The Making of a People of Prophecy: the book report

In the sermon I delivered (and posted) yesterday I said that I'd actually written another sermon which I came to realize was not the sermon I needed to deliver.  For what it's worth, here's that first version:

After coming home from General Assembly this past summer, our Director of Faith Development, Leia Durland-Jones, told me that I should watch the Sunday morning service and, particularly, to listen to the sermon that had been given by the Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd.  Not that much after, our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, told me that I needed to hear it –  “You’ve really got to listen to this sermon!” she said.  It’s really, really powerful.”  That was in early July.

Well … a week or so ago, while I was home sick, I finally cued it up and watched.  And they were right.  Oh my goodness, they were right.  I put a link to the video of the sermon – and the whole service, actually – in the insert in your Order of Service, and I strongly encourage you to watch it, because it isn’t just Nancy’s words, but her delivery – and not just her tempo, tone, and body language, but her presence as she delivered it – that makes it so powerful.

I mention all of this because in this powerful, and truly prophetic, sermon, Nancy says some really important things about just what it takes to make “a people of prophecy,” and, perhaps more specifically, what it will take to make us – Unitarian Universalists – able to live into this role. 

She grounds her prophetic charge in the importance of relationship for building up our communities into places where real change, real transformation, can come about.  She quotes the anti-racist organizer MickeyScottBey Jones – whom she calls “wonderful” and “deep-spirited” – as saying:

relationship is the sandpaper that wears away our resistance to change. Relationship is the abrasion that agitates enough to make a way forward.  Relationship, consistent and ongoing encounter with people and perspectives different than our own - it smooths the way for the sacred, even as it rubs us raw.

There is a holy abrasion of the spirit born in deep relational encounters across differences.  We, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those very encounters. 

Let me say that again – “We, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those encounters.”  You may have seen the bumper sticker that says, “The most radical thing we can do is introduce people to one another.”  The Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed has said, “The task of religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all.”  In other words, as Nancy said, we exist to facilitate these kinds of deep, real, and, yes, raw-rubbing encounters. 

And yet we know [Nancy continues] that there are so many ways to hide from the discomfort inherent in a holy abrasion. There are plenty of opportunities presented each and every day in the life of the church to back away from the hard work of continually and repeatedly relating meaningfully to one another and the world.

And one of them is to insist [she says], at any possible juncture, that you get what you want out of the experience of congregational life, as if church is a short order menu and community is a product to be consumed on your terms, in your time, without making you uncomfortable or demanding a whole lot of you in the first place. 

One of the ways to block the holy abrasion that brings change is to imagine that both congregational life and religious liberalism itself are contests compete with winners and losers and if we don’t get our way – well – we are wanderers, worshipers – and lovers of leaving, are we not?

Does any of that resonate with you?  I can tell you that as I was watching the sermon, when I’d reached this point, I was glad I don’t wear mascara.  She’d brought me to tears.  There she was, behind that pulpit, speaking to a couple of thousand of us UUs, and speaking truth to us.  Hard truth.  Challenging truth.  Truth we need to hear.

One of the ways we hobble ourselves – as a movement, and here in our own “local franchise” – one of the ways we hobble ourselves is by spending … wasting … so much of our time and energy on trying to make sure that everything is arranged just so … just so that I feel comfortable and affirmed. 

When we hear – as Christina reminded us just a couple of weeks ago – that one task of the religious enterprise is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” we give a deep sigh of gratitude that there is a place like this that will offer us such comfort.  We rarely, though, if ever, see ourselves as the ones in need of afflicting.  As I said last week, we’d like them to change so that we can just get on doing what we’ve been doing, the way we’ve been doing it.  But, as I also said last week, that’s just not the way things work. 

Nancy got even more specific, and offered us language that will no doubt be used for years to come:

[T]he greatest impediment to the efficacy of the liberal church today [she said] is not the real fights and real failures we get into when we’re doing hard work – it is the fake fights [that’s the phrase!] we waste our time on while our own people and the people all around us struggle to survive. 

