“No Creed, But A Covenant”
Rev. Lilli Nye
September 10, 2006
As I was out and about the other day, and I was turning the idea of “covenant” around in my mind in preparation for today, I just happened to glance up at the marquis of a local theatre and, low and behold, what was playing but the new movie: The Covenant. How fitting, I thought—a horror film about a group of people with demonic powers bound to each other through all eternity by a blood oath. Yep, that’s pretty much the angle I wanted to take.
If you want cheap thrills, go see the movie, but if you want deep thrills, come to Theodore Parker Church. Right?
Now, I’m not being entirely ironic here when I talk about finding deep thrills at church. It may not be roller-coaster-ride thrills, or first-kiss-thrills, or win-the-lottery thrills. But there are quieter thrills that come to us, with our beautiful gatherings in this space, thrills that come with meaningful accomplishment after creative collaboration, or the feeling that the Spirit is moving in our lives, or in our community, in a new way, opening us to fuller being, or the thrill of seeing our children grow into remarkably thoughtful, caring young citizens of the world. Those are the deep thrills.
And what is the price of admission for those kinds of thrills? Being in covenant with one another, abiding with one another, keeping the faith, walking together in loving respect, even when it’s difficult.
If you open your worship leaflet, and look on the inside left-hand page, you will see, in italics, the formal covenant of this community. (Also, on our Home page.)
In the love of God, we covenant
To dwell together in peace,
To seek the truth in freedom,
And to serve humanity in fellowship.
In a few minutes, I will spend some time unpacking and interpreting the language of our own church covenant. But before getting there, I would like to first explore the religious roots of covenant. I hope you will come along with me in this investigation. :)
First, what is a covenant? My dictionary starts by defining it as “a solemn agreement that is binding on all parties.” (Sounds like that horror film I was just mentioning). The 2nd and 3rd definitions are “a formal and legally binding agreement or contract such as a lease, or a lawsuit for damages that is brought because of the breaking of a legal covenant.”
But we’re not addressing the legal meaning of this word today. It’s the religious meaning that is relevant to us. The fourth definition begins to get to it: “The promises that were made in the Bible between God and the Israelites, who agreed to worship no other gods.”
That one, vague little sentence tries to point to an enormously complex idea that unfolds throughout every book of Hebrew and New Testament Scriptures: The covenant story.
In the book of Exodus, YHWH leads the Israelites out of their slavery in Egypt, and while they are in the desert, YHWH says, essentially, “I will be your God, and you will be my people. If you will keep my commandments, you will be a holy people, and chosen among all the earth.”
Now, this IF is very challenging—its one of the most challenging aspects of this story. “If you keep my commandments, I will be yours.” That is a conditional agreement, impying, “if you don’t keep our agreements, I will abandon you.” Those who imagine a God who is wrathful, a God who would damn a lost soul, are believers in that IF. For them, covenant is legalistic.
And yet, as the covenant story unfolds throughout the entire sacred narrative of the Hebrew Bible, it is, in fact, the story of God’s unconditional love, God’s refusal to accept the failure of the relationship. It is a story of forgiveness and reconciliation after every rupture, and the desire for full mutuality in love between a people and their God.
The people repeatedly break the covenant. They fall away from it over and over again, by worshiping other gods, by worshipping money, by abandoning the codes of decency within their own community.
Over and over, God gets really, really mad, but always in the end, God cannot do anything but love the people and try to persuade them back into right relationship. The Divine will not abandon love, but nor will the Divine abandon the covenant itself, which calls the people to keep the sacred laws.
What does this sacred story teach? In covenant, when right relations have been broken, we do not abandon each other, we do not withdraw our love, but neither do we abandon the hope and expectation that right relations can and must be restored.
Much later in history, during the Reformation of the Church, some radical thinkers began to apply the idea of covenant to religious life in a new way: Rebecca Parker tells the story:
“In 1550, Robert Browne, drew on the Biblical image of promise-making between God and people to propose a revolution in church life. Churches should come into being, he said, as a covenant among persons—not through common assent to a doctrine, or through sacraments administered by priests… Instead, people should join themselves by a mutual agreement to walk together, to keep [the great commandment to love neighbor and self], to choose their ministers and teachers, to put forth and debate questions to learn truth, to welcome the voice of dissent…Browne hoped there would be a church in which people would mutually agree ‘that any might protest, appeal, complain, exhort, dispute, reprove…watch for disorders, reform abuses, and debate matters…’”
…and yet to do so within a greater covenant of love.
This brings us back to our own church covenant. All congregational churches formed in this country, including ours, founding in 1712, were established by the stating of a covenant. To become a member was to embrace that covenant. That’s what signing the membership book actually meant. The covenant was written out, followed by the signatures of those who had chosen to enter into it with one another.
While the language of our church covenant has been modernized over time, its spirit remains very much like the early congregational covenants. So let’s consider at what it says.
In the love of God, we covenant…
Some of us might dismiss this first phrase, “In the love of God”
as the vestige of an earlier belief system embraced by a more theistic era in
this congregation. But I would suggest that it is still fully relevant to us
today:
In becoming part of a congregation, we covenant to walk with and abide with one another, but we make that commitment within a larger spiritual context. That spiritual context is the universal ideal of Love, an ideal which transcends the frailties and instabilities of our human capacities to love.
