Being a People of Covenant

I.

Imagine a religion where people of different beliefs worship as one faith. Back in the aughts, a Unitarian Universalist ad campaign promoted this slogan. "Imagine a religion where people of different beliefs worship as one faith." How could that be? One faith – one religion – many beliefs?

That’s possible because religion isn’t really about belief. So when I’m asked, "What do Unitarian Universalists believe?" I usually answer: What Unitarian Universalists believe is that your religion isn’t about what you believe.

So what is religion about? I’m so glad you asked. Three things. One, it’s about how you live – that is, the ethics and values that guide your life. Two, it’s about community – the people you come together with to share in rituals that affirm your community bond. Three, it’s about a certain kind of experience – the experiences we call religious experience, or spiritual experience: moments of transcendence and awe, of apprehending the beauty, wonder, and oneness of all things.

Those are three rather different things. Yet a faith institution exists to weave them together so that each one supports and reinforces the other two. The ethics and values that guide your life facilitate your community belonging, and prepare you to be open to transcendent experience. Your faith community helps reinforce certain ethics and values, and also helps lay the ground for you to have transcendent experiences. Transcendent experiences expose you to a oneness that awakens compassion, which becomes part of your ethics and values, and also draws you closer to your community. In faith community, each strand of the braid is shaped and directed so that it can reinforce the other two.

The idea that religion is about believing goes back to St. Paul. When Paul invented the religion known as Christianity, his big innovation was to make believing central. When Islam came along 6 centuries later, it followed Paul’s model, so Islam is also belief-centric. But the other world religions are not belief-centric. The Asian religions have teachings, but if you happen to not accept a few of them, that’s fine. What makes a person Jewish isn’t what they believe, but what they practice and that they have a shared history and understanding of themselves as under the laws.

From our roots in Christianity, Unitarian Universalism has traveled a long road back from belief-centric religion, and it was a road of understanding ourselves more and more as being people of covenant – not creed, which is to say, not belief.

A key step on that road was the Cambridge Platform. I’d like you to know about the Cambridge Platform if you don’t. The Puritans who founded the Plymouth colony in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630, proceeded to adopt in 1648, the Cambridge Platform. These Puritans didn’t have a strong political tradition other than the sense of being bound in covenant. At first, they felt need for neither a creed nor a specific structure of church governance – after all, they were God’s people bound together by covenant, and that was enough.

We today don’t agree with those Puritans on much. But we are their descendants. Two hundred years after the Plymouth landing – or, invasion – the Unitarian denomination formed consisting of New England congregations that split from their Congregationalist Puritan past. We’ve left behind the focus on sin, the doctrine of total depravity, and of predestination. We’ve sought – and still seek – to correct the way covenant was used to dismiss, disrespect, and oppress people, such as indigenous peoples, deemed not to be in the covenant.

One thing that we’ve kept from our Puritan forebears is this sense of being a people of Covenant. We are not bound together by creed. Unitarians today aren’t even bound together, as the Puritans were, by a common scripture: the 66 canonical books of the Protestant Bible. We are noncreedal and noncanonical. We are bound by covenant – by our promise to each other to walk together on this long, strange journey called life, to have each other’s backs – to care for one another. Covenant.

By 1648, a generation after the Plymouth colony began, the Puritans, facing criticism from Presbyterians for not having a polity, decided that, after all, they did would adopt a polity. They didn’t want Episcopal Polity – rule by the bishops – which is what the Church of England had. They didn’t want Presbyterian Polity – governance by groups of elders called Presbyters – which is what, back in England, the dissenting churches (dissenting, that is, from the Church of England). The Puritans would also have been aware of the Catholic church’s structure of governance, and that was definitely out of the question for them.

They decided, in 1648, to create a polity that was none of the above. It would be a new polity, one based on covenant. They called it Congregational polity, and The Cambridge Platform of 1648 spelled out what this “Congregational Polity” meant. The Platform laid out a basic form for congregations to have: a role for pastors, for teachers, and for ruling elders who oversaw church administration. As the name "Congregational Polity" implies, the Cambridge Platform gave each congregation the fundamental authority for their own operations. A congregation did have some responsibilities to other congregations; the Cambridge Platform identified six:

• take thought for each other's welfare;
• consult and advise each other;
• admonish congregations that erred;
• allow members of one church to receive communion in other churches;
• send letters of recommendation when a member goes to a new church; and
• financially assist poor churches.

Beyond these, each congregation was autonomous.

