"Covenant"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 6^th of December 1998

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

The Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here

alive together under this strong wooden gable
         which itself is under the even more wonderful gable of the sky,
to worship, which means
         to invite the part of us that wants to be a fist to open up
until it no longer resembles a fist but a dove in joyous flight.
         Praise for the power that can bring so many different people
together in deliberate peace.
         Praise to the power that draws us together and guards our struggling hearts.
And praise for the heritage that strengthens and blesses us.

Trope on a hymn   (for the first service) [Next] [back to top]

Spirit of Life! Spirit, not something dead, I mean
Breath, aliveness, not something you can carry in your wallet,
Or memorize in your brain, or tuck in some final distilled creed; Spirit!
Spirit of life, not death, movement, not stillness,
Dance, not denial.
Come unto me, sing in my heart.  Don’t come to us.
Don’t make every one good all at once, don’t lump us together.
Even if you could, don’t take away our personal struggles,
but come set fire into our individual hearts so that we might reach out
and take some responsibility for justice and peace and healing ourselves, yes, ourselves,
Beginning with ourselves as we are, fragile and broken in spots, yes,
strong yes, but not gods and goddesses striding the earth with perfection, not finished,
but rather mortals, struggling the best way we can, day by day, alone yet together.
Like the blowing wind and rising waves in the sea,
help me to realize I am only part and parcel
of the immense flow of sacred compassion and just living, that webs the earth.  I say it:
I,we, neither began the work of justice, nor shall I, we, complete it.
I, we, neither invented compassion nor shall I, we, perfect it.
But let it rise in me, in us, yes, like waves in the sea, yes, blowing through me, through us,
like horns of the wind, that even today, yes today, our hands may be put to the plow
and that we might never, never look back and say “We are chained by our regrets,
and shaped only by our loss and longing.”
Spirit of Life, come.  Come now. Come unto me.
Come and loose my tongue so that it sings yes, and yes, and yes.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]

comes from the book, One Hundred Years of Upstart Unitarianism in the Bible Belt by Robert C. Hardy, being an oral history of the Oklahoma City Unitarian Universalist Church written in 1991

The way (the Early American Puritans) knew they were God’s people was that God told each of them personally. I am not kidding. Each of them believed that he or she had been called by God, which meant that each of them had an experience in which God told them that they were among the elect.

The church could handle it when a few strangers or even a few of their children were not called to election, but in a couple of generations, the experience of God telling you that you were saved became unusual. Oh, the children were not acting up. They were good enough. But suddenly, God seemed to stop telling teenagers that they were among the elect. He was telling only a few, but when those few, who did not appear any better than anyone else, started to assume authority over the rest of them, suspicion grew about whether God had actually told them anything.

So what did they do?  They needed a new basis for membership in the church. So the Puritans wrote the Cambridge Platform. If you agreed to abide by it, you were in the church. You decided. Big change!  Before,  God told you that you were in the church, and now you decided.  That was the covenant, and if you did agree to it, they called it “owning the covenant.” Coming into the church was like coming into something valuable.

The essence of it was a pledge to walk together in the way of truth and peace. Those were the words they used: “To walk together in the way.”  Notice they were not talking about sitting down. They were talking about going somewhere. We call that “process” now.

We are their descendents. The idea of walking together, that is, having some kind of unfolding or development, and walking together within a covenant, which means (a) promise to walk in the same general direction, is still what our church is.

It is a blessed community of hope and remembrance.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]

is The title poem in Pulitzer Prize winning Lisel Mueller’s book of Poetry, Alive Together, written in 1991.

Speaking of marvels, I am alive together with you, when I might have been alive
with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard’s woman or the whore of a Renaissance pope,
or a peasant wife with not enough food or not enough love,
with my children dead of the plague.
I might have slept in an alcove next to the man with golden nose,
who poked it into the business of the stars,
or sewn a starry flag for a general with wooden teeth.

I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas, or a woman without a name
weeping in Master’s bed for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter lost in a drunken bet.

I might have been stretched on a totem pole to appease a vindictive god,
or left, a useless girl-child, to die on a cliff.

I might have been Mary Shelley, in love with a wrongheaded angel,
or Mary’s friend.  I might have been you.

