Religion in society – Page 2 – Dan Harper

The Experience of Homelessness

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

Readings

The first reading is from an essay by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi titled “Two Cheers for Symbolic Capitalists”:

“Referring to homeless people as ‘unsheltered individuals’… [is a] discursive maneuver that often obscures the brutal realities that others must confront in their day-to-day lives. If the intent of these language shifts is to avoid stigma, the reality is that these populations are still heavily stigmatized….

“Critically, however, pointing out unfortunate consequences of [this] approach to language and social justice does not invalidate the idea that language matters. In fact, it powerfully illustrates that how we choose to talk and think about society, alongside the ways we try to influence others’ thoughts and discourse, actually can have important social consequences — for better and for worse.” [https://musaalgharbi.com/2024/09/30/two-cheers-symbolic-capitalists/]

The second reading is from the recent book “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission To Bring Healing to Homeless People,” by Tracey Kidder:

“The modern era of homelessness began in the 1980s, when the size and visibility of the problem began to rise dramatically. Driving south on I-93, Jim O’Connell tried to draw me a picture of what had gone wrong in Boston. Coming out of the tunnel in the center of the city, he gestured to a portion of the South End. ‘Just look at this. Look at these new buildings, all along here. All those are apartments and all the ones behind them. There’s got to be, by my calculation, at least four thousand new units there, right next to the Pine Street Inn. But no a single one for homeless people.”… Back in the 1920s, Boston had 35,000 single room occupancy units for rent. They had served as homes for immigrants and low-wage workers, elderly people on fixed incomes, and, more recently, for struggling Vietnam veterans. In 1965, the city and South End residents had overwhelmingly approved a plan to turn the neighborhood into ‘an economically, socially and racially integrated community’ with rental housing for ‘all displaced low-income residents wishing to remain.’ The destruction of the old buildings, with their inexpensive … rooms was widely praised as an act of civic virtue, and it might have been, if anything like that plan had been followed….

“A severe recession in 1980 had inaugurated the era of rising homelessness. But the problem was driven and sustained by many long-brewing problems: the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans; … the grossly inadequate provisions made for mentally ill people;… the continuation of racist housing policies…. Also the arcana of applying for Social Security disability — a process so complex that anyone who could figure out how to get assistance probably didn’t need it.

Sermon — “The Experience of Homelessness”

Today is the date of the annual Winter Walk for the Homeless, sponsored by Boston Health Care for the Homeless. This is a fundraising walk to raise money to help fund healthcare for people who are homeless. First Parish has a history of supporting both this annual walk, and Boston Health Care for the Homeless. We most recently supported Boston Health Care for the Homeless by donating the entire collection from our Christmas Eve candlelight service. And this year, quite a few of us from First Parish planned to go on the walk, though because of the snow it’s not clear how many will be able to make the drive up to Boston.

Two things are especially notable about the Winter Walk for the Homeless: first, it takes place outdoors, regardless of the weather; and second, it includes both housed and unhoused people walking together. Thus it’s more than just another fundraising walk. It’s also a chance to experience the conditions that people who live on the street have to cope with twenty four hours a day, seven days a week; and to be out in the weather with some folks who live outdoors all the time.

Now — there are quite a few of us who cannot participate in the Winter Walk for the Homeless, for a wide variety of reasons. But I thought it might be worthwhile to talk with you about the experience of homelessness, as a way for us to participate at a distance (as it were) in the Winter Walk. I’m not going to try to explain the causes of homelessness and housing insecurity. At the end of the sermon I’ll make a couple of ethical observations. But I’m not going to suggest policies to end homelessness, or tell you what we should be doing about homelessness. I’m just going to talk about the experience of being homeless.

The last two congregations I served had members who were homeless, and both those congregations were in places where there were significant numbers of people who were homeless. As a result, I got to know people who were homeless, and I got to hear some of their stories. Since I’m a minister, I do need to protect people’s confidentiality. So the stories I’m going to tell you will provide no details that can be used to identify individuals; you won’t even know whether they lived on the East Coast or the West Coast. To further protect privacy, I’ll be combining elements from different people’s stories. All this means that the stories I’m going to tell you are, in a sense, fictionalized; at the same time, they’re entirely true.

I’ll start by telling you about someone who came close to being homeless, though he ultimately managed to avoid it. Harry had started his career as a computer programmer. Then there was one of those sudden changes in technology, and suddenly his skills were no longer in demand. He tried to pivot in the new job market by learning new computer skills. Unfortunately, he guessed wrong: just when he had spent six months becoming proficient in the new skills, all the jobs using those skills dried up. By this time, he had used up all his savings, so he didn’t have the money to start yet another training program. Then too, he was well over fifty, and the high tech industry is notorious for its age discrimination. In order to pay the rent and put food on the table, his only viable option was to take any job that he could. He wound up working at Walmart. It was supposed to be a full-time job, but (as was typical with Walmart jobs) after he’d been there a couple of months, they cut his hours to about twenty-five hours a week, and gave him an irregular schedule so it was impossible for him to pick up another part-time job.