I worry literally every day [she continued], that in this moment of utmost urgency - we, the very ones the world has been waiting for, are wasting our capacity to build change on fake fights that distract us from the work at hand.

We go over and over again who’s a humanist and who’s a theist and who got their way in what bylaw discussion and what color we should paint the church bathroom - so protected by our busyness that the real fights, the honest conversations, and the transformative sandpaper of real relationship presented to us Sunday after Sunday, week after week, slip right past us and we remain thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.

“Thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.”  As I watched the video I sat there, weeping at the power of this prophetic preacher who was speaking truth to us – to me – with such love.  Yet I was weeping, too, because her words were unveiling in me a deep sense of cynicism, revealing to me my own crisis of faith.  “Thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.”  “Thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.” 

Again and again, that crowd of a couple of thousand Unitarian Universalists applauded and cheered as Nancy challenged them with hard truths.  I’ve preached hard-truth sermons here, as well, and people have afterward told me how brave I was to do so, commended me for taking such a risk.  Yet as I listened to Nancy do just this, I was struck by the idea that, really, there is so little risk involved.  Those people in that hall that Sunday morning wanted to be challenged – they ate it up.  You all want me to challenge you – I’ve also received applause and affirmation whenever I’ve spoken “hard truths with love.”  We want to be challenged, but I fear that we want to be challenged because, on the one hand, we know – know in our bones – that something is wrong, and it fills us with anxiety, stress … with agita.  On the other hand, though, I fear that we want to be challenged because we know – know beneath our consciousness of our knowing – that by listening to these hard truths our agitation can be assuaged, and that by affirming them we can allow ourselves to remain, “fundamentally unchanged.”

Nancy told me that when she looked out at that crowd of thousands of Unitarian Universalists from around the country and around the world and said she worries, “literally every day that [we] are wasting our capacity to build change on fake fights” that she meant exactly that.  She meant that she worries about this all the time, that we, as a movement, are far too often “thoroughly agitated and fundamentally unchanged.”  She told me that she understood my frustrations, but she also said that she did not share my despair. 

Instead, in her sermon she’d decided to take advantage of that bully pulpit to publicly declare:

I tell you what, I’m tapping out.  Right now.  And I invite you to join me.  I’m tapping out of every fake fight in our congregations and our movement about getting what I want or what you want or what we think we want - because in this age the stakes are too high and we don’t have time for fake fights anymore. […]

[T]he world does not need another place for like-minded  liberal leaning people to hang out together and fight about who’s in charge.  The world does not need a place where you or I or any single one of us is going to get what we want.

What the world needs is a movement like ours to step more fully into our higher calling - to serve as an instrument for encounter - with one another, with the holy and with the world.  So that we might love more fully, and speak more truly and serve with greater efficacy, in such a time as this.

More tears poured down my cheeks, my friends.  New tears.  Because her faith had reignited mine; her hope had brought my own back to life.  Having lived with this sermon – its vision, its challenge, its truth, its hope – I can honestly say that I feel thoroughly less agitated, and can feel the stirrings of change.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Making of a People of Prophecy

This is the text of the sermon I delivered to the congregation I serve-- Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist -- on Sunday, January 29, 2017.  As always, you can listen if you've prefer.

After coming home from General Assembly this past summer, our Director of Faith Development, Leia Durland-Jones, told me that I should watch the Sunday morning service and, particularly, to listen to the sermon that had been given by the Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd.  Not that much after, our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, told me that I needed to hear it –  “You’ve really got to listen to this sermon!” she said.  It’s really, really powerful.”  That was in early July.

Well … a week or so ago, while I was home sick, I finally cued it up and watched.  And they were right.  Oh my goodness, they were right.  I put a link to the video of the sermon in the order of service.  (Or you can watch the whole service.) I strongly encourage you to watch it, because it isn’t just Nancy’s words, but her delivery – and not just her tempo, tone, and body language, but her presence as she delivered it – that makes it so powerful.  (And please, please don't wait half a year to watch it!)