The Cambridge Platform of 1648 is the foundational document of Congregational Polity – the polity we still follow today. Along with our free search for truth and meaning comes free self-governance. We make our own bylaws, elect our own board, hire our own staff, call our own minister, buy and own and maintain our own building and grounds. It is up to us alone to fund the maintenance of our home, the programs, the ministry, through which we nurture our spirits and help heal our world.

Critics of congregational polity call it a type of religious anarchism – and there’s some truth to that. Still, we share our congregational polity with a number of other denominations. The United Church of Christ – formerly known as the Congregationalist Church – also descends from those New England Puritan churches – namely, the ones that didn’t break away to become Unitarian -- so the UCC also has congregational polity. Baptists and various forms of nondominational Christianity have congregational polity, as do Quakers, Disciples of Christ, most Jewish synagogues, many Sikh Gurdwaras, and most Islamic mosques in the US.

Some of these are also officially creedless, though they all have a shared scripture. Unitarian Universalists are, to the best of my knowledge, alone in being held together neither by the authority of a creed, nor by the authority of a common scripture, nor under the authority of a bishop, synod, diocese, presbytery, or conciliarity.

Which raises the question: What does hold us together? Sometimes, sadly, the answer is: nothing, and we come apart. Congregations acrimoniously split, or dissolve. When we are held together, the name for our sticking by each other is covenant.

Another covenant that may be more familiar is the marriage covenant. That’s also a promise to stick together, to share each other’s lives and provide mutual support. The words of the vow can be highly variable, but at base it comes down to promising to stick together, to share each other’s lives and provide mutual support. It is a committing of our lives that is ultimately beyond what any set of words can capture, whether those words are the vows spoken at a marriage ceremony or the words of a congregation’s covenant.

Yes, you can make a promise without signing a piece of paper – whether that paper is a marriage certificate or our membership book. You don’t have to sign anything to make a promise. It’s just that signing makes the promise public, makes the relationship public. Signing that paper tells the world that you have entered into a sacred relationship – with a spouse, in one case -- with a congregation, in the other.

II.

Our greatest 20th century Unitarian theologian, James Luther Adams, understood “God” to be “community forming power.” That power which comes into existence when human beings gather in a group and which allows that group to form itself into a community – that’s what James Luther Adams called God. So Adams did a great deal of thinking and writing about Voluntary Associations – about the Covenants that are the community-forming power.

The Unitarian Universalist Association’s Commission on Appraisal issues a report every four years, and their 2021 report was called, “Unlocking the Power of Covenant.” The Commission observes that: “We are the promises we make and the vows we break.” A Covenant, it says, “is a mutual sacred promise between individuals or groups, to stay in relationship, care about each other, and work together in good faith.” The Commission goes on to say:

“No single concept is more central to our faith understanding than being in covenant. It is at the core of our identity. It is how we try to build and sustain the Beloved Community. It is the foundation of our governance structures at all levels.”

Ultimately the covenant is beyond language, beyond what words can say. It is the embodied commitment to keep on being together in love. Married couples may have long forgotten the exact words of the vow they spoke on their wedding day, yet, as long as they remain married and together they are embodying their covenant in their way of being together.

The ultimate covenant is beyond words but is embodied in our way of being together, expressed in our patterns of interaction. Still, attempting to put the wordless into words can be helpful. Giving it some words, inevitably imperfect and needing regular revision, but still some words to express our commitment to each other – that can provide guidance about how we shall be together.

For congregations, covenants come in two main forms: aspirational covenants and behavioral covenants. Behavioral covenants delineate the behaviors we promise to follow or avoid. Because behavior is publicly observable, we can notice when someone has broken covenant, and encourage zir back in to the right relationship that our covenant says we promise to uphold.

It’s a reality of being a people of covenant that we sometimes do break covenant. And that reality means that being a people of covenant also entails being a people of forgiveness, recognizing that we stray and calling each back, over and over, every time we do. The life of covenant turns out to be less about staying and more about returning – over and over and over again.

Rev. David Pyle was with us this weekend for a startup workshop that some of you were here for. Rev. Pyle has had some Zen training, as have I, and he referenced the basic teaching for Zen meditation. Focus on your breath. We usually suggest first-timers count their breaths, 1 to 10, then start over at one. Or just bring all your attention to the breath coming in, and going out. Your mind will wander off. It will start thinking about one darn thing or another. That’s OK. That’s what minds do. The mind secretes thoughts the way the liver secretes bile. The practice is, as soon as you notice you’ve wandered off, bring your attention back to the breath.

