Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.
Moment for All Ages
The great philosopher Socrates, who lived two thousand five hundred years ago, once had a long conversation with another philosopher named Gorgias. During that long conversation, Socrates told a story about what happens to human beings after we die.
“Listen, then (said Socrates), as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale, which I dare say that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only. But I believe this is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth.
“Since the days when the god Cronos ruled the universe, there has been a law about what happens to human beings after death: human beings who have lived their whole lives in justice and holiness shall go to the Islands of the Blessed, to dwell in perfect happiness; while human beings who have lived unjust and irreverent lives go to Tartaros, the house of punishment.
“In the time of Cronos, judgement was given on the very day on which people were to die. The judges were alive, and the people had not yet died. But the judgements were not well given. So Hades came from Tartaros, and the authorities from the Islands of the Blessed came to Zeus. They said some people were sent to the wrong places after they died.
“Zeus came up with a plan. “First of all,’ he said, ‘we must put a stop to human beings knowing the time of their death.
Next, human beings must be fully dead when they are judged — not alive as is currently true — and being dead, they will be stripped of their their bodies, and stripped of everything else that might bias the judge either for them or against them. Then the judges themselves must also be dead, so that the judge’s naked soul will be able to perceive the truth of the other naked souls.” Zeus said only in this way could the judgement of the dead be truly just.
“Zeus then decreed that three of his own human children, who were already dead, should become the judges. These three were assigned to stay in the ‘meadow at the parting of the ways.’ Two roads left this meadow: one way went to the Islands of the Blessed, and the other to Tartaros. Rhadamanthus judged all the humans who died in Asia. Aeacus judged all the humans who died in Europe. And if these two had any doubt about a human being, Minos served as the final court of appeal.”
So ends the story that the philosopher Socrates told about the afterlife. Although this story sounds a little bit like the story that some Christians tell about what happens to humans after we die, it is a very different story, and Socrates told his story hundreds of years before the Christian era.
You probably noticed some problems with the story. For example, if Rhadamanthus judges those who died in Asia, and Aeacus judges those who died in Europe, who judges those who died in Africa? With such obvious problems with the story, why did Socrates tell Gorgias that he was speaking the truth? You must remember that Socrates spoke a different language from us, and his word for truth — aletheia — meant revealing and disclosing, it meant the opposite of forgetfulness. In other words, there is more than one way to define the word “truth.”
Readings
The first reading comes from Mark Twain’s book “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” In this passage, Captain Stormfield has arrived in heaven, received a robe and a harp, and sets off to enjoy himself:
“When I found myself perched on a cloud, with a million other people, I never felt so good in my life. Says I, ‘Now this is according to the promises; I’ve been having my doubts, but now I am in heaven, sure enough.’ I gave my palm branch a wave or two, for luck, and then I tautened up my harp-strings and struck in. Well, Peters, you can’t imagine anything like the row we made. It was grand to listen to, and made a body thrill all over, but there was considerable many tunes going on at once, and that was a drawback to the harmony, you understand…. By and by I quit performing, and judged I’d take a rest. There was quite a nice mild old gentleman sitting next me, and I noticed he didn’t take a hand; I encouraged him, but he said he was naturally bashful, and was afraid to try before so many people. By and by the old gentleman said he never could seem to enjoy music somehow. The fact was, I was beginning to feel the same way; but I didn’t say anything. … After about sixteen or seventeen hours, during which I played and sung a little, now and then — always the same tune, because I didn’t know any other — I laid down my harp and begun to fan myself with my palm branch. … Finally, says he, “Don’t you know any tune but the one you’ve been pegging at all day?”
“Not another blessed one,” says I.
“Don’t you reckon you could learn another one?” says he.
“Never,” says I; “I’ve tried to, but I couldn’t manage it.”
“It’s a long time to hang to the one — eternity, you know.”
“Don’t break my heart,” says I; “I’m getting low-spirited enough already.”
After another long silence, says he — “Are you glad to be here?”
Says I, “Old man, I’ll be frank with you. This ain’t just as near my idea of bliss as I thought it was going to be, when I used to go to church.”
Says he, “What do you say to knocking off and calling it half a day?”
“That’s me,” says I. “I never wanted to get off watch so bad in my life.”