The poem is endless, the odds against us endless,
our chances of being alive together statistically non-existent.
Still, we have made it,
alive in a time when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah’s Witnesses agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children, who ---but for our endless ifs---
might have missed out on being alive together with marvels
and follies and longings and wishes and error and humor and mercy and journeys
and voices and faces and colors and summers and mornings and knowledge and tears and chance.

Prayer for the Season [Next] [back to top]

Was there really a Star, a Stable, a Gloria in the sky?
I doubt it, I guess, but I do have faith that
any star I see leads me to the kind of wonder that can save me, 
I do have faith that babes are everyday born in places that make
any stable look like a palace, and
that such poverty is inconceivable, and I do have faith that there is a Glory
singing not just in the sky, but in every handful of dust, in every tear
drop on a cheek,  and in every laughing child that ever lived.
Did the oil last for eight days? Did the menorah shine with a holy light?
Maybe not. The doubts are strong to be sure.
But I have faith that the love of freedom will last longer than eight days,
eight years, or eight centuries.

I have faith that the light that shines in the slant winter sky on newly bare branches
on a winter’s afternoon is almost unbearably holy.
I doubt that shopping frantically will make holidays mean anything interesting.
But I have faith that the carols and candles will get to me again this year,
inviting me to stand up to every Herod or Antiochus that claims power over children,
inviting me to look up and worship the menorah of the constellations,
until I have no room left in my heart for anything less beautiful than the light
of perfect compassion for others and even myself.

Praise to you, oh Doubts and Faith, for you get me through the season in peace.

Sermon: Covenant [back to top]

Almost exactly a year ago, my dear friend, Dan O'Neal, died, at age 50.  He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in his late forties.  Unfortunately for him and for all who knew and loved him, it got worse, not better.

He fought it with everything Western medicine offered.... surgery, chemotherapy, hormonal therapy etc. He fought it with everything Eastern medicine offers: Chinese herbs, special diets, even a consultation with the physician who attends the Dalai Lama. Dan also meditated daily in a Buddhist tradition he practiced as a form of spiritual centering, and the number of colleagues and friends who prayed for him, held him in their heart, and even sang to him, was immense.

Unfortunately, in his case, none of these offerings of skill and devotion accomplished anything curative for his body, and so he died in early January of this past year.

He was the parish minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Santa Rosa, California.  Of all the parish ministers in our district, I think he was by far the most loved, the most cherished, the most revered.  His colleagues covered for him gladly when he was in the hospital, and they drove up to Santa Rosa, a long drive from most places in the Bay Area, to visit him.

I admired Dan from the first moment I met him, which happened when he arrived as a student at Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, and I was an adjunct professor there.  Dan was quick-witted, insightful, and clearly far more educated in the sciences and humanities than many of his peers. When I taught classes in the New Testament or in worship, he was always my favorite student. His papers, his comments, always lifted the old ideas up in a new light, and the punctuation of his remarkable wit was much welcomed during the long winter classes that dragged on till dark.

Dan and I shared an interest in the scientific disciplines: astronomy, ecology, biology.  We often used illustrations from the physical realm in our sermons...images from the physics of the universe that is our home.  We were both particularly interested in evolution, and often exchanged articles of interest on that topic.

Dan was only two years older than I was.  Thus, we grew up at the same time in the history of mid-century Middle America, and so we shared some common memories...especially memories generated from that remarkable cultural phenomenon of the fifties, the television set.  Lucy and Ricky, to be sure, and The Honeymooners, but we both especially remembered the Walt Disney Hour on Sunday evenings before Bonanza.

We both agreed that we didn't tune in to the Disney show because of Mickey and Donald Duck, but that we tuned in for the science shows.  Walt Disney was our first science teacher.

For example, both Dan and I first learned about nuclear fission, not in school, but on TV, as Walt Disney set off a whole room of ping pong balls caught in mouse traps by throwing one ping pong ball into the fray.  We remembered that the first time we heard of the element "cesium" was when we watched the Disney show on Mars, the Red Planet....Disney's writers proposed a trip to Mars in a fleet of ships that resembled gigantic umbrellas, powered by "cesium engines."