The practice is the coming back. The point of a 25-minute meditation sit is not to be so concentrated that you stay focused on the breath the whole time. The point is to spend that time coming back over and over: noticing a thought, letting it go, returning to the breath. Returning to the breath is the practice.

And as Rev. Pyle pointed out, coming back is also the point of the practice of covenant: to return over and over to mindfulness of the promises that define who you are. Our aspirational covenant is our mission: to grow ethically and spiritually, serve justly, and love radically. This is not behaviorally defined. There’s no stipulation as to what behaviors constitute growing ethically and spiritually, serving justly, and loving radically. So we can’t judge whether someone else is out of covenant.

Certain behaviors might cause us to inquire gently whether you are keeping the aspiration in mind, but, ultimately, only you can decide if you are keeping the covenant to grow, serve, and love – and only you can assess how well or poorly you are growing, serving, and loving. You haven’t broken the covenant unless you’ve stopped trying, stopped aspiring to grow, to serve, and to love – stopped bringing your mind back to this covenant every time you notice you’ve drifted off from it.

Behavioral covenants do stipulate some behaviors. Because behaviors are observable, behavioral covenant allows us to go the further step of holding each other accountable. We have a team at work on developing a behavioral covenant for this congregation.

Covenants make us. They spell out who we are. When I don’t know who “us” is, then I don’t know who “me” is. By becoming more conscious of our covenants – spoken and unspoken – we can live into them more fully, and become who we are with greater awareness and greater intentionality.

Marcia Pally’s 2016 book, Commonwealth and Covenant, recognizes that we need both situatedness and separability. We need to be situated — embedded in functional and caring families, and thick communities that define our values and our selves: villages of ordinariness in which you can be your plain old ordinary self without the constant expectation to prove yourself.

We also need separability. We need to have the freedom and the support “to go off and create and explore and experiment with new ways of thinking and living.”

What creates situatedness, notes Pally, is covenant. A contract protects interests, she says, but a covenant protects relationships.

“A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another. It involves a vow to serve the relationship that is sealed by love.”

Contracts stipulate an exchange of goods or services, but people in a covenant delight in offering their gifts.

We are here to offer each other what gifts we can – to hold open the space of grace. It’s about seeing the goodness and dignity, and the failings and foibles or one another, and still loving each other.

I was once leading a Zen group that met weekly in the 2nd and 3rd grade classroom. Every week we Zen practitioners would gather in this room, and there on the wall, handwritten with marker on newsprint was the class covenant. It showed all the signs of a process in which grownups were drawing the language out of the out of 7- and 8-year-olds so that it would really be the kids’ own covenant. It said things like: “One: Listen and don’t speak when someone is holding the speaking stone.” There was: “Three: Pick up after each other and ourselves – don’t litter.” Notice: pick up after each other, not just after ourselves. The last one was: “11. Come together with a calm and open mind.” Nice. My favorite one, though, was number two: “Be kind to others even when they are not your friend.” Even our kids grasp the gist of the point that being a people of covenant means seeing the goodness and dignity, and the failings and foibles or one another, and still loving each other.

It’s about giving of ourselves, and being called together into a different way of being in the world. I have been held and held together in covenant with Unitarian Universalists my whole life – and now I am held in covenant with you. It is such a wonder. Thank you so much.

Amen.

A Covenantal People, part 2

To part 1

Our greatest 20th century Unitarian theologian, James Luther Adams, understood “God” to be “community forming power.” That power which brings and holds community together – that’s God, said James Luther Adams. So Adams did a great deal of thinking and writing about Voluntary Associations – about the Covenants that are the community-forming power.

The Unitarian Universalist Association’s Commission on Appraisal issues a report every four years, and their 2021 report was called, “Unlocking the Power of Covenant.” If you tuned in to the service three months ago, on July 18, or watched it on Youtube, then you heard me talk about that report. The Commission observes that:

“We are the promises we make and the vows we break.”

A Covenant, it says,

“is a mutual sacred promise between individuals or groups, to stay in relationship, care about each other, and work together in good faith.”

They go on to say:

“No single concept is more central to our faith understanding than being in covenant. It is at the core of our identity. It is how we try to build and sustain the Beloved Community. It is the foundation of our governance structures at all levels.”

For congregations, covenants come in two main forms: aspirational covenants and behavioral covenants. Behavioral covenants define the behaviors we promise to follow or avoid. Because behavior is publicly observable, we can notice when someone has broken covenant, and encourage zir back in to the right relationship that our covenant says we promise to uphold.

