"What Binds Us Together, What Sets Us Free" Part 2

“What Binds Us Together, What Sets Us Free” Part 2

(A fair amount of this sermon, as delivered, was not written down.  But here is what I prepared and reconstructed afterwards.)

Opening Words: from Rev. Victoria Safford

"Someone said to me not long ago, “Covenant is a promise I keep to myself, about the kind of person I want to be, the kind of life I mean to have together with other people, and with all other living things.” When we welcome babies in our church, when we welcome new members into the community, when we celebrate the love of beaming couples, when we ordain new ministers, we speak not in the binding language of contract, but in the life-sustaining fluency of covenant (from covenir, to travel together).

We will walk together with you, child; we will walk together with you, friend; we will walk together with each other toward the lives we mean to lead, toward the world we mean to have a hand in shaping, the world of compassion, equity, freedom, joy, and gratitude. Covenant is the work of intimate justice."

Time for All Ages: the children’s book “One” by Kathryn Otoshi (you can hear it here:  https://youtu.be/lSnSZ11ptN0 )

Reading  “The Low Road” by Marge Piercy    (you can listen here: https://youtu.be/UNjiPNd9iwU )

Two weeks ago I preached Part One of this sermon, and I began with these words from Alice Blair Wesley:

“A covenanted free church is a body of individuals who have freely made a profoundly simple promise, a covenant: We pledge to walk together in the spirit of mutual love.”

(If you are interested in further reading – check out her series of lectures on covenant in Unitarian Universalism here:  http://minnslectures.org/archive/wesley/wesley.php )

And I asked -- How is it that we can call ourselves covenanted – bound together by a promise—and free at the same time?

If we are bound together, how can we be free?

Depends on what we mean by “free.”

Two weeks ago I talked about two ways our covenant helps us to be free.

Through setting some boundaries and expectations, a framework for our relationships with one another, our covenant:

1 --helps us know how to play together; we can be free to have fun and all can fully participate in this cooperative community game we call a congregation.

2 --helps us grow spiritually, sustaining our empathy with and for one another; when we are able to know where I end and another person begins, when we are able to stand in who we are and stay connected to others, even when they don’t stand in the same place.  When we extend generous hearts of empathy to one another we can be free to be ourselves, still accepted and loved.

Today I’m talking about ways our covenant helps us find freedom by organizing our power so that we can make an impact on this world.  And freedom here is in the broadest possible terms – not just my own personal freedom to do and think what I want, but freedom that is the fullness of life and liberty for all people.  The kind of freedom that writer David Foster Wallace described as “the really important kind of freedom.” 

He says “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty (unglamorous) ways every day.  That is real freedom.”

In our Time for All Ages, the color blue wasn’t really free when just the number one stood up to the color red.  The color blue was finally free when all the colors found their power together and all the colors counted. With this power, together, they even transformed the one who had been bullying them.  This is the kind of freedom I’m talking about.

So, how does our Unitarian Universalist covenant help us reach this kind of freedom – to truly care about other people, to sacrifice for them in unglamorous ways, to use our power to transform people and institutions that bully members of our community?

Here we have to stay rooted in our history, and we have to shift from talking about our covenant as simply a behavioral covenant—one that helps us treat each other right within the walls of this Fellowship—to a wider view of covenant.  As I shared two weeks ago, the concept of covenant in our Unitarian Universalist tradition can be traced back to the early Puritan settlers in this country who formed new congregations in New England that were radically not bound to any church hierarchy or government but whose members were bound together with one another, to walk together in the “spirit of mutual love.”  

The covenant made with one another shaped how they treated one another, but it also profoundly shaped how they would structure themselves, and why.