When I met Harry, he was living in studio apartment in a rough part of town, barely able to make the rent each month. After he paid the rent and bought food and gas, he couldn’t afford things like dental care. But between his siblings, and his friends in our Unitarian Universalist congregation, he just managed to stay in his apartment. What finally saved him was that he turned sixty-two and was able to taken Social Security; and because of his days of earning good salaries as a computer programmer, he received enough money to get by. So, by the skin of his teeth and with a lot of luck, Harry managed to stay housed. But though he was never homeless himself, he experienced the constant threat of homeleness.

In his recent book called White Poverty, the Rev. William Barber, organizer of the Poor People’s Campaign, argues for an improved definition of what it means to be poor. Barber argues that if you can not find the money to pay an emergency bill of four hundred dollars — that is, you could not borrow against home equity, you could not take it out of savings, you could not put it on a credit card — then you’re poor. By this measure, Harry was poor. Barber says that by this measure, about a quarter of all Americans are poor. And if you’re poor like Harry, it’s much easier to fall into homelessness.

This brings me to the next person I’d like you to meet, whom I’ll call Alice. Alice was in her late twenties when I knew her. She began attending our Unitarian Universalist congregation regularly. She was interesting, intelligent, and articulate; and I always enjoyed chatting with her at social hour. At one point I asked her if she wanted to be listed in the congregation’s directory. It became clear that she really didn’t have a home of her own. She was staying with friends and acquaintances for a couple of weeks at a time, with no set address. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was couch-surfing. Thus, even though she wasn’t living on the streets or in her car, she was homeless.

One of the big drawbacks to being homeless is that it can make it hard to stay connected with other people. The homeless people I’ve known all have had cell phones, but their phone plans have very limited minutes, so if you try to call them it’s likely you won’t get through. The homeless people I’ve known all have email addresses, but because they don’t have regular internet access they may not be able to respond to email right away. Being homeless can be isolating, and if you have a friend who’s homeless, it can be tough to stay in touch with them.

Alice was able to check email regularly because she had email access through her job. However, she didn’t like to receive personal email at work, and asked not to be listed in the congregation’s directory. She still showed up every week for Sunday services. I finally said to her, “Look, you’re here nearly every week, you’re obviously a Unitarian Universalist, why don’t you become a member of this congregation?” And then she told me her good news. She had managed to navigate the Byzantine application process for Section 8 housing. (From what I’ve heard almost requires a college degree to navigate successfully, and Alice did in fact have a college degree). There is so little Section 8 housing that actually getting into Section 8 housing is almost like hitting the lottery. But Alice hit the lottery, and got Section 8 housing. I congratulated her on her great good fortune, and then she told me the bad news — the Section 8 apartment she had gotten was an hour’s drive from our congregation. In fact that was the last Sunday she was going to be with us. Not surprisingly, we never heard from her again.

Here I’d like to interject a short description of the different kinds of homelessness.

First, there’s couch-surfing. Alice was a couch-surfer, doing short-term stays in other people’s homes. Couch surfing can feel relatively stable, if you have hosts who are willing to let you stay for long periods of time. But couch-surfing ranges all the way to very unstable, where you’re staying for short periods of time in homes where you don’t feel safe.

Next is car dwelling. In Silicon Valley where I was based for thirteen years, car dwellers included people who owned homes in the Central Valley, a three hour’s drive away, but who lived in their RVs during the week while working at Silicon Valley jobs. And all the local state colleges had students who were full-time car dwellers during the school year. At the other end of the car dwelling scale were people who lived full-time in their cars, and barely had enough money to keep the car insured and registered.

Next are the people who live in shelters. From talking with shelter dwellers, I learned that homeless shelters can be a mixed bag. At the upper end of the scale, there were the shelters like Heart and Home in Palo Alto. This is a women-only winter shelter housing its guests in churches in Palo Alto; volunteers bring meals, and sit with the guests to talk and share dinner together. At the lower end of the scale are the big city shelters, some of which can feel overcrowded and unsafe to the guests. Not everyone feels safe in a shelter, and some people would rather live on the street.

And that brings me to Anna. When I first met Anna, she was living in a shelter. She had heard about our Unitarian Universalist congregation, and decided to come check out a worship service. After the service, she found me and, like a typical newcomer, asked me a series of questions about Unitarian Universalism. She came back again the next week, and pretty soon she was calling herself a Unitarian Universalist. A couple of months later, she went through the formal process to become a member of the congregation, making an annual financial pledge; and she pledged a greater percentage of her disposable income than most of our middle class members.