And we remembered that we learned about "centrifugal force" by watching a rock...or was it some sort of ball?… which Mr. Disney whirled around on a string.  We watched films of men training for stratospheric missions in the centrifuge, which whirled them around and made them weigh five times as much as they usually did.  Around and around they went, their faces distorted by the terrible pull of that extra weight.  Centrifugal force was defined as a force that tends to drive something away from the center...that whirling motion slung that stone out into an orbit.

But, for some reason, Mr. Disney never talked about the other force in the equation, the string that was keeping that whirling rock from being flung over into the neighbor’s yard.  That force is called centripetal force, another wonderful multi-syllable word to delight a child's mind.  Dan and I, however, do not ever remember hearing the word "centripetal".  And since we were both aficionados of big fun words, I think we would have remembered it if we had heard it.

Centripetal force is that force which is necessary to keep an object moving in a circular path and is directed inward, toward the center.  To make it simple, centrifugal force tells us what flings us off toward the edge. Centripetal force tells us what turns us toward the center. 

As Dan and I often did through the years of our friendship, I want to use this basic physical idea as a motif for this sermon on the ancient concept of Covenant.

Sometimes when I talk to folks about Unitarian Universalism, I explain that there are people of many differing religious perspectives here, especially eclectic ones, but including many self-described agnostics and non-theists. When I say that, folks often ask me a question which is invariably worded in the same way..."Well, if that's true, what holds you together?"

I answer this way: “That’s a real good question, and I cannot give an easy answer.”  If we both have time to go deeper, I say something similar to what the first reading put so well. Once, our North American ancestors, who were the so-called Puritans, used to think that they had individual experiences of God, and that God told them that they were part of the Church.  The Puritans did not use a creed to state what they believed, but rather, counted on personal experience, often framed in the language of the authorized Bible, to which they testified before the congregation. Later generations no longer felt that God talked with them, and so they decided on a more ordinarily human way to come together as a church. This idea was the covenant, or pact; and as this morning's reading makes so plain, the Cambridge Platform...the name given to the first North American articulation of this idea of church membership... used the metaphor of "walking together in the way," implying that they had not yet arrived.  This is a very different way of approaching religion than the creed system, where people are expected to at least mouth a common set of metaphysical assertions:  "We believe...all together... that this, that, or the other is true."

That’s about the most I can say when someone asks me the question, "What keeps you Unitarian Universalists together?"  I almost never have time to get into our European history, which stretches back as far before the Puritans as the Puritans era stretches from us. But who has time to hear 400 years of history in answer to what appears to be a rather simple question?

But our spiritual ancestry does indeed go back to the Radical Reformation.  The “Radical Reformation” basically means all the reformers during the Reformation who were not Lutherans, Calvinists, or Church of England.  All that’s left are those weird Anabaptists, some of whom became Quakers, some of whom became Mennonites, and some of whom led all the way to us.  If you went to public school here in the Americas, our religious ancestors may have been mentioned in a footnote, if you were lucky, but I doubt it.  If you went to a parochial school - Protestant or Catholic, our ancestors were studiously omitted from any mention. You see, our ancestors in Europe, whom UU historian George Williams calls “the rational Anabaptists,” threatened the  organizational ideas of the  Protestants and Catholics.  They accepted the idea of covenant as basic for the free congregation.  They thought it rational to state some common covenant so that their enemies, or even their friends… couldn’t say, “The only thing they share is the mortgage.” In short, they took the issue of community basis of religious life seriously.

The covenant is not a list of beliefs, like a creed or even a catechism; it’s a stated basis for a free community, a mutually agreed upon pledge of good behavior toward each other, and shared religious methods....in the words of one covenant known to many in this church for over 30 years..."to dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom."

Of course, our ancestors in Poland did have a list of beliefs that were commonly held among them...they called their argument for what they believed a “Catechism.”  The Catechism of Rakow, when disseminated throughout Europe, proved to be one of the most influential books in European History.  It was a crime to even talk about its ideas in England for centuries.  King James had it burned in public. But note, the Catechism was not the basis for their community. There were numbers among the congregations along the Vistula River that did not share this or that teaching in the Catechism.  That was OK, according to our ancestors.  They did not see the Catechism as a creed or worse, a straight jacket. 