Rev. Sue Phillips, who is a regional staff person for our Unitarian Universalist Association, writes that “For many congregations, the meaning of covenant has flattened into the means by which people share expectations and exercise a degree of control over individual behavior. Behavioral covenants are the only way most of our congregations experience covenant, and there’s no mistaking the function – to control unhealthy individual behavior. Our people have inadvertently learned that covenants are about getting other people to stop behaving badly. We come by this honestly. The Cambridge Platform – the founding agreement of our “congregational way” (1648) – is full of stipulations governing individual behavior.  Anyone who has ever tried to live in religious community knows how important it is to have clear expectations about how we will try to be with one another. 

For our Puritan ancestors, though, the motivation for governing individual behavior wasn’t copacetic community life but deep awareness that people who practice loving each other are best able to serve God.

Absent the Cambridge Platform’s abiding focus on faithful relationship to the Holy, most modern covenants are hobbled to roam only in the realm of interpersonal relationships.”

While two weeks ago I really focused on the interpersonal dynamics of our covenant, today I am telling you: that is really important and hard work but it is not the end point.  The point of having a congregational covenant is not just so that we can all get along and be nice to one another, and have a smoothly functioning congregation. 

“People who practice loving each other are best able to serve God.”  Some of us today might say, people who practice loving each other are best able to love our neighbors, to love this world so much we are willing to sacrifice for its transformation.  Our covenant is not for ourselves alone.

Alice Blair Wesley:  “[Our Puritan Ancestors] saw that if the free church is about the working of the spirit of mutual love, then that fact ought to shape the organization of the church, everything from how you join, to what joining means, to how church decisions are made.” (essay 2)

“Their radical doctrine re-located religious authority to the lived spirit among covenanted members.  Thus, they denied authority to all forms of hierarchical government or ecclesiastical control of churches.  In ‘the liberty of the Gospel’ members would obey in the church, not king or bishop but only the direction of the holy spirit working in their own hearts and minds.” (essay 3)

Now, from our perspective today, those congregations of the 1600’s might not look terribly democratic, but for their time they were experimenting with a radically different kind of authority, the authority of the people as they encountered and responded to the spirit of Love as they themselves understood it through the biblical story of Jesus, and through their own relationships and listening to one another.  And that experiment was part of and informed the founding principles of our nation. 

This was a radical empowerment of the laity, of the ordinary person, and of the local congregation as the highest authority.  It is not coincidence, in our covenantal Unitarian roots we have a streak of anti-authoritarianism that has served to put us ever since on the front lines of fighting abuses of power within and beyond our congregational walls. 

This is a gift from our Puritan ancestors.  (There are plenty of other ways our Puritan ancestors screwed up, but I’m not talking about those today.)

However, as Alice Blair Wesley and Sue Phillips and others have written about-- Somewhere along the line, our focus on empowerment of the laity became a focus on freedom of belief, empowerment of individual thought, at the expense of the power of covenantal relationship.

Sue Phillips: 

“Our people have worked theological miracles. As Unitarians and Universalists and Unitarian Universalists, we have allowed our fundamental beliefs to change over the centuries according to conscience and science and revelation. …Covenant – the collective commitment to and practices of religious community – is how we have stayed, and will continue to stay, together.

And yet we are a people of competing commitments. The freedom of belief that has helped us remain flexible in light of new revelation and experience also weakens our binding ties. We value interconnection but are cautious about asking much of each other. As individuals and groups we want to belong but are reluctant to be claimed. This tension between freedom and connection is our birthright as religious liberals. But we have lost our way. Our collective anxiety about this tension and the resulting deification of individual conscience have squashed the rich dimensionality of covenant until it has become synonymous with a vague and even ambivalent sense of commitment to each other. …

Affirming and promoting shared values is important, but it puts tepid commitment at our collective center, asks virtually nothing of us, and offers virtually nothing. This is not covenanting. It is parallel play.”

We have sometimes in our history, perhaps especially in the 20^th Century, turned our covenantal organization into a focus of individual freedom of thought so much so that we don’t ask much of each other, and cannot deal directly with lines of authority in our congregations.  

