Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Three Buddhist Stories

    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.

    Moment for All Ages

    The Quails and the Net

    Gautama Buddha was a great holy man who lived long, long ago in India. He was so wise that people came from far and wide to learn from him. Many of these people stayed with him, and became his bhikkus, or his followers.

    Once upon a time, Buddha noticed that several of his followers spent a great deal of time arguing among themselves. These bhikkus began to disturb the other people who had come to learn from Buddha. Buddha felt that because of their arguing, they were not making progress toward becoming truly enlightened beings. That evening, Buddha sat all his followers down together, and told them this story:

    “Once upon a time, long, long ago, there lived a large flock of quails in a forest. Now in near this very same forest there lived a hunter who made his living from capturing quails and selling them to people who wanted to eat them. Every day this hunter would slip quietly into the forest and sit hidden behind a big bush. Then he would imitate the call of a quail so perfectly that the quail thought the hunter was one of them.

    “Upon hearing the hunter’s call, the quail would come out of the safe places where they had been gathering food. When they came into the open, the hunter would leap out from his hiding place and throw a big net over as many quails as he could reach. He would bundle up the net and take all the quail away to the marketplace to be sold to people who would eat them for dinner.

    “The quails did not like this. And they grew frightened because the hunter captured so many of them. The quail decided to hold a meeting to discuss the problem. A wise quail said to the others:

    “‘The net the hunter throws over us isn’t heavy. As soon as he throws the net over us, if we all fly up together at the same time, we can lift the net up with us and get away.’

    “The other quails thought this was a good plan. They all agreed to fly up together and escape the next time the hunter threw the net over them.

    “The next day, the hunter came back to the forest. He imitated the call of a quail and all the quail were fooled again. Then he threw the net over as many quail as he could reach, expecting to bundle them up as always.

    “This time, however, was different. Before the hunter could bundle them up, all the quail flew up in the air together. They lifted the net up with them, and settled down together into a nearby rose bush. The net got tangled up in the thorns of the rose bush, and the quail scurried away to safety.

    “The hunter was left to pick his net out of the sharp thorns. After hours of work, he finally untangled his net. He walked home, tired and discouraged.

    “The next day, the hunter came back to try his luck again. He imitated the quail’s call. All the quail came running. When they felt the net settle over them, they flew into a nearby rose bush, leaving the net caught on the sharp thorns. Once again, the hunter was left to untangle his net, with no quails to sell at the market.

    “This went on for some days. The hunter was growing more and more discouraged. Finally, one day the hunter came back into the forest, gave his imitation of the quail’s call, and threw his net over the quail when they came out into the open.

    “But when it came time for all the quail to fly up together, one quail happened to step on the foot of another.

    “‘Hey,’ said the second quail, ‘who kicked me?’

    “‘No one kicked you,’ said a third quail.

    “A fourth quail said, ‘Oh, he’s just complaining because he’s lazy; he never lifts his share of the net.’

    “Another quail said, ‘Who are you to talk? You do very little flying, leaving the hard work to the rest of us.’

    “As the quail fought and bickered among themselves, the hunter bundled them up in his net and carried them off to market. They were all fat, plump quails, and the hunter got a good price for them.”

    The followers of Buddha all believed they had lived many lives in the past, sometimes as animals, sometimes as humans, sometimes as gods. Buddha told them that the story of the quails was really a story of them in one of their past lives.

    “When you were on this earth as quails,” said the Buddha, “you argued among yourselves, and got caught by the hunter, and were eaten for dinner that very night. You are no longer quails. Is it not time for you to stop arguing among yourselves?”

    The bhikkus who had been arguing so much grew embarrassed and ashamed, and from that day on, so it is told, they no longer engaged in silly arguments.(1)

    Reading

    The first reading was the poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” by Derek Walcott (not included here due to copyright).

    The second reading was a very short poem by Rabindranath Tagore:

    We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us. [Stray Birds #75]

    Sermon

    This morning, I’m going to retell three Buddhist stories from the Jataka Tales, one of the earliest collections of Buddhist writings. Each of these stories tells a tale from one of Gotama Buddha’s previous lives. For, you see, when Siddhartha Gotama achieved enlightenment, he was able to remember every single one of his previous lives.