It’s a reality of being a people of covenant that we sometimes do break covenant. And that reality means that being a people of covenant also entails being a people of forgiveness, recognizing that we stray and calling each back, over and over, every time we do. The life of covenant turns out to be less about staying and more returning – over and over and over again.

Aspirational covenants are the promises that aren’t behaviorally defined, so we can’t judge whether someone else is out of covenant. Certain behaviors might cause us to inquire gently whether the person is keeping the aspiration in mind, but, ultimately, only you can decide if you are keeping the aspirational covenant – and only you can assess how well or poorly you are living out the aspiration.

Behavioral covenants generally pertain to smaller groups, such as boards, committees, classes, and study groups – though some congregations have adopted a congregation wide behavioral covenant.

An example of a covenant – largely behavioral, but with some aspirational aspect is on the wall down in room 43, where the 2nd and 3rd grade class used to meet a couple years ago. The class covenant is posted – handwritten with a red marker on newsprint sheets. Our Saturday morning Zen group gathers in that room, so I have a chance to see that covenant every week – to sit in silence in the presence of its strictures. It says:

Covenant for 2nd & 3rd Graders, 2019-2020.
One: listen and don’t speak when someone is holding the speaking stone.
Two: Be kind to others even when they are not your friend. [That one’s got to be my favorite.]
Three: Pick up after each other and ourselves – don’t litter. [Notice it doesn’t just say pick up after ourselves, but pick up after each other.]
Four: Treat each other as you want to be treated and/or how they want to be treated.
Five: Listen to others.
Six: Raise your hand when you say something.
Seven: Safely move around with as little distraction for others.
Eight: Don’t play with anything that is off limits – not supposed to.
Nine: Be respectful to others. [I like how respectful was originally written an extra “T” which was then scratched out. At first, it had said “rest pectful” -- which conjures an image of respect as a place of rest. I like that.]
Ten: Let’s use the back on track clap to get our focus back on track. Clap-clap; clap-clap-clap.
And finally, eleven: Come together with a calm and open mind.

It’s a good covenant – for 2nd and 3rd graders, as well as for the adults who practice Zen in that room. It’s a largely behavioral covenant, though there are some aspects of aspirational covenant – like “come together with a calm and open mind” – which doesn’t have a behavioral definition, and for elementary schoolers, as for all of us, is sometimes more an aspiration than a reality.

An example of an aspirational covenant is our congregation’s mission. It says:

We covenant to nurture each other in our spiritual journeys;
foster compassion and understanding within and beyond our community; and
engage in service to transform ourselves and our world.

That’s our aspiration. It doesn’t mean it’s JUST an aspiration – that we aren’t actually doing it. We ARE actually doing those things – we really do, as we have for some time, nurture each other in our spiritual journeys, foster compassion, and engage in transformative service.

To say this is an aspirational covenant means three things:

(1) It means that every time any of us gathers – for a committee meeting, or Journey Group, or social justice team, or RE class, we are aspiring to do these things better than we have before – ever more thoroughly, ever more whole-heartedly, and ever more skillfully and effectively.

(2) It also means there’s not a behavioral definition specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for what nurturing spirituality, fostering compassion, or engaging in service looks like. And third,

(3) it means you haven’t broken the covenant unless you’ve stopped trying, stopped aspiring to so nurture, foster, and engage.

Our seven -- or eight -- Unitarian Universalist principles are also an aspirational covenant.

We the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association covenant to affirm and promote
- the inherent worth and dignity of every person;
- justice, equity, and compassion;
- acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth;
- a free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
- democracy;
- world community;
- respect for the interdependent web;
- dismantling racism.

Those aren’t our beliefs. They are what we promise to aspire to.

Covenants make us. They spell out who we are. When I don’t know who “us” is, then I don’t know who “me” is. By becoming more conscious of our covenants – spoken and unspoken – we can live into them more fully, and become who we are with greater awareness and greater intentionality.

Our Committee on Ministry has been studying the Commission on Appraisal’s report on Covenant, and I have been discussing that report with them over the last three months. The Committee on Ministry will be doing some investigating this year into the ways covenant works, or fails to, here at Community UU. Our Committee on Ministry is like our own congregational commission on appraisal, and this year part of what they’ll report on is the status and functioning of CUUC’s covenants. So do stay tuned for opportunities to participate in that process as they are announced.

Marcia Pally’s 2016 book, Commonwealth and Covenant, recognizes that we need both situatedness and separability.