Anna was a regular at Sunday morning services, so we began to worry a bit when she missed two weeks in a row. Anna was in her mid-seventies, and we wondered if she had gotten ill or injured. I tried calling her, but not surprisingly was unable to get through — she paid by the minute on her phone plan, and didn’t pay for any minutes unless she needed to make a call. Fortunately, she showed up the next week, and I asked her if she had been ill. She told me it wasn’t illness, it was that she had decided to leave the shelter because it just didn’t feel safe any more. You have to understand that Anna was clean and sober, and that her mental health was excellent. But not everyone who stays in a shelter is sober or mentally healthy, and the staff in shelters are usually overworked and can’t monitor everyone adequately. What had really gotten to Anna was the drinking and drug use in the shelter where she had been staying; she had 35 years of sobriety, attended Alcoholics Anonymous regularly, and had little tolerance for people who wouldn’t deal with their addictions. She decided she preferred to live on the streets, rather than live with “a bunch of drunks and druggies” (using her words, as best I can remember them).

From then on, we only saw Anna at Sunday services about once a month. It all depended on where she wound up spending the night, and whether she could catch a bus that would get her to the church in time for services. Of course, the church offered to give her rides; but she didn’t know where she was going to be on any given Saturday night, nor could she afford the phone call to arrange rides. Nor would she accept money from the congregation’s fund for members in need. Anna felt it was her duty as a member to financially support the congregation, not to have the congregation financially support her.

When I talked with Anna at social hour, she was mostly interested in talking about the sermon, or about Unitarian Universalism. She kept saying that here she was in her mid-seventies, never knew about Unitarian Universalism before, but she realized now that she’d actually been a Unitarian Universalist all her life. So that’s mostly what we talked about. But sometimes she told me a little bit about her strategies for living on the street safely. Since her methods were so idiosyncratic and creative, I feel like talking about them would betray confidentiality; suffice it to say that she developed creative ways of navigating life on the streets.

As I was leaving that congregation, I heard that Anna had been finally put on the waiting list for permanent housing — not in a shelter this time, but in an actual apartment. I don’t know if that worked out. All too often, such permanent housing deals fall through for homeless people at the last minute. But I hope that she did get housing. I’d grown fond of Anna — a good conversationalist, an incisive observer of other people, smart and funny and independent — and like to think that she wound up living some place safe. I don’t like to think of her living on the streets into her eighties.

So there you have some suitably anonymized stories of a few people’s experiences of housing insecurity and homelessness. I’m reluctant to make generalizations based on these experiences. I told you about Harry, who was housing insecure and just missed being homeless. His experience was very different from Alice, the couch-surfer — not just because of their different situations, but because of their different ages, and their different personalities. And Anna had yet another completely different experience. Therefore, I’m not going to make any generalizations about the experience of homelessness.

But I would like to make a couple of ethical observations. First of all, despite what many politicians try to tell us, homelessness cannot always be blamed on the person who winds up being homeless. That is to say, homelessness and housing insecurity do not always result from some individual moral failing. The people I have told you about were all upright and moral people; they were all intelligent, none of them was mentally ill, none of them was an addict or an alcoholic. Based on the homeless people I’ve known, homelessness is just as likely to result from bad luck as from personal failings. I still remember the thirty-something man who arrived at a homeless shelter in Palo Alto who said he had grown up in Palo Alto, graduated from Palo Alto High School, returned to Palo Alto after college, and wound up homeless due to medical bills he couldn’t pay. He did everything right, and ended up homeless through bad luck. Unfortunately, one of the legacies of the Christian tradition that lies at the root of so much of American political culture is a strong tendency to say we are each individually responsible for our sins. Even though Jesus taught us to help those who are poor, Americans have a strong tendency to blame those who are poor. This is a theological position that we Unitarian Universalists categorically reject.

The second ethical observation about homelessness I’d like to make is related to the first. If we can’t blame the homeless person for being homeless, then that means that society is to blame. And society actually includes all of us. This, I believe, is why so many politicians prefer to blame homeless people for being homeless — because if homeless people are not to blame, then it’s within our power to do something about homelessness. This, by the way, helps explain why the American tradition tries to put the blame for being poor on those who are poor — because otherwise, the blame falls on the rest of us for allowing homelessness to occur. And that’s a very uncomfortable feeling.

So end my brief ethical observations. I hope we can get past our feeling of discomfort about all being responsible for homelessness. I would like it society changed so that a responsible sober women in her seventies no longer had to worry about living on the streets.

Martin Luther King, Jr., for Times Like These

Readings

The first reading is from the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an ‘I it’ relationship for an ‘I thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong….”

The second reading is another excerpt from the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.”

Sermon: MLK for Times Like These

The readings this morning were excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” King wrote that letter in response to a public letter from eight White clergy — seven Christians and one Jew — who together wrote what they titled “A Call for Unity,” which they published in the main Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper. In their letter, these eight White clergy said: “We are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.” And their letter concluded by saying, “We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.”

King wrote his reply to these well-meaning but narrow-minded clergy while he was in the Birmingham jail, having been arrested for taking part in the demonstrations which so bothered those White clergy. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he showed these eight clergy how they were wrong: that the principles of law and order should guarantee all American citizens equal rights; that American citizens should not have to wait for human rights; that he himself was not an “outsider” but rather someone caught up in the same fight for human rights as the Black people of Birmingham. And then King asked: “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?”

