I mentioned on Sunday that I tossed out the sermon I had planned to preach, but that I’d post it. Here it is:
Readings
“Congregations before Congregationalism: social and spiritual roots of the Cambridge Platform,” by Francis J. Bremer
Three hundred and fifty years ago the churches of New England offered the world the Cambridge Platform, a statement of polity that still has meaning to Christians today. The statement was not a foundation document in the sense that the Constitution of the United States was. It was not designed to create something new but to explain something already functioning. … It did not create the “New England Way” but rather it was an attempt to expound and defend a polity that had emerged from the experiences of English Christians who had long sought means of replicating the bonds of love and faith that they believed had characterized the earliest Christian communities. The English historian John Spurr recently wrote that “[t]heology is not simply an intellectual exercise, it expresses and resolves spiritual experiences.” … [T]he Cambridge Platform was all about … the puritan search for religious community. …
And so, to fully and truly understand the puritans, and thus the meaning of the Cambridge Platform, we need to go beyond statements of doctrine and polity, to religion as they lived it. John Cotton wrote much on theology and polity, but what he was most concerned with was the nurturing of faith. [He wrote in1651] that “the breath of . . . [faith] is like bellows, to blow up sparkes one in another, and so in the end, they breathe forth many savoury and sweet expressions of the hearts, and edifie themselves by that mutuall fellowship one with another.” The purpose of church forms was to kindle such faith and nurture its sharing. Experience and migration had led the New Englanders to find new forms of church polity that they found peculiarly suited to nurturing communities of faith. And so long as the Cambridge Platform provides a framework for churches in which such faith can be nourished, it lives as the puritans wished it to live.
Hebrews 11:15-16
“If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”
Sermon
“We Pilgrim Souls”
We all know the story of Noah and the Ark. The world has become evil. God decides to start again by wiping out all humanity. It rains long and hard — enough to flood the entire world. It’s not just genocide, or xenocide — it’s everything-cide. Except for one family. They get a boat. Well, they get to build a boat. They load specimens of all the animals they can find, and God creates a nice stupefying fog to keep all the animals from eating each other, and Moses family. It’s makes for a great movie scene: ganga for the animals.
Can you imagine being Noah? We’re told he is a righteous and zealous person. It never says he’s a nice guy, or a clever one. Just righteous and obedient. Good enough. That’ll work for what God needs.
Can you imagine being Noah, knowing the fate of the world? Knowing that everything hinges on your actions? If you had been his friend, you could not have said to him: “Don’t carry around the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
The covenant begins when the boat finally lands on dry
earth. A covenant is a promise made between two parties, this between humanity and Yahweh, who says, I will never again allow the earth to be destroyed. At least not by flood. Well, thanks for that. As a token of the promise, God puts a rainbow in the sky, a symbol of the newly founded relationship.
We humans are essentially promise makers and promise breakers, and as the story of the Hebrew scriptures unfolds, we see humans and Yahweh making and breaking a number of promises, each to the other.
With Abraham and Sarah, for their obedience Yahweh will give them land, and in a promissory contract typical of those in the Near East of the times, between ruler and vassal, and there is a severing of flesh that seals the deal. The act of circumcision is the deal struck between Abraham and God. Just don’t forget me, says God.
Both parties break the contract. Israel forgets God. God even forgets Israel and has to be reminded, too, of its commitment by smelling their burnt sacrifices.
In Egypt, as Israel flees Egyptian captivity, it is Moses who renews the covenant, this time with Ten Commandments, and later Torah. Again, it reads like a typical Near Eastern contract: Since I, Yahweh, brought you out of Egypt and promise you the land of Canaan, you agree not to have any other Gods except for me.” In return, God grants protection and, again, a promise of land.
Like the rainbow before, there is a powerful symbol to serve as a reminder, that of the weekly Sabbath observance, or Shabbat.