Whether that Universal ideal is held only in the human heart and mind, or whether it exists as a cosmic reality, the point is that by embracing a Universal Ideal of Love we are called out beyond our own familiar limitations.
And we are limited. We’re often self-centered without actually being self-loving; we come up short in patience and tolerance; we are vulnerable to injuries inflicted by others; we fail sometimes, perhaps often, to be our best, to be what we long to be.
I was recently looking at a wonderful little book called Children’s
Letters To God. It captures the actual musings of children about ultimate
things. One little boy wrote,
“Dear God…It must be very hard for you to love every person in the
whole world. There are only four people in my family, and I can never do it!”
Because, as human beings, we fall short of full self-love and full love of neighbor, we make covenant not only between ourselves, laterally, but also with something beyond ourselves, something profoundly beautiful and transcendent: The Spirit of Divine Love, the universal ideal of Love with a capital L.
The universal ideal offers the potential, the possibility of unconditional, life-transforming, community transforming, healing and redeeming love, a love that does not fail, a love that does not give up on us (the human race), a love that can wait in everlasting patience for full mutuality, that sees with perfect understanding and compassion and persuades us toward wisdom—a Love that lives in the life-giving connections between things and can reweave the web of life where is has been damaged.
So, when we say, “In the love of God, we covenant together,” we are saying that our covenant with one another is held by, planted in, infused with, and accountable to that ideal—the Spirit of Divine Love, which will often be beyond us, and yet which we can embody when we believe in it and surrender to it.
In the Love of God…we covenant…to dwell together in peace…
By the word “peace”, here, I will assert that we shouldn’t take this to mean that we are to keep everything nicey-nicey. The avoidance of conflict as a value can keep a community static and lead to the suppression of honest discourse.
By dwelling together in peace, we mean that we keep coming to the table, together, we continue to abide with one another, WHILE being willing to openly and vigorously dialogue and debate what is right and true, hearing all our different voices.
In Gail Geisenhauer’s story, she describes a community that demonstrated unconditional, covenanted love. They did so by continuing to hold someone, in their bond of peace, who had violated love’s call to compassion and justice.
They were able to continue to hold her, embracing her full humanity, honoring the promise of her best self and the possibility of true relationship. They were able to do this without consenting to the alienating perspectives she held, and without being deterred in their commitment to the difficult work of justice-making, expressed, in time, through their Welcoming Congregation program and later advocacy ministries with gay folks outside their congregation.
UU minister Jacob Trapp wrote that…
“It matters what we say ‘yes’ to, and it matters what we say
‘no’ to. Every ‘no’ gets its value from the ‘yes’
it also affirms. To say ‘no’ to that which denies or destroys is
also to say ‘yes’ to what affirms, builds, and creates. ‘God,’
said the Swedenborgian theologian Nathan Söderblom, ‘is the everlasting
YES of existence.’ "
And so, this community that Gail Geisenhainer describes, said ‘no’ to the hate speech of one of their members, while saying ‘yes’ to her humanity and to the full humanity of gay people, so as to abide faithfully within their greater covenant with the Everlasting Yes.
In the Love of God…we covenant…to dwell together in peace…to seek the truth in freedom:
This is what Robert Brown was referring to what he imagined the new covenantal church—a place of freedom, where people came to discern truth more fully through a mutual exchange of ideas and wisdom.
We often forget that we inherited this radical vision from the Puritans. They are our ancestors, in terms of honoring the integrity of personal conscience. Like us, they believed that a greater understanding of the path would be disclosed through by the voices and visions of the people.
In the Love of God…we covenant…to dwell together in peace…to seek the truth in freedom…and to serve humanity in fellowship.
The covenant is a circle of love: The Ideal of Love inspires us to seek the ways of peace and reconciliation. We do this by remaining open to each other’s wisdom, especially in times of conflict. Inspired by the healing and creative potential that we experience in this mutuality, we are moved to bring that healing into the greater human community and the larger web of life. By serving humanity in fellowship, we enable the Love Ideal to be experienced and embodied in ever expanding circles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once reflected on why we need church. He said, “Is not Solomon’s temple built, because Solomon himself is not a temple, but brothel, and a change house? Is not the meeting house dedicated, because human beings are not?”
He goes on the say that, when we who worship here come to fully know and live
the truth of our own Divinity, when we awaken, through actual communion, to
the faith that God is within us, will we still need a temple, or a prayer? Or
a covenant, I might add?
Fully loving self and other will be like breathing. The ideal of covenant will
have been fulfilled.
But until then, let us walk together, and abide with each other in the half-light. Let me close with these words of UU minister Richard Harris:
“What shall we do, then, until we are perfect?
What, then, until the great clear light encompasses all—
Human, tree, insect, rock, planet?
What, until entropy brings us into nothing but the one?
Surely, at our best, something like this—
Like this celebration of hope and care,
Like this acknowledgement of what is real.
And what is real?
How the ideal takes on flesh
in the willing presence of our people,
How the true moves through blood and bone
in our movements of being good with one another,
How the infinite begins to breathe
As we say these words and shape these meanings.
How the spirit is created here by our hands and eyes.
What shall we do, then, until we are perfect?
Nothing more, nor less, than live.”
May it be so.