A Promising Community

Meditation Words

"Let us covenant with one another to keep faith with the source of life knowing that we are not our own — Earth made us. Let us covenant with one another to keep faith with the community of resistance, never to forget that life can be saved from that which threatens it by small bands of people choosing to put into practice an alternative way of life. And, let us covenant with one another to seek for an ever-deeper awareness of that which springs up inwardly in us. Even when our hearts are broken by our own failure or the failure of others cutting into our lives, even when we have done all we can and life is still broken, there is a Universal Love that has never broken faith with us and never will."

Rebecca Parker

Sermon

Last week I threatened, no I’m sorry, I promised that at some point we would begin playing with religious language in our worship. I mean play in the sense of a game, where there may be a goal, but the real fun, the real point is in the process along the way. The fun, or the challenge of a game of chess doesn’t come only when you say "checkmate" — it’s in every move along the way. It’s in that spirit that I want us to play occasionally with religious language, sometimes some surprisingly traditional language, as part of our on-going work of freely and responsibly seeking truth and meaning together. Or to use another analogy, we can chew on these words, without expectation that we have to swallow them. This is spiritual gum.

I do intend some light-heartedness by that word "play," but engaging traditional religious words also accomplishes some very serious work for us. It expands our knowledge and awareness of human religiosity in general. It may facilitate our ability to express our liberal religious values with other people. The words themselves may reveal deeper or different meanings that surprise us and call us to new understanding. And with some of these words, I feel that engaging the old words demonstrates respect for our tradition, our centuries-old tradition, particularly for the Christian heretics and Protestants whose experimentation with these concepts sometimes cost them their lives. It’s easy for us to forget that our right to say, "Your concept of God is bugging me," was earned with martyr’s blood.

Now, I also want everyone to know, I really do get why certain words cause religious liberals and freethinkers such great pause. God is a great big loaded word that’s been used for all sorts of awful purposes in addition to some very good ones. Prayer in its most commonly understood meaning is a justifiable mystery to people who don’t believe in friendly father gods or magic. The figure of Jesus, particularly if given the title of "Christ" — I’d rather take on the government than open that can of worms, at least for the time being.

That said, I was surprised to hear that the object of today’s word play, "covenant" very recently provoked some strong resistance in this very congregation. The T.I.E. groups, our small group ministry that I’ll preach about next week, are known in many other congregations as "covenant groups". That’s how they came to us from the east coast, where they were largely developed. And some folks just didn’t like the sound of that, I take it, nor the act that it required, in terms of forging an agreement in the midst of the group. Though we still require that, we’ve let the word covenant go. And I was surprised, actually. Frankly, I didn’t think most folks engaged this word on any regular enough basis to get uptight about it. I will confess that prior to heading off to Divinity School "covenant" wasn’t really on my religious vocabulary radar screen, which proves only that I did not pay any attention during Sunday School at the Lakewood Congregational Church.

But I want us to engage this word "covenant" today, because I think this word — and the truths about our lives that it speaks to — is absolutely central to our Unitarian Universalist way of life. Last week I said "freedom" was our word. "Covenant" is our word, too.

So today I offer for your gum chewing pleasure, two parts history lesson, and one part theological reflection on what it means to be an individual and a community in the light of this funky old word, "covenant."

The word, of course, comes to us from the Bible. That’s part of the trouble, I guess. It’s a translation of the Hebrew berit, or brit. It simply means a contract, a binding agreement, a pledge, a promise, sometimes between equals, sometimes from a superior party down to an inferior party that has no choice, as when the bigger nation with the bigger chariots says, "We’re going to take your gold statues, okay." That’s a berit, but so is something as mundane as "you send me 500 sheep and I’ll send you 100 rolls of fabric." That’s also berit. And of course, it’s used in a very lofty manner when it refers to Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew Bible, and his relationship to the people of Israel.