So we started. Millions were coming to the cloud-bank all the time, happy and hosannahing; millions were leaving it all the time, looking mighty quiet, I tell you. We laid for the new-comers, and pretty soon I’d got them to hold all my things a minute, and then I was a free man again and most outrageously happy.
The second reading comes from a small book published by the Buddhist Church of America. The book is titled “The Heart of the Buddha-Dharma” and it is by one of the great leaders of the late 20th century in the Buddhist Church of America, Kenryu T. Tsuji.
“In the Jodo Shinsshu school of Buddhism, the spiritual development of the person is completed with their birth in what is known as the Pure Land…. ‘Birth in the Pure Land’ means the perfect growth and fulfillment one’s personality, to achieve a state of perfect selflessness whereupon one is able to realize the oneness of the whole universe; to become a Buddha and achieve oneness with Amida Buddha. While the human weaknesses of greed, anger, and ignorance are still functioning, this perfection of the personality is an impossibility.
“Shinran Shonin and the teachers before him explained that the Pure Land was situated in the western corners of the universe, zillions of miles away. It was pictured as a very beautiful place, free of suffering, where everyone is happy. Philosophically speaking, however, the Pure Land does not refer to a specific location out there somewhere. Rather, the Pure Land is symbolic; it symbolizes the transcendence of relativity, of all limited qualities, of the finiteness of human life. In this transcendence, there is Compassion-Wisdom, an active moving, spiritual force. The Pure Land ideal is the culmination of the teaching of Wisdom and Compassion.”
Sermon
This is another in a series of sermons based on questions that were asked during last spring’s question-and-answer sermon: someone asked about the afterlife. I found this to be a difficult topic. My limited thinking about the afterlife is probably summed up in the following stupid Unitarian Universalist joke:
Two Unitarian Universalists die, and next thing they know they find themselves standing in line in front of these large pearlescent gates. Somewhat to their surprise, they’re actually waiting in line to talk with St. Peter. When their turn finally comes, St. Pete asks them what religion they used to be, and they say, “Unitarian Universalists.”
“Hmm. Unitarian Universalists,” replies St. Pete. “Well, even though you’re heretics, because you did so much good work on earth, you can go into heaven.”
The two Unitarian Universalists look at each other, and one of them says, “You mean you actually send people to hell?”
“Oh yes,” says St. Peter.
On hearing that, they step out of line and start to picket the gates of heaven: one has a sign saying, “St. Peter Unfair to the Damned!” and the other’s sign says, “End Discrimination in Heaven!”
This stupid joke represents about all the thinking I’ve done about the afterlife. Having the usual Unitarian Universalist preoccupation with the here-and-now, I tend to treat the afterlife as another social problem that needs fixing. Yet I’m also aware of how limited and narrow my thinking is, aware that much more can be said about the afterlife. Other people in our society do think about the afterlife, and some of them have come up with some pretty detailed descriptions of what it’s like. So let’s consider what the afterlife might be like. And I’d like to begin with the fable told by Socrates that we heard in the story for all ages this morning.
According to Socrates’s fable, when Zeus took over from his father Cronos, he determined that admission to the afterlife was being poorly managed — some humans were being sent to the Islands of the Blessed after death when they really belonged in Tartaros. The humans were being judged before they had quite died, and their judges were also still alive, which meant that the judges could be impressed with the appearance or wealth of the people they were supposed to be judging impartially. So Zeus reformed the system, requiring that humans be judged after death, and also requiring that the judges themselves should be dead, which apparently removed the possibility of error or corruption from the whole process. This is a vivid description of what we might call the admissions process for the afterlife.
Parts of this ancient Greek fable remind me of the story told by some Christians — the Christian story talks about heaven and hell rather than the Islands of the Blessed and Tartaros, and many Christians would say that it’s St. Peter who judges the dead, not Rhadamanthus — but in both cases, humans are judged after they die, and sent either to a good place or a bad place. Thus we can see that some people think of the afterlife as a place where humans will be judged based on our actions during our lifetimes; and furthermore, in the afterlife some humans will be condemned to punishment, while others will lead a delightful existence.
And I’d like to consider a very specific story that was told about heaven and hell in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In these American stories, the Christian belief in heaven and hell takes on more details. If you went to heaven, so it was said, you’d receive a robe and a crown and a harp and wings, and you’d spend your days sitting on a cloud playing your harp. The American humorist Mark Twain decided to explore this nineteenth century American story more carefully, by telling about the adventures of one Captain Stormfield as he arrived in heaven; and as is so often the case with Mark Twain, underneath his humor lies some serious thinking and questioning.