This question has bothered Unitarian Universalists, and the rest of American organized religion, ever since. We know those eight White clergy were misguided in their critique of King; we know they were misguided in their critique of the whole non-violent Civil Rights movement. At the same time, we secretly worry that King’s critique of organized religion might be correct: that organized religion would prefer to maintain the status quo, rather than to make the world a better place.

Conservative Christians respond to this secret worry by insisting that the primary purpose of organized religion is saving individual souls, preparing persons to get into heaven after they die. Go ahead and worry about making the world a better place if you want to, they say, but your top priority should always be saving saving souls for heaven. We actually see a similar response in other religious traditions; as one example, some Buddhists will tell you that your top priority should be spending time on your personal practice in order to achieve Enlightenment. These conservative religious groups answer Dr. King’s question by saying that they are not especially interested in saving the nation or the world.

We see a different response from those of us on the progressive wing of religion — Unitarian Universalists, progressive Christians and Jews, engaged Buddhists, and so on. Religious progressives really do believe that the primary purpose of organized religion is to try and make the world a better place. This is certainly true for Unitarian Universalists. Our old “seven principles” talked about the inherent worthiness of every human personality; the important of the democratic process; caring for the interdependent web of existence; and so on. The new Unitarian Universalist principles, adopted last June, talk about justice, equity, pluralism, generosity, and so on. We do our best to stay focused on saving the world.

The interesting thing about Dr. King was that his approach included both the impulse to save your own soul, as well as the impulse to save the world. The sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it this way: “King’s message was that God wanted you to deliver yourself. His gospel of freedom mixed responsibility [and] spiritual recovery…. This emphasis on the need for a change in Black consciousness aligned him with the most diverse cultural streams: the traditional American idea of being born again; its secular incarnation in … identity as a project of self-fashioning…. [and] It also jibed with the Exodus story: The Israelites needed forty years in the wilderness to get their minds right, so they would cease their whining….” So writes sociologist Jonathan Rieder.

Dr. King taught that it’s not enough to just go out and solve the world’s problems. We also have to solve our own personal problems. Maybe even we even have to figure out whether we’re a part of the problem. Dr. King tells us that personal and global problems may be linked. You can’t take on responsibility for solving the world’s problems unless you deal with your own internal personal problems. And you can’t solve your own internal personal problems until you also take on responsibility for helping to solve the world’s problems.

But how, you may wonder, does this pertain to the Exodus story? We usually read the Exodus story as a quaint fable, a primitive attempt at history. We chuckle a little at the naïveté of the story. We know that it’s only about 350 miles from Egypt to the Promised Land. If you take forty years to walk 350 miles, that works out to about 125 feet per day. How naive to think that Moses would take forty years to lead his people that short a distance.

But instead of reading Exodus story as a primitive attempt at history, we can read it as a sophisticated metaphorical account of internal psychological growth and change. You begin in a mental state that you want to escape from. What do you have to do to free yourself from that mental state? With that in mind let’s consider one episode from Exodus, the story of the golden calf. It goes something like this:

During their psychological journey from the fleshpots of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land, Moses has his people camp out at the base of Mount Sinai. While the people are making camp and taking care of the day-to-day necessities of survival in the desert, Moses climbs up Mount Sinai to talk with God. God tells Moses that he and his people are now under God’s special care. All they have to do is promise not to worship other gods. Then God provides insightful rules for living, given to Moses in the form of laws inscribed on stone tablets.

There comes a time when Moses stays on top of the mountain for a really long time. The people camped out at the bottom of the mountain begin to grow uneasy. They worry that Moses isn’t going to come back. Is he lost in meditation and contemplation? Has their new God has abandoned them? So they decide to make a different god. Aaron, the brother of Moses, gets the people to make a calf out of gold. Aaron and the people invent new ways to worship this god of their own invention. They worship this god, share a big meal, then begin to celebrate together.

At that moment, Moses comes back down the mountain. “What’s going on here?” he said. “Don’t you remember your commitment to stay focused on one spiritual task? Yet here you all are, distracted from your goal by some deity that you invented. And seriously people, a baby cow covered in gold? — this is not something that is worth worshipping.”

Moses takes the golden calf, burns it, grinds it up into a powder, dissolves it in water, and makes the people drink it. The people look a little shamefaced at first, but then some of them point out that Moses had been gone for a long time. For all they knew, Moses and his god had given up on them and gone somewhere else. Next Aaron tries to calm Moses down, telling him, “You know the people, they are bent on evil.” But Moses perceives these are merely attempts to placate him. He sees that the people are still running wild, and that they have no intention of actually improving their behavior.

“Who’s on my side?” said Moses angrily. “If you’re still committed to your original promises, if you can see that the golden calf is merely a distraction from your serious purpose, come with me!” Some of the people joined him. Moses made sure they all had swords, and then told them to go and kill anyone who still worshipped that golden calf.

So they did.