So very briefly, I just want to throw out the uses of the word "covenant" in the Bible because that’s where we inherit it from, we might as well know what we’re doing. The first time it’s mentioned is with Noah. God says — by which I mean in the story — let’s not get too hung up on the literal aspect of this. "I won’t flood the whole earth anymore and there’s the rainbow that seals the deal." That’s the first time we hear "covenant."

The most important one or the first real significant one comes with Abraham. Yahweh says for reasons that are beyond Abraham’s understanding, "You’re my man and from you I will build a people." And they cut a covenant, which is a unique aspect of this word in the Hebrew Bible. It literally refers to a practice in which, in the ancient world, when a serious contract would be made an animal would be cut in half and laid down in a kind of circle. The participants would walk in between it as a gesture of the seriousness of the thing. I think the implication was "don’t hold up your end of the bargain, take a peek at the donkey, Ok?" It worked for Abraham.

We have another significant covenant with Moses at Mt. Sinai with the receipt of the Torah, the law. It laid out the whole way of practicing at the temple with sacrifices, which was the central practice of the Israelite religion for centuries. That later gets usurped by another covenant with King David. Again this choice was for reasons that are beyond anyone’s understanding, since David is such a slippery character. But God loves him. God says, "Your people will rule Israel forever." And they do until it ceases to exist in the 500’s BCE. Finally there is some covenant language around Jesus too, with some understandings of what his death meant for people and a new relationship that that may have brought with god.

Now, that said, I assume that when people have trouble with the word "covenant" it’s because they have trouble with these notions of covenant. Specifically that the Divine Power, whatever it is — at least as big as the universe —would pick one person kind of arbitrarily; would be that whimsical or capricious, or personal; would be that small. The idea from a Unitarian Universalist perspective, of a god who plays favorites is anathema to us. All people are the unique people who are set apart. And I will say that those critiques are all totally legit. I accept them. I hold them.

It is worth noting, however, that in the Bible we also find the prophetic response to these very problems. All the major prophets, including Jesus, reveal that even from the earliest time when people were thinking that the relationship with the Divine was like I just described, there was also the acknowledgement that living in a binding relationship with the Sacred or with your neighbors wasn’t about following some strict set of rules or taking for granted a privileged place. Instead what the Divine really demanded — we read it again and again — was the seeking of justice, taking care of the poor and downtrodden, demonstrating patience and mercy, and being humble before the mysteries of life. That’s actual biblical teaching on covenant, too. I’m basically restating Micah 6:8.

I could go on and on about this scripture stuff because I love it, but Rita, my beloved wife and one of the world’s sharpest sermon critics, wisely advised that I save it for a Bible study class and move on to the next point. I will, because those biblical covenants aren’t what I’m referring to when I say that covenant is at the heart of the Unitarian Universalist religious path. For that we have to fast-forward many centuries to the early 1600s…

We’re in the midst of Protestant reformation now. And young John Robinson, a disaffected preacher in the Anglican Church wants to break away because all he sees is corruption and abuse of privileges and people inheriting churches because their father had it and drunkards and adulterers as far as the eye could see. And he said, "That’s not a church." So he gathered together a group of similarly minded people and they made a new way of understanding what a church was; what a religious community was. It was the freely gathered body of the committed people who said, "Here and now, we’re a church." And they were persecuted for that of course. They were trying to break away from the Church of England, which was not okay. They ended up living in Holland for a little while and in 1620 they arrived on our shores as the Pilgrims.

We are the direct descendents, religiously, of the Pilgrims. Not because of the mythic grade school presentation of them as heroes of religious freedom, since they weren’t terribly gracious about extending it to anyone else once they found themselves in charge, and we can safely say that their openness to so-called pagan religion was a lot less open-minded than our own. But their act of forming a church created a whole new way of organizing religious communities in the West. It was called congregationalism, and that’s us. We do it essentially unchanged to this day. This act of creating a religious community that would be local, autonomous, and constituted only of those folk who freely choose to belong was centered for them on a binding agreement, on promises made, on a covenant. That’s what they called it: a covenant.