    I find it fascinating that Buddha had over five hundred previous lives. In Western culture, we are much more likely to think that we each get one life, and after that life is over we either go to heaven, or to oblivion. Time is linear for most Westerners, but circular for Buddhists. We are encountering a very different mindset in these stories.

    The Jataka Tales mostly begin with a framing story: something happened in the community that gathered around Gotama Buddha, and Buddha tells a story from one of his previous lives in order to help the people in the community get along better.

    With that in mind, let’s consider the first story, which I told as the “Moment for All Ages”: the story of the quails and the net. This is a well-known story, and doubtless many of you have heard it before. In Western culture, the story is often told as a parable showing the importance of cooperation. Derek Walcott’s poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” offers a variation of that interpretation. The poem opens with an image taken directly from this Jataka Tale:

    Then all the nations of birds lifted together
    the huge net of the shadows of this earth
    in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
    stitching and crossing it….

    If only human beings could learn how to cooperate, as do the birds, then we could have a world filled with peace!

    Indeed, today’s world feels much like what happens in the story when the quails start to argue with each other. One quail accuses another of stepping on their foot; another quail says that someone is not lifting their share of the net; while another quail says that someone else didn’t do their share of flying. This sound very much like what we hear from our world leaders these days. And what is the result of all this bickering? Here’s how the Buddha told of the outcome:

    “As the quail fought and bickered among themselves, the hunter bundled them up in his net and carried them off to market. They were all fat, plump quails, and the hunter got a very good price for them.”

    Buddha doesn’t say we should never argue — he’s telling us that we should have enough humility so we don’t let our arguments get in the way of accomplishing our common goals.

    This is true both in a small community like that gathered around Buddha, and the world community of nations. It’s always easy to blame our world leaders for acting like the quails in the net, yet we too must take responsibility for our actions in our families, in the workplace, in all the community groups we may belong to. Having the humility to admit when we are wrong turns out to be necessary ingredient for peaceful communities.

    The next Jataka Tale is one you may have heard in a different form, but try to let go of your expectations….

    The Tale of the Dhak Tree

    One day, four of Buddha’s followers came up to him and asked how they might learn to meditate and rise above earthly things. Buddha explained to the four bhikkus how they might do so, and each went off to learn a different kind of meditation. The first learned the Six Spheres of Touch. The second learned the Five Elements of Being. The third learned the Four Principal Elements. The fourth learned the Eighteen Constituents of Being. Each one learned how to meditate so well, they each achieved Enlightenment and became a holy person.

    One day all four of these bhikkus came back to tell the Buddha what they had done. Each of them claimed that their way was the best form of mediation. At last one of them said, “Buddha, each of us has achieved Enlightenment, but we each used a different type of meditation. How could this be?”

    And Buddha said, “It is like the four brothers who saw the dhak tree….”

    Once upon a time Bramadatta, the King of Benares, had four sons. One day, the four sons sent for a charioteer and said to him, “We want to see a dhak tree [Butea monosperma]. Show us one!”

    “Very well,” said the charioteer . “Let me begin by showing the eldest.”

    The charioteer took the eldest to the forest. It was late winter, so the eldest brother saw the dhak tree at the time when the buds had not yet begun to swell, and the tree looked dead.

    The charioteer could not return to the dhak tree right away. Two months went by until at last the charioteer could bring the second brother to see the dhak tree. It was spring, and the tree was entirely covered with reddish-orange flowers.

    The charioteer could not return to the dhak tree right away. Two more months went by until at last the charioteer could bring the third brother to see the dhak tree. It was summer now, the flowers were gone, and the tree was covered with leaves.

    he charioteer could not return to the dhak tree right away. Months went by until the fourth brother declared he could wait no longer. The charioteer brought him to see the dhak tree. Now it was autumn, and the tree was covered with long seed-pods.

    When all four brothers had seen the dhak tree, they sat down together, and talked about what the dhak tree was like.

    “It is like a bunch of dead twigs,” said the first.

    “No, it is reddish like a piece of meat,” said the second.

    “No, it has leaves like a banyan tree,” said the third.

    “No, it looks like an acacia tree with its long seed pods,” said the fourth.

    None of them liked the answers the other gave. They ran to find their father. “Father,” they asked, “tell us, what is the dhak tree like?”

    “You have all seen the tree,” the king said. “You tell me what it’s like.”

    The four brothers gave the king their four different answers: it is like dead twigs, it is like meat, it has leaves like a banyan, it has seed pods like the acacia.