Now, if you read Exodus as if it’s naive history, this story of the golden calf sounds brutal, and it seems difficult to understand. But if we read Exodus as a psychological journey, the story of the golden calf makes more sense.

Think of it this way: Here we all are, on our journey to the Promised Land, the land where we will live in peace and plenty. But the journey to the Promised Land takes longer and proves more difficult than we had expected. The length and the difficulty of the journey causes us to get distracted by meaningless and trivial things. The only way to get ourselves back on track is by completely cutting out the trivial distractions. Yet those trivial distractions are pleasant, and cutting them out proves painful. If this is the general outline of the psychological journey described in the story of the golden calf, it doesn’t take much to imagine specific applications of this story to real life.

To take one example, the story of the golden calf might serve as a metaphor for how my friends in recovery programs describe their psychological journey out of addiction. The road to recovery takes longer than expected, and it’s more difficult than is expected. You may know the principles needed to recover from addiction, whether you’re following a twelve-step program or some other program. But it’s easy to abandon those abstract principles for the empty pleasure of trivial distractions. Sometimes successful recovery requires the harsh act of cutting ties with old friends, people who might drag one back into addiction.

To take another example, the story of the golden calf can resemble the journey of taking up a serious spiritual practice. Your spiritual practice, whether it’s meditation or some other practice, seems like such a good idea when you start out. But there often comes a time when your progress slows and stops. You grow weary of the effort required. You think to yourself: Maybe things weren’t so bad in the old days when you weren’t committed to this spiritual practice. Wouldn’t it be so easy to give it up? And so maybe you drop your spiritual practice for a time, and revert to your old way of being. When you realize that your spiritual practice really was doing you good, you find it can be wrenching to return to that spiritual practice, it can require the harsh acting of cutting out whatever trivial pursuits took the place of your spiritual practice.

To take one more example, the story of the golden calf can also resemble the journey towards some social justice goal. When you first start working for racial justice, for example, you’re invigorated and enthusiastic. Then there are the inevitable setbacks; the political climate becomes hostile; the party in power uses barely concealed racist vocabulary; the people who resist racial justice are spreading disinformation. You grow weary of the work. You begin to feel that you only have enough energy for your ordinary day-to-day tasks, and you pull back from racial justice. Yet something happens — another racially motivated killing, another law supporting racial inequality, whatever — and you find that you cannot simply ignore the problem. You find yourself forced to return to the hard work of establishing racial justice here in the United States.

If we read the story of Exodus as a psychological metaphor, it can apply to all these situations: to personal recovery; to personal spiritual growth; to making the world a better place. If we understand the story of Exodus as a psychological journey, it also helps us perceive the interrelations between all these things — between our personal recovery, and our personal spiritual, and our communal quest for making the world a better place. All these thing are interrelated.

Martin Luther King understood the psychological truth that all these things are interrelated. Our own personal spiritual growth cannot be separated from our communal quest to make this a better world. Our own personal recovery from pain and trauma cannot be separated from the communal attempt to recover from the wrongs arising out of our shared history. This psychological truth runs through all of King’s speeches and sermons and writings: correcting injustice in the world cannot be separated from caring for our own individual spiritual health.

I would suggest to you that this part of Dr. King’s message may be especially relevant to us in these times. Our country is faced with major problems that we must solve — racial injustice, economic injustice, ecological problems, the list goes on. Yet the psychological truth is that taking care of the world requires us to take care of our individual selves. If we neglect our own spiritual and emotional and physical health, we won’t be able to work on the world’s problems. If we ignore the world’s problems, our own personal health will suffer.

Thus you see: we cannot achieve our goal of the earth made fair and all her people free, unless we simultaneously cultivate our own spiritual health. That is one reason why we gather here each week: to take care of ourselves, while also considering how to care for the world. And so it is we continue to live out Dr. King’s teachings.

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from the long poem “Fasti” by the ancient Roman poet Ovid:

While I was musing, writing-tablets in hand,
The house seemed brighter than it was before.
Then suddenly, sacred and marvelous, Janus,
In two-headed form, showed his twin faces to my eyes.
Terrified, I felt my hair grow stiff with fear
And my heart was frozen with sudden cold.
Holding his stick in his right hand, his key in the left,
He spoke these words to me from his forward looking face:

“Do not fear, but learn what you seek, O poet who labors
Over the days, and remember what I say.

“The ancients called me Chaos (since I am of the first world):
Note the long ages past of which I shall tell.
The clear air, and the three other elements,
Fire, water, earth, were heaped together as one.
When, through the discord of its components,
The mass dissolved, and scattered to new regions,
Flame found the heights: air took a lower place,
While earth and sea sank to the furthest depth.
Then I, who was a shapeless mass, a ball,
Took on the appearance, and noble limbs of a god.
Even now, a small sign of my once confused state,
My front and back appear just the same….