We need to be situated — embedded in functional and caring families, and thick communities that define our values and our selves: villages of ordinariness in which you can be your plain old ordinary self without the constant expectation to prove yourself.

We also need separability. We need to have the freedom and the support “to go off and create and explore and experiment with new ways of thinking and living.”

What creates situatedness, notes Pally, is covenant. A contract protects interests, she says, but a covenant protects relationships.

“A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another. It involves a vow to serve the relationship that is sealed by love.”

Contracts stipulate an exchange of goods or services, but people in a covenant delight in offering their gifts.

We are here to offer each other what gifts we can – to hold open the space of grace. It’s not that we are like-minded, as Rev. Worsnop said for today’s invocation. It’s about “people who value compassion, justice, love and truth, though they have different opinions about all sorts of things" (Worsnop). It’s about seeing the goodness and dignity, and the failings and foibles or one another, and still loving each other. It’s about giving of ourselves, and being called together into a different way of being in the world.

I am so grateful to be held together with you, to be connected with you, in covenant. It is such a wonder. Thank you so much.

Amen.

To part 1

A Covenantal People, part 1

To part 2

In our UU Minute #53 and UU Minute #54, we learned about the Puritans who founded the Plymouth colony in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630, and about the Cambridge Platform they adopted in 1648. These Puritans didn’t have a strong political tradition other than the sense of being bound in covenant. They felt need for neither a creed nor a specific structure of church governance – after all, they were God’s people bound together by covenant, and that was enough.

We don’t agree with those Puritans on much. But we are their descendants. Two hundred years after the Plymouth landing – or, invasion – the Unitarian denomination formed consisting of New England congregations that split from their Congregationalist Puritan past. We’ve left behind the focus on sin, the doctrine of total depravity, and of predestination. We’ve sought – and still seek – to correct the way covenant was used to dismiss, disrespect, and oppress people, such as indigenous peoples, deemed not to be in the covenant.

One thing that we’ve kept from our Puritan forebears is this sense of being a people of Covenant. We are not bound together by creed. Unitarians today aren’t even bound together, as the Puritans were, by a common scripture: the 66 books of the Protestant Bible. We are bound by covenant – by our promise to each other to walk together on this long, strange journey called life, to have each other’s backs – to care for one another.

Covenant. We are a people of covenant. By 1648, a generation after the Plymouth colony began, the Puritans decided that, after all, they did need to have a polity – an articulation of the principles by which their churches would be run. The Presbyterians had been criticizing them for not having a polity, so they decided to form one. Back home in England, the Church of England had Episcopal polity – rule by the bishops. The dissenting churches – that dissented, that is, from the Church of England – had Presbyterian polity – governance by groups of elders called Presbyters. The Puritans would also have been aware of the Catholic church’s structure of governance, but that was definitely out of the question for them.

They decided, in 1648, to create a polity that was none of the above. It would be a new polity, one based on covenant. They called it Congregational polity, and The Cambridge Platform of 1648 spelled out what this “Congregational Polity” meant.

They laid out a basic form for congregations to have: a role for pastors, for teachers, and for ruling elders who oversaw church administration. They authorized a few ways that congregations had responsibilities to each other. They were to:

• Take thought for each other's welfare;
• consult and advise each other;
• admonish congregations that erred;
• allow members of one church to receive communion in other churches;
• send letters of recommendation when a member goes to a new church; and
• financially assist poor churches.

Beyond these, each congregation was autonomous.

The Cambridge Platform of 1648 is the foundational document of Congregational Polity – the polity we still follow today. As Kim pointed out when she introduced the offering today: We stand under no rule of bishops or denominational hierarchy. Along with our free search for truth and meaning comes free self-governance. We make our own bylaws, elect our own board, hire our own staff, call our own minister, buy and own and maintain our own building and grounds. It is up to us alone to fund the maintenance of our home, the programs, the ministry, through which we nurture our spirits and help heal our world. Thus, truly the offering is indeed a sacrament of Free Congregations.

Here at this congregation, we’ve been using those words, about once a quarter ever since I got here, as a recurrent reminder of our heritage of congregational polity that goes back to 1648 and the Cambridge Platform. There is no higher authority than us: the members of this congregation. We have denominational headquarters in Boston, and each of the five regions of the US have regional staff but all they can do is make recommendations and advice as to what they have determined is best practices. They have no authority to compel a congregation to do anything. They give assistance and advice only to congregations that ask for it.