    “You have all seen the tree,” said the king. “But when the charioteer showed you the tree, you didn’t ask him what the tree looked like at other times of the year. This is where your mistake lies.” And the king recited a poem:

    Each one of you has gone to view the tree,
    Yet you remain in great perplexity
    Because you did not ask the charioteer
    Just how it looked at other times of year.

    Buddha then spoke to the four bhikkus. “These four brothers did not ask themselves what the tree looked like in different times of the year, and so they fell into doubt. In just the same way, the four of you have fallen into doubt about what is true and right.” Then the Buddha gave another stanza for the king’s poem:

    If you know truth, and yet the whole you cannot see,
    You’ll be unsure, like those four brothers and the tree.(2)

    I love the framing story of this Jataka Tale. The four bhikkus have each achieved enlightenment, yet they still feel the need to argue about which method for attaining enlightenment is best. You would think they would realize that they learned of the four different types of meditation from the same person, from Buddha, which would imply that he felt each meditation system was of equal value. Yet although they have achieved enlightenment, perhaps they have not yet achieved humility. The framing story is telling us that there is no end to spiritual growth; even when you think you have attained some major spiritual accomplishment, you are not yet finished.

    This wisdom of Buddhas reminds me a bit of the wisdom of Jesus. Jesus chose several of his followers to be especially close to him, yet they constantly misinterpret Jesus’s teachings; at which point, Jesus assists them in proceeding farther along their spiritual journey. I also get the sense that both Jesus and Buddha realize they have fallen short as spiritual teachers — their spiritual guidance is not wholly adequate for the needs of limited, fallible human beings — and they both have the humility to understand that they, too, have human failings.

    This comes back to one of our basic Unitarian teachings. In my Unitarian Universalist Sunday school, when I was a child, we heard stories about both Jesus and Buddha. Our teachers always made it clear that neither Jesus nor Buddha was God; they were each much wiser than the rest of us, but they were not infallible. Their greatness lay in their ability to show us we all have the capacity to choose to become better human beings.

    And with that in mind, here’s another story….

    King Usinara and the Huge Hound

    One day, the followers of Buddha were sitting in the Hall of Truth talking with one another.

    “Isn’t it amazing,” one of them said, “that the Buddha gave up a beautiful home, and now lives only for the good of the world?”

    “Yes,” said another, “isn’t it amazing that he has attained supreme wisdom, yet rather than making himself rich, he goes about teaching goodness?”

    Buddha came into the Hall and heard them talking. “Yes, it is true,” said the Buddha. “Even in my previous lives, even then when I had not attained supreme wisdom, I still always tried to live for the good of the world. Let me tell you the story of one of my previous lives.” This is the story the Buddha told:

    Once upon a time, there reigned a king named Usinara. Under the rule of this king, the people had given up doing good, and instead they followed the paths of evil-doing. Sakka, the ruler of all the gods, looked upon this, and saw that the people were suffering because they did evil.

    “What shall I do, now?” he said to himself. “Ah, I have it! I will scare and terrify humankind. And when I see they are terrified, I will comfort them, I will tell them the universal Law of life, I will restore their moral compasses!”

    Sakka turned his divine charioteer Matali into a huge black hound, with four tusks each as big as a plantain, with a hideous shape and a fat belly. Sakka fastened this horrible dog with a chain, and turned himself into a hunter. Together they walked to King Usinara’s city.

    “Everything is doomed to destruction!” the hunter cried out, so loudly that he terrified everyone within earshot. He repeated this cry as he walked up to the very gates of the city.

    The people of the city saw the huge dog and heard the hunter’s cries, and hurried into the city to tell the king what had happened. The king ordered the city gates to be closed. But the hunter and the huge dog leaped over the wall.

    When they saw that the hunter and the dog had gotten inside the city, everyone ran away to find a place to hide. Those who could not get to their houses in time ran to the king’s palace to find safety.

    The hunter and the dog came to the palace. The dog raised itself up, put its paws on the window of the room where the king was hiding, and barked. Its bark was a huge roaring that seemed to go from the depths of the earth to the highest heaven. The people were terrified by this, and no one could say a word.

    At last the king plucked up his courage, and went to the window. He called out to the hunter: “Ho, huntsman! why did your hound roar?”