“Now learn the reason for my shape:
Though already you partially understand it.
Every doorway has two sides, this way and that,
One facing the crowds, and the other the household gods:
And like your doorkeeper seated at the threshold,
Who watches who goes and out and who goes in,
So I am the doorkeeper of the heavenly court,
Looking towards both east and west at once:…
And I, lest I lose time twisting my neck around,
Am free to look both ways without moving.”

The second reading is from “Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye:

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers….

Sermon: “Looking Forward, Looking Back”

The ancient Roman gods and goddesses are part of our shared Western culture. We name planets and dwarf planets after them — Jupiter, Neptune, Ceres, Pluto. And most of us have at least some passing familiarity with these ancient deities: Jupiter, the ruler of the other gods and goddesses; Neptune, the god of the sea; and so on.

For the most part, the Romans gods and goddesses were said to have appearances that were much like humans. Some of the them, however, had a more bizarre appearance. Janus was one of those odd-looking gods: he had two faces, one which looked forward, and one which looked backwards. In the first reading this morning, we heard Janus’s own explanation for his appearance. “I am the doorkeeper of the heavenly court,” he told the poet Ovid, “Looking towards both east and west at once… [for] lest I lose time twisting my neck around, [I] am free to look both ways without moving.”

Janus also told the poet that he began as a part of Chaos, the stuff out of which the universe emerged. And Janus says, “as a small sign of my once confused state, my front and back appear just the same.” Because of that, he became the god of doorways, looking both outwards towards the crowds of people outside the door of the house, and inwards towards the household gods that preside over the safety of each household.

No wonder, then, that the Romans named the first month of their calendar year for Janus. He is the perfect god for the beginning of a new year, because of the way he looks both forward and backwards. So it is that we, at the beginning of a new year, feel an impulse to look both forwards and backwards. So I’m going imitate Janus, and at the beginning of this new year I’m going to take a look backwards at last year, then a look forward into the new year.

The most difficult task will be looking backwards. This is because looking back at 2024 seems to lead inevitably to conversations about the presidential election, and those conversations can be fraught. Either that, or people start arguing about the war in Gaza and Israel. Either that, or someone will bring up global climate change. When looking back at the past year, it’s all too easy to talk about topics which cause people distress.

But I decided that for this first sermon of the year, I didn’t want to cause distress to either you or me. In the second reading, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye tells us: “So much of any year is flammable,/ lists of vegetables, partial poems./ Orange swirling flame of days,/ so little is a stone.” That is to say, at the end of any given year there are a great many things that we can let go of. In her poem, she imagines the things you can let go of as being things that are flammable. Then she adds another image: “So little is a stone”; or to put it another way, when you look back over the year there are only a few things that are solid like a stone, things that won’t perish in the flames, things that are worth holding on to. For example, it is worth holding on to the memories of the love of family and friends. It is worth holding on the the memories of people who have died in the past year. It is always worth holding on to that which is true and good.

With that in mind, I’d like to suggest that we might also think about some of the good things that happened in the past year. Perhaps we can’t avoid thinking about what went wrong in 2024; but let’s take a moment to think about what went right.

First: a sign of hope in the seemingly intractable problem of housing insecurity and homelessness. As we all know, the rate of homelessness is rising both nationwide and here in Massachusetts; our state is now in the top five states with the greatest numbers of people who are homeless. Yet in spite of these increases, last year the city of Los Angeles bucked the trend with a 2.2% decline the total number of people who were homeless in their city, while unsheltered homelessness declined by 10.4%. They accomplished this through a combination of policies and programs to get people into housing. (1) Thus we can see that homelessness is not an insoluble problem. There are viable solutions out there, and we can learn from places like Los Angeles.

A second piece of positive news: three more countries legalized same sex marriage. Two of those were countries we might not have expected: both Thailand and Greece legalized same sex marriage last year. Thailand is the first Southeast Asian country, and the third country in all of Asia, to legalize same-sex marriage. Greece is the first majority-Orthodox Christian country to legalize same-sex marriage. (2) Estonia was the third country that legalized same-sex marriage last year, so there are now 38 countries around the world where same-sex marriage is legal. Same-sex marriage is now legal somewhere on all six permanently inhabited continents. This is not something I ever expected to see in my lifetime.

Third: there was actually quite a bit of good news in the environment. In just one example, as of last year the United Kingdom no longer produces any of its energy from coal; the last coal power generation station closed in October. Since England was the site of the first coal power generation plant, this is both a symbolic milestone and a practical milestone. (3) In other positive environmental news from last year, the sail cargo ship Anemos completed its maiden voyage from the Netherlands to New York carrying one thousand tons of cargo. The ship Anemos has, and I quote, a “projected carbon intensity per unit transport [that is] less than a tenth of that of a sub-Panamax container ship.” Anemos will soon have seven sister ships, and regular cargo routes are already planned. (4) Electric vehicle sales continued to increase around the world in 2024. We’re still waiting for accurate data, but it looks like the price of renewable energy continued to drop significantly in the past year. All this is good news.

