it is that First Parish is not merely a leisure time activity, it is one of the bulwarks of democracy. To use Robert Putnam’s term, it’s where you build social capital. In today’s political climate, I would say that religious congregations and similar organizations are critical for maintaining our democracy. Those who prioritize leisure time activities over building social capital are acquiescing to the growth of authoritarianism.

    In fact, if First Parish were just another leisure time activity, I wouldn’t be here. But over and over again, I’ve seen how our Unitarian Universalist congregations actually do make a difference in the world through building social capital. We actually do change society for the better.

    I’ll conclude by noting that this is Stewardship Sunday. The Stewardship Committee wants me to make to talk about our fundraising campaign. I feel this whole sermon has been about why you should support First Parish with your presence and your money. But to keep the Stewardship Committee happy, I’ll add three short sentences. It’s a matter of public record what I earn each year. To show my commitment to my principles, I’m pledging three percent of my gross annual earnings to First Parish for the coming year. I wish it were more, because I believe strongly in the power of our congregation to be a force for good and a bulwark of democracy.