Critics of congregational polity call it a type of religious anarchism – and there’s some truth to that. The United Church of Christ – formerly known as the Congregationalist Church – also descends from those New England Puritan churches – namely, the ones that didn’t break away to become Unitarian. They also have congregational polity. Baptists and various forms of nondominational Christianity have congregational polity, as do Quakers, Disciples of Christ, most Jewish synagogues, many Sikh Gurdwaras, and most Islamic mosques in the US. Some of these are also officially creedless, though they all have a shared scripture.

Unitarian Universalists are, to the best of my knowledge, alone in being held together neither by the authority of a creed, nor by the authority of a common scripture, nor under the authority of a bishop, synod, diocese, presbytery, or conciliarity. Which raises the question: What does hold us together?

Sometimes, sadly, the answer is: nothing, and we come apart. Congregations acrimoniously split, or dissolve.

When we are held together, the name for our sticking by each other is covenant. The other covenant that’s most familiar to most of us is the marriage covenant. That’s also a promise to stick together, to share each other’s lives and provide mutual support. The words of the vow can be highly variable, but at base it comes down to promising to stick together, to share each other’s lives and provide mutual support.

It is a committing of our lives that is ultimately beyond what any set of words can capture, whether those words are the vows spoken at a marriage ceremony or the words of a congregation’s covenant. Yes, you can make a promise without signing a piece of paper – whether that paper is a marriage certificate or our membership book. You don’t have to sign anything to make a promise. It’s just that signing makes the promise public, makes the relationship public. Signing that paper tells the world that you have entered into a sacred relationship – with a spouse, in one case -- with a congregation, in the other.

Ultimately the covenant is beyond language, beyond what words can say. It is the embodied commitment to keep on being together in love. Yet giving it some words, inevitably imperfect and regularly revised, to express and articulate our commitment to each other can helpfully provide guidance about how we shall be together.

Toward this end, congregations need two kinds of language: There is the language of aspirational covenant, and the language of behavioral covenant. That's what we'll look into in part 2.

To part 2

More Than Words Can Say

Covenant, part 3

A contract, whether oral or written, consists of words. There may be disputes about the meaning of those words, but the words are the contract. Covenant is different. Covenant is ultimately beyond words.

Yes, we generally do make attempts to articulate the covenant in words, but the words aren’t the covenant. A poem can articulate the love the poet feels for the beloved, but the poem isn’t the love. The covenantal reality is much more than what can be spoken. A marriage covenant, for example, can never be wholly and fully expressed by the vows made at the wedding, no matter how carefully or extensively those vows might be crafted. The promise is more than what can be said.

Love rings the bells of wanted birth and wedding day --
Love guides the hands that promise more than words can say. (Brain Wren, "Love Makes a Bridge")

This is not to say that articulating vows is unimportant.The words matter – but they matter not because they capture and constitute the whole promise, but because they serve to point to the promise that is deeper and wider than words can say.

As a people of covenant, we cannot grasp all that this covenant means – we can only live it. We cannot articulate all that our commitment to each other means – but can articulate a few aspects that will help us stay pointed in the direction of being the people we want to be: we promise to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, or being, to respect the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part, to nurture each other in our spiritual journeys and engage in service. The words are merely the tip of the iceberg of the covenant as it is lived.

The great Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams speaks of the community-forming power – this mysterious thing that, like God promising Abraham, lifts us out of our separate, small lives and forms us into community, a great nation. Covenant is the name of that mystery, that community-forming power, the promise and commitment to be together, bear witness to one another, to be for each other what we cannot be alone. As Annie Dillard says,

“Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”

We are surrounded by a culture that emphasizes individualism, heroic separation. The covenantal theology that Unitarian Universalism has inherited and shaped in its own way teaches that there is another way.

Our flourishing lies in the promises we make to and with each other. That flourishing happens through the keeping of those promises, and maybe even more it happens through the repairing of the promises when they are broken. For under-girding our covenantal promises to each other is the covenantal promise to the promise of covenant itself – our promise to do the work of re-connecting when we find ourselves divided. We forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love. When we think someone isn’t doing enough, when we find someone annoying, when we think someone isn’t listening to us, is doing things wrong, in that very moment: forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love.

