The Power of a Promise

This is the text of the sermon I delivered on September 18, 2016 at the congregation I serve, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.

Here’s a catchy title for you:  A Platform of Church Discipline Gathered Out of the Word of God and Agreed Upon by the Elders and Messengers of the Churches Assembled in the Synod at Cambridge in New England.  Kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?  Trippingly, as my mom used to say. 

It was 1637, and the settlers in what know we today as Dedham, Massachusetts, came together to discuss the creation of a church.  Although the roughly 30 families had already come together to the extent that they were generally able to govern themselves, they had not yet figured out how to worship together.  And that was a pretty important thing back in 1637.

You might be surprised to learn that our impulse to set up “cottage conversations” whenever we have large issues to grapple with was their impulse as well.  For a year those settlers, now neighbors, met in a series of cottage meetings, each one being organized around a specific question.  Given what we know – or think we know – about the religious sensibilities of 17^th century New England, we might imagine that the topics for discussion would be things like salvation, damnation, predestination.  We might imagine that in order to come together in forming a church these doctrinal issues would need to be sorted out and that some sort of mutual understanding would need to be reached.

We’d be wrong.  The result of their deliberations was not titled, A Platform of Theological Understandings Gathered Out of the Word of God and Agreed Upon, etc., etc.  Instead, what comes down to us is A Platform of Church Discipline …  In other words, these folks felt that even more important than a unified theological understanding, what was essential in forming their new church was a common organizational understanding.  Not, what would be the common beliefs, but what would be their agreements about how to be together.  (This should come as welcome vindication for the folks who’ve been serving on our Governance Task Force this past year, who know how important their work is but who’ve often felt as if they, alone, have cared about it.)

The Cambridge Platform, as it is more commonly (thankfully) known established the vision of a church built on covenant instead of creed, built on the promises inherent in such principles as investing ultimate authority in the congregation itself rather than in some ecclesiastical role or structure.  The church – the meaning, the very idea of “church”– is defined in the Platform as “a company of saints by calling united into one body by a holy covenant, for public worship of God, and the mutual edification of one another in the fellowship of the Lord Jesus.”  I want to lift up three things in there:

“A company of saints by calling” means people who identify themselves as trying to live a good, moral life.  No outside body or power declares them to be such; they are “saints by calling.”  We could add, they are “saints” by an inner “calling,” an inner recognition that they belong.

Then, the Platform declares that there are really only two reasons for a church to exist – the public worship of God, and “the mutual edification of one another.”  “Edification” is the improving of someone’s morals or intellect; we could say that it involves making someone a better person.  Yet these 17^th century New Englanders apparently didn’t think that this was a job for the clergy to do for the laity but, instead, something that they were all called to do for one another – “mutual edification.”  That’s a pretty huge, radical leap from what was more commonly understood at the time, and that’d be more than a little radical in some arenas still today.

But here’s the big one, the thing I really want to make sure we don’t miss:   the church is “a company of saints by calling united into one body by a holy covenant …”  They weren’t called together by God or some other Higher Authority.  And it wasn’t that they had a shared theological understanding; it wasn’t that they agreed on creed.  What brought them together, and held them together, was that they covenanted with one another, that they made promises to one another about the kind of community they were making and how they were going to behave with one another within it. 

The basis of their church is the basis of ours – an agreement to come together in mutual respect, even when we disagree.  What brings us together, and holds us together, are the promises we make to and with one another about the kind of community we are making, and how we are going to behave with one another within it.  Not surprisingly, the settlers who came together and created The Cambridge Platform are, indeed, our religious ancestors.  There’s a direct line from them to us.  When we ask ourselves, as we’ve been doing this month, what it means that we, as Unitarian Universalists, are “a people of covenant” – this is what it means:  that what brings us together, and holds us together, are the promises we make to and with one another about the kind of community we are making, and how we are going to behave with one another within it. 

Earlier we read together the words of our covenant.  I’ve often thought that when someone signs the book to formalize their membership in this community, or when we recognize our new formalized members during a Sunday service, we should have them raise their right hand and ask them:

·         Do you promise to communicate with compassion and respect, especially when we disagree?

·         Do you promise to celebrate diversity and nurture our inclusivity?

·         Do you promise to embrace each of us spiritually and emotionally?

·         Do you promise to promote social justice within our congregation and the larger community?