So, this is great: The Pilgrim covenant, forged in Holland, brought to America, of the First Parish Plymouth church, the oldest congregation in the country, and today a Unitarian Universalist congregation, still reads: "We, as the Lord's free people, join ourselves into a church estate, in the fellowship of the Gospel, to walk in all his ways, made known, or to be made known unto us, according to our best endeavors, whatsoever it should cost us, the Lord assisting us."

For a moment set down "Lord", set down "Him", set down "the Gospel" –the congregation in Plymouth likely still uses those words out respect for their tradition. I’m not proposing any of that kind of language, but when we look at what they said, and what they are still able to say as Unitarian Universalists, what do we find in that covenant?

1. Free people willingly binding together, and pledging common action and loyalty.
2. It was open to change and ongoing revelation: they said, " truths made known, or to be made known." They could tell that they would grow and change and they knew that what they did there would extend beyond their generation to the next. That’s very important.
3. They were aware that trying to be this way religiously is fraught with the danger of failure. They said: "according to our best endeavors." In other words, "we’ll try; we’ll try and do it."
4. And they were aware of the demands religious fellowship makes: "whatsoever it should cost us." Say, $3,000,000.
5. They were aware that the success of the undertaking depends on something larger than one person, larger than the self.
6. And what I read in it, finally, is that it is hopeful. It believes the deed can be done.

Those are the ingredients of any healthy religious community. They are the ingredients of this religious community.

Just one more word on that old Plymouth covenant, there is a UU historian and minister, Alice Blair Wesley. She looked closely at the oldest congregational covenants, some of which are still in use. And she found as their guiding principle, "the spirit of persuasion." A good covenant is persuasive, it calls forth from us our best and helps us reject that which doesn't sustain or nourish us. A good covenant also sets out some rules for engaging one another, and creates what Wesley called: "a partnership of unforced mutuality." That’s a mouthful, but maybe that’s what we do: a partnership (each of us an equal partner) of unforced (nobody cramming anybody into a spot) mutuality. We are seeking this path together. Believe it or not what the record shows is that from the earliest days of congregational covenanted religious communities that "partnership of unforced mutuality" was expressed in a very familiar form: sitting around and talking. Yes, friends, the true contribution of the Pilgrims to the world’s religious heritage is the committee meeting. That most sacred of UU acts.

When a good meeting works, though, it works beautifully. What is a good meeting but a place where ideas are shared, challenged, tested, where the morality of action is debated, where consensus and understanding are sought. When the persuasive spirit that binds people together is flowing, we’re open to persuading each other — we speak our truth, but we’re also open to being persuaded ourselves. And in that dynamic of promising to keep bringing our truth and to keep hearing truth the horizon of the possible or the allowable is extended.

So our job as Unitarian Universalists is to be persuasive with each other. This is why the old saw about UUs being able to believe whatever they want is so wrong. You can bring whatever belief you want here, but our common job, our agreed upon job is to test each other and ourselves as to whether those beliefs hold up to the high standards of truth and compassion that we set for ourselves. And our promise is that we will do that as gently and affectionately as we can.

Human beings have been called the "meaning-making creature". We are also the promise-making creature. What other critter does that: makes Promise-making, promise-breaking, and promise-renewing. Note, not promise-keeping. We’ve proven notoriously bad at that. But in the act of finding some way to give meaning to our fleeting lives within an impersonal and what-seems-to-be an impartial universe, compels us to make binding agreements with ourselves and other people.

The great Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies said, "None of our private worlds is big enough for us to live a wholesome life in. We need the wider world of joy and wonder, of purpose and adventure, of toil and tears. What are we," he asks, "any of us, but strangers and sojourners forlornly wandering through the nighttime, until we draw together and find the meaning of our lives in one another, dissolving our fears in each other's courage, making music together, and lighting torches to guide us through the dark? We belong together, because love is what we need," he said.