In the story, Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven and receives a robe and crown and wings and harp just as he expected. But he quickly finds out that it isn’t much fun sitting on a cloud and playing a harp — especially when you can only play but one song over and over again, and when everyone around you plays a different song, mostly with the same low level of skill that you have. After a time, the Captain sneaks away from his cloud, dumps his robe and crown and wings and his harp, and heads off to explore heaven.
In the course of his explorations, Captain Stormfield meets up with his old friend Sam, who has been in heaven for a while. Sam fills the Captain in on the realities of heaven. To the Captain’s surprise, Sam tells him that pain and suffering exist in heaven. “You see,” Sam tells him, “happiness ain’t a thing in itself — it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant. That’s all it is.” In other words, in order for there to be happiness in heaven, there must also be pain and suffering, to serve as a contrast. The difference is that in heaven pain causes no lasting harm, and suffering cannot last.
Mark Twain is not making fun of heaven in this story. Instead, he’s thinking carefully and logically about the afterlife by asking serious questions. He asks: what age will we be in heaven? If you die as a baby, will you have to remain as a baby throughout eternity? — in other words, can those in heaven continue to grow and change and gain more wisdom? Another question Twain asks is this: If heaven is a place where we’ll meet up with those who have died before us, how will that work, exactly? — will you still have something in common with someone who died twenty or thirty or forty years before you did? Twain also brings up a point that would have been very challenging for some white people in his time (and maybe equally challenging for some white people in our time): the majority of people in heaven would not be white, because white people have been a minority throughout human history. Those white people who are expecting an all-white heaven are going to be sadly disappointed.
There’s more that could be said about American conceptions of heaven. But I’d like to consider some other ideas of the afterlife that are floating around in today’s popular culture. The other great proselytizing religion in the United States today is Buddhism, so it feels important to consider some Buddhist conceptions of the afterlife.
Traditional Buddhism holds that after we die, we get reborn as something else. The goal is to get off the endless cycle of rebirth. Ordinarily, we don’t remember our previous lives, so one of the remarkable things about Gotama Buddha was that after he became enlightened he could remember his previous lives, and told his disciples more than five hundred stories about those previous lives. These stories became the Kataka tales, which are now part of the Buddhist scriptures, and in these stories Buddha remembers previous lives in which he took on human forms, animal forms, even the form of a tree. According to traditional Buddhism, we’ve all had hundreds of previous lives. Our actions in this life determine in what form we shall be reborn in our next life. Furthermore, in many Mahayana Buddhist traditions, there is a place called naraka into which you can be reborn if you were extremely bad in your previous life. Naraka is roughly equivalent to the Christian hell, though you don’t arrive through by being judged by someone else; furthermore, and you don’t stay there for all eternity, but rather only for as long as it takes to work out your karma so that you can be reborn again into a higher world.
Just as naraka is not the same as the Christian hell, Buddhists don’t have an exact equivalent for the Christian heaven. The goal is to break the endless cycle of rebirth, which you do by achieving nirvana; as I understand it, the word nirvana means in a literal sense something like extinction or nothingness. Gotama Buddha was able to achieve enlightenment, to reach nirvana, and what made him truly great was that he was then able to turn back from nirvana so that he could tell others how to be freed from the endless cycle of rebirth.
You can see that traditional Buddhism doesn’t think about the afterlife in the same way as the ancient Greeks did, nor as nineteenth century American Christians did. Yet each of these three different religious traditions argues that if you live your life in the right way, you can be rewarded after death with something good. Interestingly, we find this same basic notion in some atheist traditions — or to speak more precisely, in the tradition of religious naturalism, a tradition that rejects any kind of supernaturalism in religion. Religious naturalists argue that the only way we can live on is in the thoughts and memories and actions of the people who survive us. If during your lifetime, you treat other people with kindness and compassion, then after you die you can live on in them whenever they act with whatever kindness and compassion they may have learned from you. So this is yet another kind of afterlife — and it’s not just a metaphorical afterlife, because your memory can have a very real and literal impact on the world. While there is no heaven or hell, no nirvana or endless rebirth, nevertheless your actions during you life affect what happens to you after death.