But in all the chaos of running away from chariots, Moses inadvertently breaks a covenant. There was a promise made in the flight from Egypt between God and Moses: speak to the rock and I’ll part the Red Sea. But Moses decides to strike the rock instead of speaking to it. God still decides to save Israel, but he forbids Moses from the entering the promised land.
Covenant is the set of promises we make to each other. As humans we are essentially promise makers and promise breakers. It’s like we can’t help ourselves. “I want to be good,” Saint Augustine said of his intentions, “but I just can’t help myself.”
With the idea of covenant, there is the essential idea of forgiveness and reconciliation as well. In the Hebrew story, God breaks the biggest promise of all, because Israel loses the promised land. Or was it Israel who broke the promise by worshiping other Gods? It’s kind of fuzzy, but Israel is sent into exile by the Assyrians, then the Babylonians. The period of exile is the time of the prophets, such as Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Amos. There were female prophets as well, Miriam, Esther, and Hannah. While the people were lamenting God’s broken promise, the prophets were pointing out the people’s: you have treated the land badly, you have forgotten goodness, you have failed to live into your end of the deal, O Israel.
In North America, the idea of Covenant became rooted….
You won’t find a more fitting example of this than the pilgrims who established the Plymouth Colony. They were a more tolerant bunch than the Puritans who came later and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Pilgrims came to escape religious persecution and to establish a place free from such oppression. Unlike the Puritans, the Pilgrims did not come here directly from England but by way of the Netherlands, where they witnessed a diverse cultural and religious society.
While the Pilgrims were staunch Calvinists like the Puritans, the Pilgrims had experienced life as a religious minority in an atmosphere of religious tolerance. They still believed that theirs was the true religion and that they knew how salvation worked, but they tended to treat outsiders better than the Puritans did. One example was their relative openness with the Native Americans. Another example was the time when a Spanish missionary visited the Plymouth Colony. He stayed with William Bradford, the head of the colony, and special arrangements were made so that he could eat fish on Friday. He was even allowed to conduct a Mass on Sunday. “While no one would confuse them for hippies” writes Snyder, “they were a bit more open to freedom than their Puritan neighbors. The Pilgrim’s Mayflower Compact was the first articulation of democratic ideals on North American soil and would not only influence our political government, but also the way in which Unitarians and others organized their Churches.”
Eventually the decedents of the Pilgrims and Puritans would write a document called the Cambridge Platform that described how they would organize their churches upon the idea of covenant. It was there way to build their theology upon a bedrock of promise—promises perfected with accountability and relationship. Each church was to be organized independently, but also would exist within a web of mutual support. They knew that humans tend to get out of line, that we are promise makers and promise breakers, and a covenant establishes the lines in which we get to play. Covenant was their way of perfecting the art of promising making. It also acknowledges that no matter how good you are, or how one gets saved, that you cannot get from here to there (wherever there might be) by yourself. You need a community to guide you along your way, not a priest or elder, but a community of, what they called “the saints.” Oh when saints come marching in.
That’s why many of our churches are called “All Souls;” it’s a direct response to the theology that said only the saints go to heaven. For everyone, “all souls” get to go wherever it is that “all souls” go in the hereafter.
At least we agree with the Pilgrims that it is here, within the container of a freely chosen faith, that we find our way in this troubled world.
Eventually, the churches that wrote the Cambridge Platform would split into orthodox and liberal denominations. Baptists and Congregationalists formed the conservative branches of our religious family tree, and we Unitarians branched out to the left.
Who knew we had so much in common with Baptists!
The idea of creating covenantal, rather than creedal, community comes from our Pilgrim mothers, fathers, and kin — who got it from the Bible. And with covenant comes responsibility. First, to help each other grow spiritually. That is the end of covenant: spiritual growth, “to help one another,” as our own covenant reads. Second, it is a mandate to care deeply for one another, “to dwell together in peace and seek the truth in love,” as our covenant also reads.