My claim is that the type of covenanting community that the Pilgrims pioneered is still the essence of Unitarian Universalism. The way we organize ourselves religiously is essentially the same as all those who have come before in the congregational way. We choose our own leaders. We make our own rules. We design our own worship. We choose our own members. We do our own thing. By joining the community here you promise to protect and uphold that way of being.

In this place where we put our trust and find our meaning among the members, among the promises we make to seek truth and live justly and compassionately as best as we are able. That covenant, however hidden or unstated, is what enables us to continue to pursue this path of love and reason and freedom together, year after year after year. And to hang in there even through our doubts and disappointments. Friends, if you don’t think church brings doubts and disappointments, you're still new. The real promise of liberal religious community is that in spite of disappointment, we will come back to the table and sit and face each other and open our eyes and our mouths and our ears again and again. Because religious community brings out the best and the worst in people, and the promise we make is to embrace that. I like to say that religious community brings out the Most in people. Whatever a person is magnified here. We pledge to celebrate that and dignify it with loving tenderness.

Ultimately covenant is not about the specific words of a promise or an agreement we might make to one another and post up on the wall (though that's not a bad idea), it’s about bringing that promise to life. Covenant is a practice; it's the practice of loyalty, of returning, of enduring, of letting go, of commitment, of action. Covenant is a way of life.

Someone joked once that in the absence of a creed, what becomes orthodoxy for UUs is "how we do things." I'm kind of proposing we adopt that orthodoxy: A covenantal congregational relationship is how we do things. Unfortunately, because we're so bad about being explicit about the promises we make one another, the how we do things that becomes orthodoxy becomes things like "you've got to run that by the finance committee" or "you can’t put the flowers over there we've never put them over there." Ironically, the more liberal we become theologically, the more conservative we become in the way we do things. The problem is, we have not been as intentional about this core principle as we might be.

The "how we do things" should be rooted in a deep commitment we make to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us, expressed as an open-minded engagement with ideas, open-hearted engagement with beings and open-handed service to the Web of Life. We need to speak those commitments out loud to each other — not just "feel" them. Even the Pilgrims said that most of the time they didn't write down their covenants, they felt it in their relationship. But they noted, and this is a quote: "the more express and plain it is, the more fully it puts us in mind of our mutual duty, and stirreth us up to it." It’s good to say what we are trying to do here.

Let’s remember that crusty old New England farmer, whose wife complained that he never said, "I love you" to her. I love this story. "Listen," he replied, "I told you thirty years ago that I love you. If I ever change my mind, I'll let you know." Well, that's not going to hold here. We can't say we named what we were going to do 50 years ago and it's good to go forever. It's something we recreate again and again and again in our insisted upon deep loving relationships, one with another. We must remember and affirm and celebrate the covenants that connect us; we must name our failures as well as our successes in them. We must bring those who would unite with us into them, into this faith that we share.

This week I'd like you to chew on these things. What are the commitments that you've made to yourself or other people in becoming part of this community? What are the promises, spoken or unspoken that keep this place together and real and vital?

It’s one thing to say the vision is "Celebrating Life." Would you say:

• "I promise to celebrate life."
• "I promise to empower people."
• "I promise to care for one another."
• "I promise to build a better world."

That's what our way asks of us. Are you willing to keep those promises even if things don't work out the way you think they should. I know that you are, because you are here 50 into what I hope will be a 1,000 year history. Bound by the covenant of love.

Closing Words

"Though our knowledge is incomplete, our truth partial and our love uneven, from our own experience and from the witness of our faith tradition we believe that new light is ever waiting to break through individual hearts and minds to illumine the ways of humankind, that there is mutual strength in willing cooperation, and that the bonds of love keep open the ways of freedom. Therefore we pledge to walk together in the ways of truth and affection as best we understand them now or may learn them in days to come, that we and our children might be fulfilled, and that we might speak to the world in words and actions of peace and good will."

Alice Blair Wesley