    “The hound is hungry,” said the hunter.

    “Well,” said the king, “I will order some food for it.”

    The king told his servants to give all the food in the palace to the dog. The huge dog gulped all the food down in one mouthful, then roared again.

    Again the king called out the window: “Huntsman! Why does your dog still roar?”

    “My hound is still hungry,” said the hunter.

    Then the king had all the food for all his elephants and all his horses and all his other animals brought and given to the huge dog. Once again, the dog swallowed it in one gulp. So the king had all the food in the entire city brought. The huge dog swallowed all that in one gulp, and then roared again.

    Terrified with fear, the king thought to himself, “This is no ordinary dog. I must ask why he has come.” He said to the hunter: “Why does this huge hound, with sharp white fangs as big as plantains, come here with you?”

    “The dog comes to eat my enemies,” said the hunter.

    “And who are your enemies?” said the king.

    “All those people who are smart and educated, but who use their skill only to acquire money. All those who do not take care of their parents, once their parents get old. All those who betray their friends or spouses or siblings. All those who pretend to follow religious principles, but who actually do whatever they want. All those who are criminals, who kill and rob. All those who have hearts filled with evil, and who are evil and deceitful.

    “These,” said the hunter, “are all are my enemies, O king!”

    And the hunter made as though he would let the hound leap forth and devour all those who were his enemies. But as all the people froze in terror, he held the hound by the leash.

    Then Sakka shed his disguise of a hunter. By his power he rose and poised himself in the air, and said: “O great king, I am Sakka, ruler of the gods! I saw how this land had become corrupt; I saw humans were suffering because they were doing evil; and I came here with my huge hungry hound. If you wish to keep me out of your land, you must all stop doing evil.”

    King Usinara and all the people saw they must return to the ways of virtue. They must stop doing evil, or the huge dog would remain hungry, and would keep roaring!

    And when Sakka and Matali saw that the people had turned away from evil, and once again followed the paths of good — then they returned to the home of the gods.

    When Buddha finished telling this story, he said: “So you see, in my former lives I lived for the good of the world.” Buddha then added: “My follower and friend, Ananda, was Matali. And I was Sakka.”(3)

    I like to think of this story as a parable about the limits of human knowledge. King Usinara and his people had lost the knowledge of how to be good, and it took a huge frightening roaring dog to scare them into the knowledge of how foolish and wrongheaded they had been. This is a good metaphor for what it feels like when I have had to confront my own foolishness and wrongheadedness.

    Earlier this week, I was talking over these stories with Kate Sullivan, our director of spiritual exploration. The stories made her think of two questions for reflection:

    What did you think you knew, only to find that you didn’t actually know it?

    And when you realized you didn’t know, were you courageous enough to humble yourself?

    I’ll leave you with those questions.

    Sources for the stories

    (1) Source: Jataka tale no. 33, from The Jataka, or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, in six volumes, ed. E. B. Cowell (Cambridge Univ., 1895-1907).
    (2) Source: Kimsukopama-Jataka, Jataka tale no. 248, in the Cowell translation.
    (3) Source: Maha-Kanha Jataka, Jataka tale no. 469, in the Cowell translation.

  • 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.

  • When Our Actions Define Us, pt. 1

    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 the series — last sermon in the series

    Readings

    The first reading was from a short story titled “The Guest” by Albert Camus. The story is set in Algeria during the French colonial era. A French police officer has delivered an Arab prisoner to a French schoolteacher named Daru, and he has told Daru to deliver the Arab to prison. Here’s what Daru does:

    “Daru surveyed the two directions. There was nothing but the sky on the horizon. Not a man could be seen. He turned toward the Arab, who was looking at him blankly. Daru held out the package to him. ‘Take it,’ he said [in Arabic]. ‘There are dates, bread, and sugar. You can hold out for two days. Here are a thousand francs too.’ The Arab took the package and the money but kept his full hands at chest level as if he didn’t know what to do with what was being given him. ‘Now look,’ the schoolmaster said as he pointed in the direction of the east, ‘there’s the way to Tinguit. You have a two-hour walk. At Tinguit you’ll find the administration and the police. They are expecting you.’ The Arab looked toward the east, still holding the package and the money against his chest. Daru took his elbow and turned him rather roughly toward the south. At the foot of the height on which they stood could be seen a faint path. ‘That’s the trail across the plateau. In a day’s walk from here you’ll find pasturelands and the first nomads. They’ll take you in and shelter you according to their law.’ The Arab had now turned toward Daru and a sort of panic was visible in his expression. ‘Listen,’ he said. Daru shook his head: ‘No, be quiet. Now I’m leaving you.’ He turned his back on him, took two long steps in the direction of the school, looking hesitantly at the motionless Arab and started off again. For a few minutes he heard nothing but his own step resounding on the cold ground and did not turn his head. … He had already gone some distance when he again stopped and looked. There was no longer anyone on the hill.”