We have sometimes equated anyone having power with the automatic abuse of power.  We have sometimes equated democracy with the idea that every single person has exactly the same kind of say in every decision.  We have sometimes been hesitant to organize ourselves to serve powerfully something bigger than ourselves and our congregation.  Some of our congregations have simply become places for parallel play.

Parallel play means you are playing your game over there, I’m playing mine here, we are nice to each other and we don’t interfere with each other’s games.  We can get along that way for a long time, individuals side by side doing our own thing. More a social club of people who gather because they feel comfortable with one another than religious community with a purpose. There’s not much power or transformation in that.  I don’t think we’ll change the world that way.

When we take our covenantal relationship seriously, then it means we have a claim on each other, accountability for serving something larger than ourselves, and we must structure ourselves for empowerment of the whole. 

In a covenanted free church, we all have a voice, we all have a kind of power, but we don’t all have the same amount or same kind of authority or power.  There, I said it!

In a healthy, covenanted, free church, some people have more power than others, but it’s not because of who they know or how long they’ve been a member or how much money they give or how loudly they proclaim their opinions.  Some people have more power because they have been invested by the whole with that power, to exercise that power on behalf of the congregation, and they are then accountable to the whole for how they exercise that power.  This is why we elect Board members and some other leaders. 

One example of how we have done this very well this last year: the process to decide on Congregational Community Outreach process, to fund it, and to truly empower a team to implement it, with accountability for reporting back to the Board and the congregation.

Another example in our tradition is when a congregation calls a minister into covenantal relationship for shared ministry.  A called minister has the ability to exercise authority on behalf of the congregation, rooted in their own relationship with the holy, and in the context of a covenant with the congregation.  As this congregation has said, through our long-range plan process, that it would like to call a minister into a longer-term covenantal relationship, some of the work we have been doing and still have to do is getting clearer and clearer about where authority resides in this congregation as it engages in shared ministry.

By virtue of being a part of this congregation each one of us is in a public relationship with one another – we may also be friends—but that is not the primary relationship here.  Here we are gathered under a covenantal relationship that asks us to play a particular role as a member, leader, minister.  When we are clear about our roles and relationships, we can move toward the goal of our mission more effectively, more powerfully, together.

If we go back to our Story this morning, I might make a revision to it – I would for instance, think about how the number 1 could have first been invested with a particular kind of authority for speaking up against the bully, with the full backing and support of all the colors together from the beginning.

One person can make a difference in one instance or situation. I do believe that.

However, only groups of people, organized for power, can transform systems and institutions that create and give free reign to bullies.

Right now in our world there are plenty of bullies—from our local schools to the highest offices in the land.  The stakes are very high – the stakes are the actual lives of children, the elderly, the ill, the disabled, people of color, LGBT folks, immigrants and refugees, those living on the margins. 

To paraphrase James Luther Adams – we want to be the religious community that impacts and transforms history, not simply get pushed around by it.  We must believe that we are so much more powerful that we often let ourselves believe; and we must act like it.

How seriously do we take our covenant with one another?  Do we recognize that living out this covenant is part of being a powerful, loving force in this world?  How much to do we hold each other accountable to this covenant?  Do we allow our covenant to really unleash the power of our love in our community?

My hope for us is that we will continue to walk together in the spirit of mutual love, transforming ourselves and each other, and organizing that love for its most powerful expression in our community.

May it be so. Amen.

What Binds Us Together, What Sets Us Free -- Part I

“What Binds us Together, What Sets us Free”    Part I                

Rev. Laura Bogle            March 5, 2017

In our Opening Words this morning, Rev. Alice Blair Wesley says:

“A covenanted free church is a body of individuals who have freely made a profoundly simple promise, a covenant: We pledge to walk together in the spirit of mutual love.”

How is it that we can call ourselves covenanted – bound together by a promise—and free at the same time?

If we are bound together, how can we be free?

Depends on what we mean by “free.”