·         Do you promise to generously support the ministries of the church with time, money and enthusiasm?

·         Do you promise that when someone has fallen short, you will lovingly call them back into covenant, and hope that others will do the same for you?

I wonder if there’d be people who would decide not to sign if they knew that doing so meant saying “yes” to these promises.  And I wonder what it’d be like if during that same New Member Recognition Service the rest of us were asked to raise our right hands and reaffirm our commitment to these promises, too.

There is such power in a promise.  It’s true that commitments can challenge us. Think about New Year’s Resolutions – most of us make them and then break them, and have done this so many times that we hardly ever make them anymore.  Or, when we do, we take the resolve out of them by saying that we’ll try to do this or that but, you know, “I can’t make any promises.”  Making a promise, a commitment, is saying that I’m going to go for it with all that I’ve got; that I’ll resist giving in to excuses; that I’ll make the effort a priority; that I’ll stick with it even when it’s not particularly comfortable to do so or when I don’t really feel like it, thank you very much.  I understand the reality that all I can really ever do is try my best, but a promise is a way of saying that I don’t intend to use that as an out.  As Grand Master Yoda so famously said, “Do or do not.  There is no try.”  That’s the spirit, the heart, of commitment; and commitment is the heart, the spirit, of covenant; and covenant is at the core of our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, and it’s the heart of who we are as Unitarian Universalists who’ve come together to create this community of faith. 

So we promise to communicate with compassion and respect, especially when we disagree.  And that means, of course, that we’re willing to disagree, that we’re willing to risk disagreeing.  And yet even in this open-minded and open-hearted community we often hold back sharing all of who we are, and how we think, and what the world looks like through our eyes.  I guess we often do this because we don’t want to offend anyone.  I know that we sometimes do this because we fear rejection even in this loving and inclusive community.

The first congregation I served had a Unison Affirmation we repeated each week at the beginning of our Sunday sanctuary service.  There was a line in it that said, “We respect differences of opinion, and strive to be a democratic community.”  More than once I felt the need to challenge them on this, asking, “How do we know we respect differences of opinion if we won’t risk having any?”

Take our prized theological differences, for instance.  How often do we really talk plainly, openly, without inhibiting qualifiers, about what we really believe – especially with someone we know – or suspect – believes something else?  I’ve often observed that we UUs seem to have a theological “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” –  I won’t offend you by telling you that I believe in God, and you won’t offend me by telling me that you don’t.  We appear to respect our differences, even though it looks like that because we try to avoid calling attention to them.  The surface may appear calm and clear, yet underneath it’s all pretty murky.

Here’s the thing – maintaining a semblance of acceptance always … always … comes at the cost of the real thing.  Let me repeat that:  maintaining a semblance of acceptance always comes at the cost of the real thing.  And it makes the next step, the one our faith tradition calls us to, eager engagement with difference, virtually impossible.  You see, I don’t want you to hold back in telling me about your Atheism.  I already know how the world looks to a Theist.  I already understand what a belief in God – what I mean by that phrase, anyway – I already understand what a belief in God adds to my life.  I got that.  What I don’t know is what life without that belief looks like.  I don’t know how your life is enriched by your belief that we humans are all there is, and that reality consists of what we can taste, touch, feel, and see.  Clearly it is, but how it is, is a mystery to me.  And unless you dare to tell me, I’ll never know.  And you’ll never know … for sure … that you can.  We’ll express a respect for one another’s different views, but we won’t actually know them.  So we won’t actually know each other.  And TJMC won’t really be what we say it is, what we tell the world it is, what we truly need it to be.

And that’s just one example of the power in the promises we make that make this community.  Read them over again at some point, and see how challenging they are.  And I’d don’t mean just how challenging it will be for me to really live that way, but also the challenge they offer me to go deeper and live more fully.  The much celebrated “seven principles” of Unitarian Universalism are also a promise, a covenant, a challenge.  (You can find them on the UUA’s website, uua.org, or on ours, uucharlottesville.org, or in the front of the grey hymnal.)  These are not statements of what UUs believe, no matter how many times they’re described in that way.  Instead, they are a series of principles, and it is the covenant to “affirm and promote” them which brings together, and holds together, as the Unitarian Universalist Association of Affiliated Congregations.  (The UUA’s full and formal name.)