    The second reading was from the Unitarian Universalist theologian William R. Jones. Dr. Jones was best known for his 1973 book titled Is God a White Racist? but reading comes from his 1975 essay titled “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows.”

    “Abraham’s situation, when he is commanded to slay Isaac, represents the human situation. Forced to decide whether he is addressed by God or Moloch and given the impossibility of demonstrating whose voice he hears, Abraham … must decide the source of the command…. If he concludes that the decree is from God, it is morally imperative. If, however, he decides that it is Moloch’s voice that he hears, the order must be rejected. But clearly, only Abraham can make this crucial decision.

    “Likewise with humankind: forced by virtue of our freedom and the existential situation of objective uncertainty, we cannot escape the necessity to be the measure of even that higher reality that created us. There is no way to escape this responsibility … for it is a factor of the freedom that is our essence.”

    Sermon

    In last week’s sermon, I gave a brief theological history of First Parish; this was in response to a question asked by one of you during last spring’s question box sermon. Last week, I said that one of the theological strands running through the three centuries of First Parish’s history is our firm conviction that human beings have a great deal of free will. And at the end of the sermon last week, I promised I would explore how free will — the human freedom to act in the world — continues to shape us religiously. And that’s what we’ll consider this week.

    Which brings us to the first reading, from a story titled “The Guest” by Albert Camus. I know some of you have read the story, but for those of you who haven’t, or who read it so long ago that you’ve forgotten it, here’s what happens:

    The story opens with Daru, a schoolteacher who is French but who has spent most of his life in Algeria. He alone in his mountain classroom; alone because a blizzard has just ended, forcing his students to stay home. This blizzard ended an eight month drought, a drought which had driven many of his students deeper into grinding poverty.

    Daru looks out the window, and sees two figures struggling through the snow up the steep rise to the school. These two turn out to be Balducci, a policeman from Corsica, now close to retirement, and Balducci’s prisoner, an Arab who killed his cousin. Balducci talks with Daru in French — the Arab doesn’t speak French — telling Daru that he must bring the Arab another 20 kilometers to the main police station. Balducci, for his part, has to get back to where he is based, since some of the native Algerians are planning to revolt against French rule. Daru says that he is not a policeman, and he won’t turn the Arab over to the main police station. Balducci leaves the Arab in the schoolhouse anyway, and returns from whence he came.

    When Balducci is gone, Daru treats the Arab as a guest; he does not tie him up, and indeed he hopes the Arab will escape. But the Arab stays; Daru feeds him; they sleep side by side that night; and in the morning, Daru walks with the Arab to a trail junction.

    There Daru gives the Arab enough food and money to allow escape into the interior of the country, shows him the two paths — one the escape route to the interior, one the path to police headquarters — and lets the Arab decide what to do. When Daru looks back a little later, he sees “with a heavy heart” that the Arab has chosen to take the path leading to police headquarters, where he will face certain execution. When Daru gets back to the schoolhouse, he find these words written in chalk upon the blackboard: “‘You handed over our brother. You will pay for this.’” And the final sentence of the story says: “In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone.”

    Daru did what he thought was right — he treated the Arab as a guest, gave him food and money, and refused to turn him over to a French colonial system of justice for which he doesn’t appear to have much respect. Daru does the right thing, and yet the Arab’s brothers blame him, and promise to take revenge on him. In short, Daru does what he thinks is right, and everyone despises him for it — he offends Balducci, the policeman; he will probably die at the hands of the Arab’s brothers.

    There are two points to which I’d like to draw your attention. First, this story shows how our actions can define us. Daru defines himself by treating the Arab as a guest, by being a good host; the Arab prisoner defines himself by not choosing to escape when Daru gives him the opportunity. Second, the story shows that the consequences of our actions may be judged differently by different people. The Arab probably feels that Daru is a decent person — although we never learn exactly what the Arab feels, just as we never learn his name — but the policeman and the Arab’s brothers obviously judge Daru harshly.