These are just a few of the more common ideas of the afterlife that are floating around in our culture today. But I find I don’t fully agree with any of these ideas of the afterlife. I’m a Universalist, as the result of which I demand an egalitarian afterlife. Universalism began as the Christian heresy of universal salvation: if God is indeed omnibenevolent or all good, then God would not damn anyone to eternal punishment; so everyone gets to go to heaven. By now, I think I’ve heard all the standard rebuttals of Universalism — from people who want to make sure their political opponents go to hell; from people who want to make sure someone they especially dislike, like an ex-spouse, doesn’t join them in heaven; from people who rebel at the idea that evil-doers get to go to heaven; and so on. But I remain a Universalist because I figure if there is an afterlife (a question I remain neutral on), then universal salvation is my only chance of getting to heaven. I’m a fallible human being, and like every other fallible human being, I’ve done plenty of things that were — to use Mark Twain’s phrase — “ornery and low down and mean.” If there really are pearly gates, and if I get there, St. Peter is going to open up his big book and remind me of the time when I was four years old and I bit my older sister — and that would be only the beginning of a very long list of low-down, mean, ornery things I’ve done.
In my opinion, the problem with all these schemes of an afterlife is how exclusive they are. You have to be a far better human being than I’ll ever be to make it into the afterlife. Not only would I not be allowed into heaven, I’m no good as a Buddhist, either. I meditated for fifteen years, and finally gave it up because it was making me miserable; which means I have no doubt I’m accumulating all kinds of karma that will keep me on the endless cycle of rebirth forever. Nor am I comforted by the religious naturalists who tell me that I’ll live on in the memories of those who knew me: partly because that’s a pretty short afterlife, lasting maybe sixty or seventy years; and partly because (as is true of all of us) there are plenty of people who don’t like me, and honestly I don’t want to live on in their memories.
If there’s going to be an afterlife, I want it to be an egalitarian afterlife — I want everyone to get in. If I were a Buddhist, I’d be a Pure Land Buddhist. As I understand it, the Pure Land Buddhists teach that anyone can gain access to the Pure Land after you die; you don’t have to go into seclusion, you don’t have to engage in difficult esoteric practices like mindfulness, you don’t have to achieve some higher spiritual state. Really, all you have to do is to chant, “I take refuge in Buddha.” There, I just did it — now I get to go to the Pure Land. That’s why I want everyone to get in — because if everyone can get in, then I know I can get in, too.
And there are many other notions of the afterlife that are more or less current in our society today. We can see traces of traditional African cultures in which someone who’s dead remains with us as long as there’s someone who knew them when they were alive, and who can pour libations for them; after everyone who knew them is dead, then they merge into a broad group of the dead, a sort of collective unconscious. In traditional Navajo religion, once you die you’re supposed to fade into oblivion, but if there’s something to keep you tied to the world of the living, then you persist as a troubled ghost; this is not the kind of afterlife any of us would hope for. Among some religious naturalists, the afterlife is nothing but a metaphor, and we heard an echo of that in the second reading this morning: “The Pure Land is symbolic; it symbolizes the transcendence of relativity, of all limited qualities, of the finiteness of human life.” And to return to Socrates — Plato tells us that when Socrates was on his deathbed, he gave two possibilities for what happens to us after we die: either we all go to the Elysian fields, enjoying there a blessed existence for all eternity; or we slip into oblivion, which he describes as having the most perfect sleep possible, without the disturbance of dreams or nightmares. This last idea of the afterlife retains currency for some people in our society today.
These are but a few of the possibilities for the afterlife. All these different possibilities remind me of another stupid joke, which goes like this:
A Unitarian Universalist dies and, somewhat to her surprise, finds herself standing in a long line of people waiting along the road to heaven. Way up ahead, she catches sight of a fork in the road. When she gets up to the fork in the road, she sees there’s a signpost. One sign, which points to the right, say “This Way to Heaven.” The other sign, which points to the left, says “This Way to a Discussion about Heaven.” She takes the left-hand path, going to the discussion about heaven.
It’s just a stupid joke, but I think it reveals something that’s true for me. If the afterlife is going to be a place of exquisite perfection, I’d be exquisitely bored — and I don’t want to be bored for all eternity. If I were confronted with the situation in the joke, I guess I too would go to the discussion about heaven. At least it wouldn’t be boring, and there’d always be the possibility of making some kind of progress.