What it means to say that we Unitarian Universalists are “a people of covenant” is that we are not bound together by shared creeds, but by shared commitments.  Those commitments form our covenant, and that covenant is what makes us who we are.  Or, at least, it can.  It can.  If we trust one another, and trust ourselves, enough to put it into practice, we will make real who we say we want to be.  If we can’t, or don’t, we’ll be just show.  And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the real, than the show.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Where Have We Gathered? (Reflections for In-Gathering Water Communion)

Date Taken: 28 Dec 2011
Place: Bangalore, Karnataka, India

This is the text of the sermon I delivered to the congregation I serve, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.  You can listen to the podcast if you'd prefer.

Welcome

In Spanish it’s, “Bienvenidos.”  Our friends in Oltheviz Transylvania would say, “Isten hozott mindenkit.”  Our other overseas partner, the Nongkrem Unitarian Church in the Khasi Hills of India, might offer a simple, “Phi long kumno.”  I’ll just say, “Welcome everyone.”

<go into our usual welcoming words>

First Reflection

Good morning!  How many of you are back in school already, or have a sibling who’s back in school?  Any of you know an adult who’s back in school now?

For a lot of people this feels like the start of the year.  I know that New Year’s Day is the first of January, and that Chinese New Year is in February.  Some people think that the new year begins in springtime, and some feel like their birthday is the start of a new year.  (My younger son was born on December 31, so I’ve always told him that all those fireworks are to celebrate his birthday!)  The Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashanah – begins at sundown next Sunday.  (And did you know that on the Jewish calendar it’s not 2015?  It’s 5775!)

Lots of days and lots of ways of marking and celebrating the start of a new year.  We have In-Gathering Sunday with its wonderful Water Communion.  This is how we start a new year of being together.  I don’t know how long we’ve been doing it, but I know that it’s been quite a while.  I also know that in Unitarian Universalist congregations around the country people recently have done, are doing today, or are soon about to do what we’re going to do in a little while – pour our individual containers of water into one big container so that they all get mixed up with one another  Anybody know why we do this?

The Water Communion is a way of acting out with our water what we do as people.  We come together here, each of us unique and each of us different from everybody else.  Yet when we come together week after week for worship – here or in the children’s worship room (which this year, you know, is going to be next door over in Summit House) – when we come together week after week to learn together, and sing together, and play together, and laugh together, and sometimes cry together … when we come together over and over again to do these kinds of things we also – just like the water – start to become one big something instead of just a whole bunch of separate somethings.  And that big thing we could call, “community.”  Each of these separate people – including you, including me – come together and become a community.

Now … the water has something to hold it:  the bowl.  What do you think holds us?  Our covenant.  (Some of you may remember that at the start of RE year last year you made a covenant together for your class.)  A covenant is really just a promise, but it’s not a one-sided promise like when I would promise my mom that I’d never put my dirty shoes on the couch again, or that when I was done with something I’d put things back where I’d found them.  A covenant’s not like that. A covenant is a two-way promise – you and me, we both promise it to each other.  I promise to you, and you promise to me.

And here at TJMC we have a covenant, a promise that we all make to one another as a way of holding our beloved community.

I’d like to read our covenant to you this morning, and I’ve put it in less formal language than you’d find it on our website, in the framed picture in the Church Office, or on the big sign in the Social Hall.  Here’s our covenant, our promise, in words that even I can understand:

So that we can make TJMC the kind of place we all want it to be, we promise to each other:

·         That we’ll talk to each other with kindness and respect, especially when we don’t agree with each other;

·         That we’ll make room for all of our differences and work really hard at including everybody;

·         That we’ll be there to help each other;

·         That we’ll work for justice, fairness, what is right, both here in our congregation and in the world around us;

·         That we’ll give happily to this church with our time, our money, and our energy;

·         And that when we forget these promises, we will remind one another in loving ways.

I think that those are pretty good promises.

I hope this new school year, and this new church year will be really fun and full of wonder for each of us.  And all of us together.