That’s the covenant, and the covenantal tradition of which we are today the latest manifestation. Of course we try to keep our promises, and often we do. But it’s when we don’t that we confront the task of repair, of beginning again in love, and that’s when our lives meet the holy. As Rev. Gretchen Haley writes:

“Let me tell you right now, sometime in the next year, maybe in the next few minutes, the people you most believe in and care about are going to disappoint you. Your church is going to disappoint you. This world is surely going to disappoint you. Like, all the time. We all are walking wounded and weary from the way this world can – and does – break our hearts. And what our faith asks of us, what our faith imagines for us, is that somehow, right at that moment when our hearts break, we will find our way to see through that heartbreak. We will stay put – not close off, not run away, not hurt back – but keep on being in relationship, doing what we can to repair the world and each other, keep on opening our hearts with greater love. And, right then, our covenantal faith says, we are most whole and most at home.”

We are promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, and promise-repairing animals. And here we are. A group of people who happen to be in a room together looking for meaning and belonging -- the most recent embodiment of a tradition that shows us how to do that. For we are a covenantal people -- and our lives do not play to an empty house.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Covenant"
See also
Part 1: The Covenantal Tradition
Part 2: What Makes a People

What Makes a People

Covenant, part 2

When this tradition of ours reached a branching point, and one of the branches called itself Christian, these new Christians characterized themselves as recognizing a "New Covenant." At the last supper, Jesus says, “this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” There’s a promise. Those who promise to dedicate their lives to the new community and its teachings are promised “life everlasting” – which essentially means meaning and connection – a realization of the you that is more than the set of your ego defense mechanisms.

Some centuries more go by, and the Protestants split off from the other Christians. Then the Unitarians and Universalists became distinct branches of Protestantism, and our branches gradually dropped the expectation that members were Christian. Each of the many branches of Western religion has evolved in its own way, but we all have this covenantal tradition in our roots.

The key insight articulated in the stories that took form among Hebrew slaves in Babylonian captivity is with us still: Our relationship to each other, to our world, is constituted by promises, by agreement.

The word covenant also appears in some legal contexts. In legal contexts a covenant is "a type of contract in which the covenantor makes a promise to a covenantee to do or not do some action.” In real estate law, “covenant” refers to conditions tied to the use of land. That’s not what I'm talking about – although a real estate covenant does relate to how we use the ground on which we come together – so there is a metaphorical connection.

The origin of the word covenant means both “to agree” and “to meet.” You see that in the similarity with the word “convene.” A covenant is the ground of agreement on which we meet, the agreement that makes convening possible. It’s the agreement that makes us a people, instead of isolated individuals. Covenant is what brings us together; it convenes us.

A contract stipulates conditions that can be objectively determined to be violated or not. If the terms are violated, then there’s recourse or remedy: you can go to court to have the contract enforced, or there are terms in the contract itself that apply if one party fails to do their part. Covenant doesn’t work like that at all. Unlike a contract, a covenant doesn't generally stipulate conditions that can be objectively determined to be violated or not, and, even when its conditions are clearly violated, covenants are unenforceable and afford no remedy or recourse.

The function of a covenant is not to work the way a legal contract works. The function of a covenant is to remind us of our shared aspiration for how we'd like to be together. Covenants express the sort of general principles that we honor and uphold yet also sometimes fail to honor and uphold.

The content of the covenant that convenes Unitarian Universalists, and that, before 1961, convened Unitarians and Universalists, has been articulated in various ways through the years and centuries. In the mid-1980s, we articulated it in the words of our seven principles:

“We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote

• the inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
• acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth;
• a free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
• the right of conscience and the use of democratic process;
• the goal of world community with peace liberty, and justice for all;
• respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.”

In addition, Community UU, White Plains, is also convened by our agreement that we gather on behalf of our mission

“to nurture each other in our spiritual journeys;
foster compassion and understanding within and beyond our community; and
engage in service to transform ourselves and our world.”

The shared agreement to embody these words convenes this congregation – it is part of how the covenant is articulated. References to the covenant are invitations for each of us to reflect on how we might better follow its principles. Judging others on how well they're following the covenant is not how it works. Rather, the terms of the covenant are a promise that we each individually make to ourselves -- but within a context of knowing that all the others in the group are also making that promise to themselves.

The stories of our tradition speak of the covenant with God – which is a way of evoking the commonality of a shared higher self with which we commit ourselves in promise. Instead of triggering specified consequences after which it is then null, as a contract would, each breaking of the promise is the occasion of recommitting to the covenant's ideals.

There’s a hymn that we sing here with words by Rumi:

Come, come whoever you are,
Wonderer, worshiper, lover of leaving,
Ours is no caravan of despair,
Come yet again come.

But our hymn leaves out one line of the original Rumi poem:

“Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come.”