Each week we read a covenant together, and we hope that all who gather here find themselves in harmony with that covenant. That doesn’t mean that you’ll agree with every phrase, but that, in general, it resonates with you enough to invite you into a harmonious relationship with this church and its people.
To be a promise makers is to be human. Our lives are full of promises. When we purchase a home, we promise to pay the mortgage. When we marry we promise to be faithful to a spouse. When we dedicate or baptize children, we promise to support and nurture their delicate lives. But foreclosure, divorce, and even hurt and abandoned children, all exist.
We tell all our newcomers to this faith that we are a “covenantal” rather than creedal faith. We say, and it’s true, that you don’t have to sign onto a set of beliefs to be one with us. There is no signature required. It’s supposed to be inspiring, and it’s also a challenge, because living in a covenantal community can be even more difficult. In a creedal community, just follow the creed or your out. In a covenantal community, the breaking of promises is expected, because it happens.
We tell our newcomers that we are a covenantal not creedal, and yet we do not spend enough time explaining to them what that means. Says Rev. Susan Frederick Gray, “We sometimes wrongly say it is the absence of creed that is most important to who we are. This is wrong. Any one of us could practice religious freedom at home on Sunday mornings…. It is covenant that brings us out of isolation, covenant that brings us out of selfish concerns, out of individualism, to join ourselves to something greater, to become a part of a community that is working to practice love, to dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge and wisdom together, to find better ways to live our lives and live in the world.”
An essential aspect to covenant is what to do after the promise has been broken. When you break a creed, you just have to fall back into line to be “saved” or “back into relationship” — because your relationship is to the creed, not another messy, complicated, beautiful human being. With creed, your relationship is to the creed. With covenant, your relationship is with another person. With a creed, the way back is to the beginning. With a covenant, there may not be a way back to the place from which you started. I think of the quote from Hebrews we read earlier when the question arises of what to do after we’ve broken our promises: “why don’t we go back from where we’ve come.” That passage from Hebrews refers to the patriarch and matriarch of the Jewish faith, Abraham and Sarah. At some point, the passage suggests, if refugees have a chance to return —why don’t they? Why do they go back to make a new home?
The answer is because we can’t. Israel never goes home. There is always a new Canaan. There is always a new relationship that forms in the ashes of the old.
Soul Matters program minister Gretchen Haley says that covenant holds a whole vision for how to live in this complicated, beautiful and broken world. It is a vision that says we are most human when we bind ourselves in relationship of trust, accountability and return to each other, which may not be the place from which we have come.
Our culture doesn’t teach this. It teaches that to be human is to be independent and self-determined. But our Unitarian Universalist theology, a theology of covenant, teaches something very different, something counter cultural. Our theology teaches that being human lies in the commitments we make to each other and the relationships we keep. We become human when we make a promise to another. We are human when we break that promise. We are human when we repair the relationship and enter into a new covenant.
Haley writes that “covenantal theology doesn’t just say that we become human through our promising, but also when we break those promises, and yet somehow find ways to reconnect and begin again – when we repair the relationship because we know we need each other, even when we think the other isn’t doing enough, even when the other is annoying us, or isn’t listening well, or isn’t doing things the way we want them done – even then. When we realize right then, that we are still connected, and we can’t give up – and so we return, and begin again. This beginning again, says our faith, is when the holy and the human meet.”
Here is a truth, at some point the people you care for will disappoint you. This church will disappoint you. The world is always disappointing us. Therefore, there is healing in covenant, that at the moment our heart breaks there is a way forward. In fact, our faith demands this of us, that we come back together after separation and rupture, to begin again and be renewed.
We share a covenant that says Love is the spirit of this church — and when we are unkind to each other we must seek the ways of kindness. We covenant to dwell together in peace, and when the peace is broken, and we do the natural thing of moving apart, we are called back together to help each other find a new path. As poet Wendell Berry notes, “you do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.”
May our covenants be reminders of the things that we hold most precious: truth, freedom, service, fellowship, humanity.