Fourth: there was good news, perhaps unexpectedly, in the area of peace and nonviolence. Homicide rates in the United States dropped sixteen percent last year. That’s the third straight year homicides have declined in our country. (5) This is true locally, too — my recollection is that the Boston Globe ran a front page story a couple of days ago reporting that homicide rates in Boston for 2024 were the lowest since 1957.

And one last bit of good news from the past year: This past summer, the United Nations reported that as of 2024, “population size had peaked in 63 countries…including China, Germany, Japan, and the Russian Federation.” The United Nations report went on to say that “in more than half of all countries…the average number of live births per woman is below 2.1 — the level required for a population to maintain a constant size.” Admittedly, because of so-called “population momentum,” the overall human population is still growing and will peak around the year 2080. Nevertheless, the projection for total human population is now projected to stabilize at three quarters of a billion people lower than was expected a decade ago. (6) Since human overpopulation contributes to just about every major world problem, from the environmental crisis to the worldwide refugee crisis, this final piece of news is very good news indeed.

Now if you only read social media, these news items are unlikely to rise to the top of what your social media outlet is feeding to you. The people who design the algorithms that drive social media know you spend more time on their sites when you’re doomscrolling. As for traditional news outlets, they too are more likely to emphasize the bad news over the good news. On the Freakonomics podcast a couple of years ago, young adult author John Green pointed out: “a lot of times good news happens slowly and bad news happens all at once, and so we tend to focus on the bad news that’s crashing over us in waves and not on the slow long-term work that people are doing together to try to make a better world for us to share.” (6.5)

Yes, there are many bad things going on in the world right now. But if you focus only on the bad things in the world, you’re presenting yourself with a distorted view of the world. Not only that, but when you’re thinking about good news you have to consider long-term stories that might not be newsworthy. And with that in mind, let’s look forward into the new year.

I anticipate that some of the more interesting good news in the coming year will occur in the realm of public health. As one example of what I mean, consider the efforts to develop a vaccine for malaria. Beginning in 2021, a WHO-approved malaria vaccine has been made available to children in many high malaria transmission areas. In 2024, Cameroon was the first country to require childhood vaccination for malaria. We are in the middle of a long slow process to eradicate one of the more debilitating diseases on Earth. Some scientists are now predicting that malaria could be wiped out in another two decades. Because this is a long, slow process, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see it covered in social media or in traditional news outlets. But this represents a huge advance in public health, and a huge reduction in suffering world-wide.

In the coming year, I’m going to be watching another interesting development in public health, one that directly affects us here on the South Shore. Public health experts are beginning to work with an emerging concept known as “social health.” A group at Stanford University called “Stanford Lifestyle Medicine” defines social health this way: “Social health refers to the quality of our relationships and how often we interact with others. Since social connection is in our nature as humans, when we are isolated and feel a lack of connection, research shows that our mental health can be affected…. Research also shows that our social health profoundly impacts our physical health.” (7)

You may say this is just another case of university researchers catching up with good old common sense: we already know we’re going to have better physical and mental health when we have a good social network. But thinking about social health as an aspect of public health does represent an advance, because this allows us to think about how we might improve social health through communal effort. Two years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report about the health impacts of the loneliness epidemic in this country. (8) Treating loneliness as a public health issue means not blaming individuals for being lonely, but instead working on solutions that may include public policy, local community efforts, and so on.

So, for example, if we address social health from a public health perspective, we might develop public policies and public education campaigns that can deal effectively with the loneliness epidemic and the wider mental health crisis. This would be analogous to the way we used a public health perspective to develop public policies and public education campaigns that targeted the addictiveness of tobacco. Those public policies and those education campaigns led to a dramatic reduction in tobacco use, with a concomitant drop in the cancers associated with tobacco use. So I’m going to be watching what the public health community does to develop public policies and public education campaigns to improve social health, thereby addressing the loneliness epidemic and the mental health crisis.

And I feel we don’t have to wait for the public health community to do all the work. I believe we here at First Parish can contribute to this effort, because we’re already contributing to this effort through what we do here every Sunday morning. It is clear that one way to improve social health is by building local communities. That is something we actually do quite well here at First Parish: we’re actually quite good at creating a welcoming community. We’re not perfect, and of course there’s always room for improvement in every human endeavor. But I’ve noticed that during social hour following the weekly service, we are actually quite good at talking with one another, and reaching out to people we may not know well. Having spent the last thirty years working in nine different congregations, I’d say that our First Parish community is well above average in providing community and positive social interaction.

Now let’s put that into the context of the loneliness epidemic in the United States. When we think in terms of social health, what we offer as a community may be one of the most important things we do at First Parish. Simply by doing what we ordinarily do, we actually implement several of the U.S. Surgeon General’s recommendations for mitigating the loneliness epidemic: we “create opportunities and spaces for inclusive social connection”; we “embed social connection in … practices [and] programs”; and we “foster a culture of connection in the broader community by… leading by example.” (9) Just by doing what we would be doing anyway, we’re helping address a major public health crisis.