    Once we accept these two points, then we are led to conclude that there are no universal standards of morality with which all persons agree. And if we accept these two points, we are also led to conclude that when it comes to moral decisions, no one of us ever sees the whole picture. Life forces us to make decisions all the time, yet all too often we cannot foresee all the consequences of our actions; indeed, sometimes the consequences of our actions may turn out to be completely unexpected, or the opposite of what we thought or hoped for. Yet we cannot stop making decisions, because life constantly forces us to choose between different courses of action.

    All this may seem a bit depressing. We might like to believe the good guys always win. We might like to believe life is like those old movies about mythical cowboys, where the good guys wear white hats, and the bad guys wear black hats, and the good guys always win in the end. But we know life is not like that. So maybe it’s less depressing to keep it real, and admit that many times it’s difficult to determine what to do.

    I think about precisely this issue whenever I teach the comprehensive sexuality education course first developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association for grades seven through nine back in 1968, and revised regularly since then. Originally called “About Your Sexuality,” and now called “Our Whole Lives,” this course is designed to give early adolescents the information they need to make informed decisions when they are confronted with sexual choices. Here I should say that the sexual choices that confront early adolescents are pretty wide-ranging. At one end of a range of behaviors, early adolescents can choose to engage in no sexual activity, or in very low risk sexual behavior like kissing; and we actually tell them that it is healthier for early adolescents to stay at this end of the range of behaviors. Then of course there is a wide range of behaviors beyond that. Not only do early adolescents have a wide range of behaviors they can choose from, they are also called upon to make frequent decisions about their sexuality.

    Nor is it possible for early adolescents to avoid making decisions about their sexuality, not least because our culture is awash in sexual imagery. Advertisers use sex and sexuality to sell their products. Movie and TV producers use sex to attract viewers. Songwriters include love and sex in most of the popular songs that we all listen to; even in a fairly benign song like Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire,” he’s not singing about wildfires in California, he’s singing about sexuality and love. Nor is it any wonder that sexuality so permeates our culture; reproduction and child rearing are essential to the survival or our species, which means that reproduction and child rearing are going to be a major concern for all human beings (even for child-free people like me). No wonder, then, that reproduction and child rearing permeate every aspect of human culture. Including religion and spirituality. Religion and spirituality are human activities, so of course religions and spiritualities are going to concern themselves with human sexuality. For some religions and some spiritualities, their concern with human sexuality is going to result in lots of rules and doctrines limiting the apparent choices that can be made by individuals.

    Our religion takes a somewhat different approach. We have seen that rules and doctrines are especially effective; rules and doctrines may work for some people, but they don’t work for other people. More importantly, rigid rules and doctrines require a harsh and rigid view of human nature, something like original sin. But we do not perceive the world in terms of binary, black-and-white choices — a right choice and a wrong choice and nothing in between — but rather we perceive the world in shifting shades of gray which can often make it difficult to determine which is the correct course of action to follow. In our view, the real world is more like the world depicted in the story of Daru the schoolteacher, where people can make what seem to be the right choices, but which turn out to have consequences no one could foresee. To put this another way, we believe that human beings have a radical freedom to act. Even though some recent findings of neuroscientists may indicate that we may not have all that much free will, we believe that we still have to live our lives as if we had radical freedom of action.

    No original sin. Radical freedom. A world where it can be difficult to determine what is right. Our religious worldview leads us to believe that we cannot, and should not, rely on strict rules and doctrines handed down from higher authorities. Instead, we have to figure out how to make choices — and how to live with the consequences of our choices when things don’t turn out quite the way we had expected.

    At the end of the story by Albert Camus, Daru the schoolteacher feels utterly alone, or as the story put it: “In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone.” This is where I part ways with Camus. Our religious worldview would suggest that Daru does not need to be quite so alone. This is really the point of the Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education program that we offer — we tell early adolescents that they do not need to be alone. Indeed, much of the course is designed to improve their communication skills, not only so that they can someday talk with future partners about sexual choice, but also so that they can talk better with their parents and guardians. We also want them to be able to talk openly with their friends and peers about sexual choices. One positive result of this is we hear back from teens who have completed the program that their friends and peers turn to them for trustworthy information about sexual choices and about human sexuality. Radical freedom of action does not mean you have to be lonely.