Sermon

So … here we are.  As one of the hymns I’d thought about having us sing puts it, “Here we have gathered; gathered side by side.  Circle of kindship, come and step inside.”  Whether you have been away for the summer, or just for part of it, or have been here doing the day-to-day as if summer was just another season no different than any other (except for the humidity) – welcome back.  To students coming back to town for a new semester, and parents whose children have gone back to school, and children whose vacations are over, and people who for a myriad of reasons “took the summer off” from church – it’s good to see you all again at the start of this “new” year, this new church season.  To those who’ve been here pretty much each and every Sunday throughout the summer – it’s been nice to see you all along and it’s nice to see you now amidst all these returning folks.  Kumno.  Isten hozott mindenkit. Bienvenidos.

Earlier we did our annual Water Communion.  Our separate vials of water comingling in the bowl to create one common pool.  At some level we all get it – each of us comes here as an individual and together we create a community.  I’ve found myself wondering, though, just what kind of community is it that we’re creating?  “Community” in the abstract?  Some kind of generic community?  Somebody’s probably thinking, “a Unitarian Universalist community!” but that’s kind of a generalization too, isn’t it?  Liberal, progressive, free thinking, spiritual, loving, welcoming – these are all a part of it, yet I don’t think that any of them really captures it.

From time to time I remind us that each week we create a unique congregation – this particular combination of people has never been together before and won’t all be together, in this same way, ever again.  Even if next week everyone here returned and no one else joined us, it still wouldn’t be the same as it is right here and right now because many of us would be in a different place physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.  The energy, the feel, of the group would be different.  We would be different.

So this community thing that we say we are building, that we join and say we’re a part of, that we come home to in this homecoming, is a kind of fluid thing, isn’t it?  In fact, there are people who think of themselves as part of TJMC who haven’t attended worship or anything else in a long time yet who still feel that connection.  And there are people who’ve moved away yet who also feel a tie to this place and these people.  And there are people in book groups who’ve never met some of the people who have breakfast together every week, who may not know the new families that have been coming for the past couple of weeks or the widower who’s dipped his toes in every now and again for the past couple of years and thinks he’s now ready for more of a commitment.  The truth is that we’re never all together at the same time in the same place, yet still, almost despite ourselves, we are one community.

And it’s sure not theology that holds us together.  It might not be immediately obvious, because we UUs often hold our religious beliefs and practices pretty privately, but there are a lot of folk here who are really deeply and passionately trying to live their lives in accord with their beliefs.  Of course, the person sitting next to them might be equally passionate for entirely different reasons.  As the quote so long erroneously attributed to Transylvanian martyr Francis David says, “We need not think alike to love alike.”  So it’s not our theology that holds us together, nor is this the kind of community that is built by constant face-to-face encounters with one another.

What holds us together, as I said earlier, is our promise.  Our covenant.  I’ll bet that many of you didn’t know we had one, or were surprised to hear that it’s posted in several places.  I would bet good money that there’s no one here who could recite it from memory.  And I am fairly sure that its unpacking wasn’t a part of any Newcomer Orientation, nor was it even explicitly shared at the time of “signing the book.”  (In preparing for this sermon it dawned on me that this would probably be a pretty good idea –asking people to think about and then actually make these promises as part of formalizing their membership.  How can we expect each other to keep them if it was never really clear that we were expected to make them?)

So … we’re going to try to make up for that oversight this morning.  I would like to ask you all to rise in body or spirit, and for the folks on this side to look at the folks on that side (and vice versa).  Here’s our formal covenant:

In order to create the beloved community we all desire for ourselves, we, the Congregation of [and I realized that that probably should be “we, the members of …”] Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist Covenant to:

·         Communicate with compassion and respect, especially when we disagree,

·         Celebrate diversity and nurture our inclusivity,

·         Embrace one another spiritually and emotionally,

·         Promote social justice within our congregation and the larger community,

·         Generously support the ministries of the church with time, money and enthusiasm, and

·         When we have fallen short, lovingly call each other back into covenant. 

As I said earlier – I think those are pretty good promises.  I think they are strong enough to hold us together even as entropy – and elemental group dynamics – work to undo us.  These promises tell us who we are as a community – we are a people of covenant, of mutual promise, and these are the things we have promised to one another.  May these promises guide us in the coming year.  May they keep us safe; may the encourage us to try new things; may they get us through any hard times (and there probably will be some of those!); may they remind us inspire us to go deeper and reach higher; and my they be there to catch us when we have – as each of us at some point no doubt surely will – forgotten and fallen short of them.

Welcome home, everyone.  I think it’s going to be a great year.

Pax tecum,

RevWik