For the record, our ancestors made their covenantal pledge when they took communion, four times a year.  The word "sacrament" means "pledge of faithfulness" and thus, the sharing of the bread and cup was seen as the perfect time to pledge themselves to the values of non-violence and generosity found so explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount, which was the implicit text of their covenant.

But the idea "covenant" itself was not invented by the Polish rational anabaptists, the Socinians. It is a much older idea than almost any in our history. It goes back over 3000 years. The pyramids may be older than the word "covenant," and Stonehenge probably is, as well as the wonderful goddess figures at Tarxien on Malta.  But I tell you now, not much else is older.

The idea of “covenant” comes from the Middle East. It comes from the land we now call Palestine.  You see, back in the days when Rameses the Second was on the throne of Egypt, and Hatusilis I was on the throne of the Hittites, the empire of Egypt and the empire of Hatti were in the bad habit of fighting costly wars. Each one wanted to be the one and only Empire.

But eventually, thank God, they both realized this was foolish.  So they made a treaty, a covenant pledging to not fight each other any more, to no more make fun of each other’s religion or politics, to exchange ambassadors in good faith, and to begin trade and the exchange of ideas, again in good faith. This covenant was signed at a place in Palestine, because that’s where they used to fight their battles… Palestine, obviously, being half way between Egypt and Hatti.  And, as usual, the poor blokes who lived in this tragic land of battlegrounds learned the hard way what war and fighting mean.  Egypt and Hatti did not suffer as much as they did.  No ,Palestinian tents and cities were burned, their crops destroyed, their civilians raped and killed by the two monstrous, marauding armies.

But all of this terrible carnage stopped rather suddenly when the treaty, the covenant, was enacted. And so it makes perfect sense to me that our remote ancestors began to find this idea of mutual respect and cooperation to be a most sane idea. 

As the various clans that lived in Palestine and shared a basic culture began to worry that future warfare might one day again try and wipe them out, they decided to band together, much as the Greek city states would do later on when Persia began to menace the world.  This banding together, this mutual cooperation, they signed by the word ,"covenant."  No final individual human authority, they said. To the amazement of a modern like me, they refused to have a king or a government or a standing army in those early days. No final religious practices....they built no temple to their God, and only shared among them a small box with religious objects in it… a box, or ark, as they called it, with which they signed their covenant with each other and with their God.

Later, when they told their story, they talked about how they broke the covenant of freedom by getting a king, building a temple, and having a government just like all the other nations around them.   And, the internal social critics of these people, a group of men and women called "the prophets," told them that the reason that Assyria, Chaldea, Persia and finally Greece ripped them to pieces was because they had abandoned their mutual covenant of freedom, their centripetal force, and allowed the centrifugal forces of idolatry, greed, disregard for the poor, and outcasts, to turn from each other.

Their theory of disaster, their broken covenant theory, may or not be true according to the theology you accept. I think it was probably just a terrible coincidence that all these mighty armies destroyed this nation century after century...after all…humanity is not justly famous for its peacefulness, is it?

But the majestic idea of  “covenant” came down through the ages none the less, despite the destruction of the temple, the loss of their kingdom, and the loss of their priests. They lost almost everything, but not the word, “covenant.” It is not surprising to me that our ancestors found it a great word too, useful to explain how and why they come together at all.

But the poet Mueller in the second reading reminds us, with her heartbreakingly beautiful poem, that we do not live in ancient days. We are not peasants during the days of Abelard. We do not live in the days of slavery or the days of Renaissance popes. We are not each other.  Chance and accident has it that we are not living tomorrow or yesterday, but rather, right now.  We are who we are. We are not anyone but who we are, all on this earth, alive together, having found this place, at this time. We are alive together, along with our children, she tells us, with "marvels and follies and longings and wishes and error and humor and mercy and journeys and voices and faces and colors and summers and mornings and knowledge and tears and chance."