In 2000 Alice Blair Wesley gave a series of six whole lectures on covenant in our Unitarian Universalist tradition – they are called the Minns lectures and I commend them to you.  In them she traced the history of our covenanted free churches back to the first Congregationalist churches founded in the New England colonies in the 1600’s.  In particular, she tells the story of the organization of the First Church of Dedham, MA, in 1637.  It was a new town, and the people there gathered for weeks of conversation about whether and how they might form a congregation for the town, sharing and listening in a fashion that sounds very much like the way we run our Circles of Trust—giving everyone a chance to speak, each person’s perspective a chance to stand alongside another’s even if they differ.

Wesley says, “These laypeople’s central conclusion, from all these weeks of discussion, was this: Members of their new free church should be joined in a covenant of religious loyalty to the spirit of love.”  [which, to be clear, at that time they understood through the biblical account of the life and teachings of Jesus]

But this was a big deal – this church did not require members give account for a particular belief, but to only be loyal to the spirit of love as they saw it, experienced it, not as individuals, but together.

The congregation as it was formed was not controlled by or subordinate to some other religious body somewhere else—no bishop or pope. 

The church was the people who made it up, accountable to each other, and also accountable to sibling congregations.  This is what we today call congregational polity – which simply means having a democratic structure, with the highest authority resting with the local church, in relationship with other local churches.  Wesley argues that that structure of organizing a congregation simply grew out of and reflected the theological perspective of the people who formed them—namely a covenantal theology.  That the two cannot be separated.

If you look up the word covenant in the dictionary you will find words like “contract” or “binding agreement.”  Is this the way we use the word covenant in our congregations?  No, not exactly.

James Luther Adams wrote of covenant in our UU tradition: “The covenant includes a rule of law, but it is not fundamentally a legal covenant. It depends upon faithfulness, and faithfulness is nerved by loyalty, by love.”

I compare it to marriage, and two different ways to think about marriage.

Katie I have a marriage license from the state that is really a contract.  A marriage license gives all 

sorts of legal and financial rights and responsibilities to the couple—things related to state matters like taxes, and how things get split up if you divorce, etc. (Believe me, not having access to this legal contract for so long makes it really apparent what is at stake with a marriage license.)

This marriage contract is really important for lots of reasons, but I don’t think of that marriage license as my marriage covenant.  Our marriage covenant happens to be represented by a large framed statement with over 100 signatures on it – the people who were present as a community to witness our vows in 2005 and affirm our relationship in love. 

But even that document isn’t the covenant itself.  Our marriage covenant is something that gives definition to our relationship, guides our relationship, and gets re-negotiated, in the spirit of the love, as we live our lives. 

I think some folks consider a marriage more like a contract than a covenant – I’ll give you this if you’ll give me that.  I’ll be this for you for ever and for always, as long as you don’t change.

Yet many people have an experience of marriage that is expansive, that allows for growth, freedom, and change within the bonds of a committed relationship.  The covenant provides a container for the relationship, some mutually agreed-upon boundaries within which, hopefully, a bond of two people is life-giving and loving and flexible and full of grace and understanding—at least most of the time!  Different people decide very different boundaries for their marriage covenants, but as long as they are intentional and clear and explicit, it’s not so much the content of the agreement that matters but that it is rooted in the spirit of love.

As Rev. Lisa Ward writes,

“A covenant is not a definition of a relationship; it is the framework for our relating. A covenant leaves room for chance and change, it is humble toward evolution. It claims: I will abide with you in this common endeavor, be present as best as I can in our becoming. This calls for a level of trust, courage and sacrifice that needs to be nurtured, renewed and affirmed on a regular basis.”

Covenanted free churches with congregational polity make a bold claim, that takes a lot of intention and practice to bring to reality:  it is our very covenant with one another, being bound together, that leads to greater freedom, spiritual growth, and power. 

Today I want to talk about two ways our covenant helps us find freedom.

Through setting some boundaries and expectations, a framework for our relationships, our covenant:

1 --helps us know how to play together

2 --helps us grow spiritually, sustaining our empathy with and for one another

In a couple of weeks there will be a Part II of this sermon, and I’ll talk about ways our covenant helps us find freedom by organizing our power so that we can make an impact on this world.