When I think about our First Parish community as a part of a larger public health effort to address the loneliness epidemic, two things occur to me. First, I believe we should recognize that we are in fact participating in this public health effort; I could reframe this slightly and say that this is yet another one of our unrecognized social justice projects. Second, we could also be a little more public about talking about how we are contributing to social health.

This would not require us to add any programs; we don’t have to do anything more, because we’re already promoting social health and fighting the loneliness epidemic. But the U.S. Surgeon General suggests that community-based organizations have a key role to play in advancing “public education and awareness.” And advancing public education and awareness could turn out to be quite simple. So, for example, if someone finds out that I’m part of First Parish, and if they express the least bit of interest, I make sure that the first thing I tell them is that First Parish is a good community. I make it clear being a community is one of most important things we do. Yes, I mention that we talk about moral and ethical issues; yes, I mention that we have good music programs; yes, I mention our beautiful historic Meetinghouse. But I always make sure to mention our sense of community first. I make sure to mention that it’s a good place to connect with other people.

While this may seem like a very minor point, it’s not. Most people here on the South Shore still think that religion is primarily about religious belief. Many people still think the only reason to do religion is to shore up your belief system. However, in the context of the loneliness epidemic, I’d argue that the most important thing we do here at First Parish is provide social connection. By pointing this out, we can contribute to public education and awareness; we can help others in our community to understand that any organization they join is going to reduce their social disconnection and improve their social health. We can help them understand that this is true for all the community groups we participate in — whether it’s Rotary, or the sailing club, or the town elder affairs group — any membership-based organization, civic group, or arts and education group.

We can all be a part of this low-key campaign of public education and awareness, and it doesn’t take much effort. All we have to do is just be a little more willing to talk with others about the community-based organizations we belong to, and to mention that belonging to such community based groups helps support social health.

As I look forward into the coming year — as I look for positive trends that I think may continue in the coming year –I’ve spent most of my time talking about social health. The way we can contribute to social health is just one among many long-term projects that people are doing together to make this a better world. I know many of you are participating in other long-term projects that are making this a better world; long-term projects that don’t make it into the news. The only reason that I’ve focused on social health is that it’s something that we do together here in our First Parish community; improving social health is a project that we all share.

Just by showing up here at First Parish, we help create a place where people who are lonely can come and find safe, healthy, supportive social interaction. Just by showing up here, we are helping improve our community’s social health, and thereby making the world a better place.

As we look back over the past year, as we look forward into the new year, it’s easy to be negative. It’s easy to think about everything that’s wrong with the world. But I think it’s more productive to think about how we are contributing to making the world a better place; and in the year to come, may we all think more about our positive efforts in this world.

Notes

(1) “Unsheltered Homelessness Drops and Sheltered Homelessness Rises in City and County of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority website, 28 June, 2024, https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=977-unsheltered-homelessness-drops-and-sheltered-homelessness-rises-in-la accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(2) “Thailand’s king signs landmark same-sex marriage bill into law,” Associated Press, 24 Sept. 2024 https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/asia/thailand-same-sex-marriage-intl-hnk/index.html accessed 4 Jan. 2025. — James Gregory, “Greece legalises same-sex marriage,” BBC News, 15 Feb. 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68310126 accessed 4 Jan. 2025
(3) Mark Poynting and Esme Stallard, “UK to finish with coal power after 142 years,” BBC News, 30 September 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(4) The Maritime Executive, “High-Tech Sailing Ship Starts Maiden Voyage With 1,000 Tonnes of Cargo,” 18 Aug. 2024 https://maritime-executive.com/article/high-tech-sailing-ship-starts-maiden-voyage-with-1-000-tonnes-of-cargo accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(5) Bill Hutchinson, “US poised to see dramatic drop in homicides for 3rd straight year: More than 5,000 fewer homicides have been recorded this year compared to 2023,” ABC News, 31 Dec. 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/US/united-states-drop-homicides-2024/story?id=116902123 accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(6) “Growing or shrinking? What the latest trends tell us about the world’s population,” United Nations News, Global perspective Human stories, 11 July 2024 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/07/1151971 accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(6.5) Freakonomics podcast, Episode 92, “John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride,” 11 Nov. 2022, transcript at: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/john-greens-reluctant-rocket-ship-ride/ accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(7) Sharon Brock, What is Social Health and How Does it Impact Longevity? Stanford Lifestyle Medicine website, 14 Nov. 2024 https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2024/11/14/what-is-social-health-and-how-does-it-impact-longevity/ accessed 4 Jan. 2025. Robert D. Russell of Southern Illinois University is usually credited with originating the concept of social health back in the 1970s: “With an interest in the holistic and ecological aspects of health and spirituality as components of personal health, he often gets credit from colleagues for creating the ecological model of health education.” Southern Illinois University News, https://news.siu.edu/2012/03/032812cjm12090.php accessed 4 Jan. 2025.
(8) See: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (Washington, DC: Office of the Surgeon General, 2023), https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
(9) Ibid., p. 62.