We have different ways of interpreting all these faces, these summers and mornings...some of us finding solace in the word God, others finding solace in questioning that word, some of us stressing our own Western heritage, others turning toward the East, some of us gravitating toward the languages of science and philosophy, others moving to the thrill of poetry or music.  But we come together under this gable in peace, and that peace is our covenant, though of course,  no set of words can finally articulate that peace or force it...the proof, as the Letter of James reminds us, is always in behavior, not in stated words.  And so, some might say that no verbal covenant is necessary, since none can either last forever, or touch each and every human heart in the same way, human hearts being different as they are.

But I beg to differ. And so, since we do not live in the days of Abelard and Eloise, but right now, I must speak today’s language.  I must return in time, not to the Radical Reformation, but at most just a few years, a decade, to be exact. I must go back to the day my late friend and colleague Dan O'Neal was ordained.  You remember Dan, don’t you?  The man with whom I share a love of images from the scientific disciplines, including the great words, "centrifugal" and "centripetal."

When Dan was ordained, almost ten years to the day from the date of his death, Bill Shultz, then president of the UUA,  preached a terrific sermon.  I gave the charge to the minister. The choir sang. And Dan's best friend gave a little talk.

I don't remember his name anymore.  I believe that he, too, died of prostate-cancer a year before Dan did.  But I remember his exact words.  He talked of his friendship history with Dan: "Dan and I worked together once, laughing at workplace absurdities. But our ways parted after a while...we went each to different livelihoods and different locales.

I said to Dan,"We should keep in touch."  Dan said to me, "No, we should make specific plans to keep in touch."  I said to him, "Let's keep things real, Dan; we're friends; we don't have to plan."

"Not true," said Dan, "planning doesn't make things less real, but more real.  The equation 'spontaneity = sincerity' is false. Sometimes that equation is actually responsible for letting friendships wither.  And I love you too much to let that happen.  Commitment is part of friendship.'  So we did plan, and we are still best friends after twenty years."

For me, those words were the heart of the ordination of Dan O' Neal. They summarized three thousand years of history in a few sentences, and they explained to me, in the language of friendship, the same thing that the scientific vocabulary of "centrifugal and centripetal" also makes clear.  When we are faithful to our life experiences, we may indeed find ourselves speaking different languages and different metaphors, thus making both friendship and any kind of community most fragile...or, to use Dan's friend's words, "less real."

To make a covenant with each other, to pledge some specific commitment of behavior and shared approach, however brief, is to make things, not less real, but more real; it’s to take ourselves seriously, as community, not seeing ourselves as some also-ran religious way of life, some thin ghost of real religion defined by “True-Believing” Baptist divines, but as a powerful and rooted religious contribution to Western thought and practice; it’s to point out that the reason that the ball whirling around at the end of the string does not go flying off into space is because of the string connected to the center, the centripetal force that makes for beloved community which is the shelter and solace for our individual spiritual ways.

Our religious way of life has a center as well as edges.  And I say it is a caricature...a very sad and pathetic caricature,... to describe our religious way of life (as some of our critics do, I am afraid) as embracing anything and everything. It’s just plain wrong to say we have no center. It’s as if you could shoot dice to come up with your theology, or toss darts to pick out your world-view, all views being absolutely the same. As if the only thing we share is the bill for roof repair and the electric bill. 

No, our martyrs did not burn in the fire...and they did, I tell you, they did… just so anyone could say that anything and everything is equally wonderful.  James Reeb was shot, not because he thought that racism was the same as anti-racism, but rather, he thought that racism was wrong, and anti-racism was right.  Susan B. Anthony did not go to Seneca Falls believing that misogyny was equal to gender equality. It’s maddening to even think such a thing.

No, our religious approach, despite its very real metaphysical ambiguities, has a center rooted in passionate reason, disciplined tolerance, responsible freedom, and unconditional love.  And working to make our relationships with each other, rooted in that incandescent center, more, and not less, real, is the reason why this congregation voted to give the Covenant Committee their important work last year. We asked them to suggest to us the possibility of a covenant for these particular days, these particular people, this particular church. The way to that covenant may appear to be rocky at times, but like our Puritan ancestors gone before us, may we walk the way of truth in peace.

[back to top]

First UU Church Home | Church Newsletters | First UU Staff | Sermons | Elected Officers
Email Mark | Email the Church Office | Email the Webmaster

Last update: 05/02/2001