Playing together with full participation

I invited you during the Time for All Ages to think about our congregational life as a great big cooperative game. We make serious commitments to each other but if we aren’t having fun as we go….who wants to be part of that?  It’s the rules of the game and the boundaries of the field of play that allow for playful, creative fun.  It’s the rules of the game that allow for equal participation.

Last weekend I played a whole lot of Uno with a certain 5 year old as well as a couple of 8 year olds. 

Sometimes it takes a kid a while to grasp the rules of the game.  Sometimes a kid is playing for a totally different reason than my adult reasons, not for the interesting strategy or open-endedness of the game, but to win no matter what—in which case the rules just don’t matter as much!

It is a great leap forward to be able to play a game with a child when they know, understand, and follow the rules—because then we can actually enjoy playing the same game.  And maybe, it gives the child a little more satisfaction at beating me, I don’t know!

As a relatively new congregation about 10 years old, we live with this tension:

--We are not old enough yet to have too many areas where we say “well, that’s just the way its always been done.”  Believe me, this is a blessing.  And frankly, I hope we never get there.

--Yet, we are young enough that there are some official structures and policies that are still in development, or that are on paper but we haven’t quite figured out how to live up to them. This is OK and normal because we are still forming ourselves. But we’ve got to be up front about it.  It can be confusing to some newer folks who join us, especially those who have been part of older, bigger, more established congregations.  When folks walk in our doors they want to know:  how do I join in the play here?

In 2014 this congregation gathered for conversation and reflection and worked together on an explicit articulation of some of the agreements and expectations we would aspire to live out, based on our congregational covenant – it begins with the affirmation that we speak together in worship each week:  “love is the spirit of this fellowship…” 

This covenant provides basic rules, the container of our cooperative game.  Our mission, our structure, our governance, our planning, our financial decisions, our actions, our interactions with one another, all rooted in this.

Let me give you an example, pertinent to Stewardship season: 

Some congregations have a rule that to be a member you have to have some financial contribution on record.  Could be $5, but it has to be on record.  Our congregation does not have such a specific rule at this time, but we do have an expectation, that all will give as they are able of their time, talent and treasure.  I believe this is rooted in our covenant with one another—service is our blessing, to help one another is our great covenant.  We are not funded nor controlled by some group outside of ourselves—in our covenant we are dependent on each other and accountable to each other. 

Think about this:  other people actually depend on you to show up here on Sunday morning as an expression of love within our covenant.  No one says, if you don’t show up you’ll be thrown out!  That’s not how we roll.  But we want to play a fun and serious game together, and we can only do it to the extent that each one of us shows up to play.

The more we each live up to that covenantal expectation, to be in loving and generous relationship with one another, the more fun we can have serving our mission in this world. 

As you all consider what your financial contribution to this congregation will be in the coming year, I hope you will keep these two things in mind:  What does our covenant mean to me?  How much fun do we want to have this year?

My challenge to all of us is to have 100% participation in supporting the financial needs of this congregation.  That every single one of us gives as we are able, not because some rule says we have to, but because we recognize our covenantal relationship with one another and how important it is that we play our part.

Alice Blair Wesley: “When you sign the membership book of a covenanted free church, you are not signing any list of propositions, such as make up a creed: “I believe this, that, the other and maybe forty-'leven other things.  To join a free church is to sign a promise that may sound simple - it should sound simple - but which, if you “keep covenant,” brings you into intimate companionship with others who have promised to live with all the integrity you and they can together muster, in all the years of your lives.”

Sustaining empathy with and for one another

So, if that commitment sounds a little too much, a little too committed to you, here is the balance to it. The second way our covenant helps us find freedom together is by helping us find and sustain empathy for one another through setting boundaries.  And here I want to bring in the reflection we heard from Brene Brown.

