"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.