With a contract, if you don’t live up to your side, I don’t have to live up to my side either. With a covenant, breaking it doesn’t weaken the power the covenant has. However much or often we may fail – and we all sometimes fail at our covenants – the covenant calls us back to try again to live up to and live by our promise – for the promise convenes us, makes us a people, and constitutes our promised land.

Come, yet again, come.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Covenant."
See also
Part 1: The Covenantal Tradition
Part 3: More Than Words Can Say

The Covenantal Tradition

Covenant, part 1

Hey, thanks for reading. What I write here is an expression of the tradition that informs me -- and by reading it, you, too, take a step into the stream of that tradition.

Those who gather at Unitarian Universalist congregations for worship on Sunday morning (or during another time of the week) keep alive a tradition. Our being together is not just a group of people who happen to be in a room together looking for something meaningful – something that will help us make a little more sense of our lives – something that will connect us and ground us and reveal to us the abundance of what we are and what this world affords us – something that will strengthen us to face the week ahead a little more bravely and maybe a little more cheerfully and kindly.

Those who gather at Unitarian Universalist congregations for worship are a group of people who happen to be in a room together looking for meaning and belonging, but we are not just that. We are also the current embodiment of a tradition. Thousands of years of people getting together, telling stories and singing songs and lifting up their heart’s yearnings and their souls’ anguish in prayer – millennia of people developing a practice and a shared understanding of their place in the universe and passing that down to subsequent generations -- has split into many branches, each branch still fed by the nutrients from the roots.

Every time we gather we are creating the next incarnation of who we are. We create the next version of “we” – and this “we” has a history, whether we know it or not, that gives shape to who we are. So let’s talk about that.

The Hebrew people, following the conquest of Judah in 598 BCE, were marched out of their homeland into Babylon as slaves. The period of Babylonian captivity, Babylonian exile, lasted 60 years until Persia in turn conquered Babylonia, and the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, gave the Jews permission to return to Palestine.

During those 60 years, these Hebrew slaves of Babylon began to do something remarkable, something of world-historical significance. Faced with the extinction of their existence as a distinct people, they began to collect, re-tell, and elaborate upon old stories. Fragments and snippets of legend were expanded and woven together along with oral history of the people of Israel. Most of what we know as the Torah – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy – and much of the rest of the Tanakh, which Christians call the Old Testament – took form and was first brought together and written down during the Babylonian captivity. Somehow these slaves, in their desperation to know who they were, found ways to solidify their story.

A central thread running through that story is the centrality of promises: promise-making and promise-breaking. The world makes us a promise, we make promises to our world, and to each other. Promises get broken, they get repaired and restored. Our lives have the meaning that they have in and through promises – promises made to us, promises we make to others, promises kept, promises not kept, promises kinda kept.

An early episode in the story concerns Noah, whose ark carries the promise of life’s continuation into a world where most of life is destroyed. The episode ends with a promise: God promises never again to destroy all life on Earth by flood, and creates the rainbow as the sign of this "everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth."

Three chapters later in Genesis, there’s another promise.

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you,...so that you will be a blessing....And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (Gen 12:1-3, NRSV)

It’s a promise. You – lonely, isolated and puny – are transformed into a great nation by the blessing of promise.

A few centuries go by, and there’s Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, saying, “have I got a deal for you.” We are promised a land – and in return, in order for us keep our land and be a people, we have to not kill, steal, lie, get envious of our neighbors’ stuff. We need to honor our parents and uphold the exclusivity of marriage. Also, no graven images, because that way we won’t have different ones and we can feel like we’re unified in worshiping together what is holy. This is the promise we need to live by. If we live by these promises to be decent to each other, the promise to want to feel our hearts connected, then we get this promised land. Indeed, the promise of the promised land is the promise we make to each other that makes us a people.

Moses was fulfilling – filling more full – the Noah covenant; for our promise to each other is what assures us that the flood of our greed, anger, and delusions will not destroy us again. It fills out the Abrahamic covenant; for our promise constitutes Abraham’s great nation.

A few more centuries go by, and the people have their own land, and their own king, David. The promise of land that you will get becomes a promise of land that you will keep:

"And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more,...and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house....I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever....Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever." (2 Sam 7:10-16, NRSV)

That promise -- the Davidic covenant -- would seem to have been broken, though interpreters have found ways around the apparent violations. But promises define us even when they aren't kept.

This is the basic story line that emerged in the Babylonian captivity: a story about being a people of covenant: the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, and the Davidic covenant.

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This is part 1 of 3 of "Covenant."
See also
Part 2: What Makes a People
Part 3: More Than Words Can Say