When we say “Love is the Spirit of this Fellowship”  what do we think that means?

--Does it mean always putting others’ needs before your own?

--Does it mean we must give unendingly?

--Does it mean that we are doormats or remain silent when someone else’s actions are hurtful to us?

--Does it mean that we just give others a pass when we see that they aren’t living up fully to our covenant?

Nope, nope, nope, and nope.

Brene Brown says a boundary is simply being clear what is OK and what is not OK for me.  It is a posture of respect for self and others at the same time. 

In family systems thinking it is called self-differentiation—I stand where I am, you stand where you are, we don’t have to be in the same place, but we stay connected—we can see and touch each other, we listen and learn from each other.

The alternatives are to be fused with another person or organization or to be cut-off –

Fused--to be unable to define yourself, to set aside your opinions or desires in order to simply keep harmony.

Cut-off – to totally disengage from relationship because you don’t like the other person, or were hurt by them, or don’t like their stance, or don’t like that they won’t join you standing where you are.  To walk away from the game; take your balls and go home. 

Each one of us at any given time are more or less fused or cut-off or self-differentiated with those around us.   Put another way, we have more or less defined boundaries.

Our full congregational covenant as we currently express it has some really good, specific guidelines for setting boundaries with one another.  The one I want to highlight today:

·       to speak our truth in ways that honor other people’s truths, to communicate directly with one another whenever possible, and to assume the best intentions of others,

It’s another way of saying Brene Brown’s BIG-  Boundaries, Integrity, Generosity

Boundaries – to speak your own truth while honoring other people’s truths;  We realize that we can 

still Love one another even though we disagree.  We communicate in Loving but clear, not always sweet, ways.  A boundary is not dependent on sweetness, it is not about making nice, but it is dependent on being fiercely Loving of self and others.

Integrity – communicate directly with one another.  To have integrity means to carry who you are to others, even if it’s scary; your inner commitments and outer actions align.  So if you have something to communicate about another person – go talk to that person.  Not someone else in the congregation.  And not your minister, unless you want your minister to help you go talk to that person.  I am happy to listen and to help people figure out a way forward in your relationships.  I am not happy to be your go-between or to fix things for you.  Our covenant calls us each to our own responsibility for that.

Finally, Generosity – meaning having generous assumptions about each other, assuming the best intentions of others.  It is a deep and challenging spiritual practice to remember that people are not being annoying just to make our life difficult.  Take a deep breath and remember that we are all doing the best that we can.  Assuming best intentions may actually enable me to go talk to a person about why what they did or said was hurtful; or why not living up to a commitment impacted me.  “Of course you didn’t mean to hurt me; you were acting out of your best intentions, but you still impacted me, and let me tell you why.”

When we say in our mission statement that we encourage one another in spiritual growth this is one of the primary ways it happens in a covenantal community, through our boundaried, full of integrity, and generous relationships.

We seek the freedom to grow and change in and through relationship. I can be me, you can be you, I can feel with you – have empathy with you --- but I do not take on all of you or your problems or your desires as my own.

Just as I challenged you to think about our covenant as a guide for our financial commitments, I want to challenge you this month to think about our covenant as you engage with and interact with one another.  What difference does it make to you and our congregation?  If you don’t see it making a difference, what would it take for our covenant to make a difference?

Finally, I want to acknowledge that covenants can be and are broken, but it is the affirmation of our faith that they can be repaired and redeemed in and through the creative Love that holds us all.

Closing from Rev. Lisa Ward:  “The courage within this covenant is in the acceptance and celebration of life, with all of its challenges, pain, ironies and joys. And the sacrifice within this covenant is in the letting go of dogma, of assumptions, of control—and giving over to a greater wisdom which comes to us in bits and pieces.

The task of this covenant is to take responsibility for the freedom we espouse. We know that we are interconnected and that what we do creates ripples of hope or despair, of affirmation or negation. What we do with and for one another is powerful and beyond our imagining.”

Amen.