    The Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education program is not just for early adolescents — there are Our Whole Lives courses for other age groups, including for adults. Next year, I hope we can offer the Our Whole Lives program for grades ten through twelve, that is for middle adolescents. My experience of teaching this program is that middle adolescents have become very aware that they are soon to go off to college or the military or full-time work, where they will be confronted with new sexual choices. As a result, not only do they want time to talk with their peers and with trusted adults about those impending sexual choices, they also feel a desire to improve their communication skills so they can talk more easily with others about human sexuality. In short, middle adolescents have begun to better understand that we are not as alone as Albert Camus would have us believe; we are not so completely alone as Camus wants us to believe, and we can reach out to others as we make decisions.

    This has been brought home to me in talking with late adolescents (that is, people who are roughly aged eighteen into their early twenties). Statistics show that a large percentage of people are sexually assaulted during the course of their lives. Figures vary, but the National Sexual Violence Resource center says perhaps one in five women and some significant number of men are raped or sexually assaulted over their lifetimes.(1) Other sources give higher numbers; one source says 27% of American women have been raped, and 54% have experienced some kind of sexual violence.(2) And most sexual assaults happen to people under the age of thirty. From talking with late adolescents, I’ve learned that many of them either know someone who has been sexually assaulted, or have been sexually assaulted themselves. While no one chooses to be sexually assaulted, people do have choices about how to recover from sexual assault. And reaching out to trusted people does seem to help with recovery from sexual assault. Here again, we do not need to be alone; we can reach out to others when we are confronted with difficult choices.

    And there are also Our Whole Lives sexuality education courses for young adults, middle adults, and older adults (that is, age fifty and up). At each of these ages, we can make life-changing choices — to have children, or to not have children; how we become emotionally intimate with another person; how we deal with the ethical implications of consent; and so on. I appreciate the fact that there is a course for older adults. As an older adult myself, I’ve found that our culture does not offer many places where people over fifty are encouraged to talk about human sexuality. Society tells older adults that we’re not sexual beings, yet we too are constantly making choices about emotional intimacy, about appropriate touch, and so on. Society also tells us adults, especially us older adults, that we’re supposed to figure things out by ourselves, without talking to other people. I don’t think this is the best way to make choices about important things. It’s easier for us human beings when we can talk things out with other people whom we trust, and we seem to make better decisions when we can talk things out.

    I think about this when I hear the second reading, the words by Rev. Dr. William R. Jones. Dr. Jones was a Unitarian Universalist who served as a religious educator, a minister, and then for most of his career a professor of religion and religious studies. Speaking of the necessity for making choices, Jones says, “There is no way to escape this responsibility … for it is a factor of the freedom that is our essence.” Thus, whether or not you happen to believe in God, we are still forced by our human freedom to constantly make choices; and we must make those choices even though it is impossible for any one human being to know with certainty what is true and right. Jones used to say that both liberal theism and religious humanism had this in common; and therefore theists and humanists have much more in common with each other than it may seem at first.

    Elsewhere in his writings, Jones spoke of “humanocentric” religion. By this he meant both religious theism and religious humanism where human beings are the focus. Some religious theists push off the responsibility for their actions onto a big Daddy God, and some religious atheists push off their responsibility for their actions onto a big Daddy DNA, or bid Daddy brain science. But Dr. Jones wanted us to see how human beings could be the measure of all things; and the implication here is that human community is an essential locus for our human decision-making.

    That is one of the main purposes of the Our Whole Lives sexuality education program — if we can come together and learn how to communicate better, if we can get some practice communicating with others, we won’t feel so alone when we have to make the choices that define us. This is also one of the main purposes of our Sunday mornings — although to get the full benefit, you really have to come across the street after the service, you have to come to social hour, because that’s where we have the time to talk with one another.

    We’re out of time, but there is still much more to say about the topic of human freedom to make choices. You can come back next week for more on this big topic, as I explore another big area where people have to make potentially life-altering choices. This week, I took a quick look at human sexuality as something that requires us to make life-changing choices. The other area of human activity that requires us to make difficult and potentially life-changing decisions is money. So I’ll continue this conversation about human freedom next week by considering how human freedom intersects with money.

    To Be Continued…