Her sermon called out a sermon from me.  Two, actually.  The first one I’d written a little earlier in the week, so it was all done and I was feeling pretty good about it last night when I decided to re-watch Nancy’s.  Afterward, I realized that that first sermon was really only a little more than a book report, and that the real sermon hadn’t made its way to the surface yet.

Nancy begins by lifting up the importance of relationship in building up our communities into places where real change, real transformation, can come about.  She quotes the anti-racist organizer Mickey ScottBey Jones – whom she calls “wonderful” and “deep-spirited” – as saying:

relationship is the sandpaper that wears away our resistance to change. Relationship is the abrasion that agitates enough to make a way forward.  Relationship, consistent and ongoing encounter with people and perspectives different than our own - it smooths the way for the sacred, even as it rubs us raw.

There is a holy abrasion of the spirit born in deep relational encounters across differences.  We, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those very encounters. 

Let me say that again – “We, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those encounters.”  You may have seen the bumper sticker that says, “The most radical thing we can do is introduce people to one another.”  The Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed has said, “The task of religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all.”  In other words, we exist to facilitate these kinds of deep, real, and, yes, raw-rubbing encounters. 

“And yet,” and I’m quoting Nancy again here, “we know that there are so many ways to hide from the discomfort inherent in a holy abrasion. There are plenty of opportunities presented each and every day in the life of the church to back away from the hard work of continually and repeatedly relating meaningfully to one another and the world.”

The first she names is our misunderstanding that congregational life is going well when we’re happy.  When we’re getting what we want out of it.  She says:

One of the ways to block the holy abrasion that brings change is to imagine that both congregational life and religious liberalism itself are contests complete with winners and losers and if we don’t get our way – well – we are wanderers, worshippers – and lovers of leaving, are we not?

Ours is a religious movement that is part of the “free faith” tradition, and many of us interpret that to mean that we are free to come and go as we please.  If things get unpleasant, or not to our liking, there’s nothing saying that we have to come, is there?  Even if we did have a hell to threaten you with, most of us are such questioners of authority that we wouldn’t take it seriously anyway.  For many of us, here and in our wider movement, we take full advantage of the escape clause we see in our “free faith,” and feel no compulsion to show up when we get busy or things here get hard.

Yet this work of “continually and repeatedly relating meaningfully to one another and the world,” that is our work takes showing up again and again, even when we don’t particularly want to.  Even, truth be told, when we’d really rather not, because we know it’s going to be messy and we know it’s going to be hard, and we know we’re not going to get what we want.

Yet there’s an even more pernicious way we undercut the possibility of that sandpaper of relationship bringing about that holy abrasion that may rub us raw at times but which ultimately and inevitably smooths the way for change.  In her sermon, Nancy put it this way.:

[T]he greatest impediment to the efficacy of the liberal church today is not the real fights and real failures we get into when we’re doing hard work – it is the fake fights we waste our time on while our own people and the people all around us struggle to survive. 

I worry literally every day [she continued], that in this moment of utmost urgency - we, the very ones the world has been waiting for, are wasting our capacity to build change on fake fights that distract us from the work at hand.

We go over and over again who’s a humanist and who’s a theist and who got their way in what bylaw discussion and what color we should paint the church bathroom - so protected by our busyness that the real fights, the honest conversations, and the transformative sandpaper of real relationship presented to us Sunday after Sunday, week after week, slip right past us and we remain thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.

“Thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.”  I will confess that as I listened to this prophet in our midst speaking truth to our movement I felt … depressed and discouraged.  A cynicism overtook me, and I discovered a despair that we, as a movement, as a congregation, and as individuals, may well simply and forever remain stuck being “thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.”

A couple of days later, I had a dream.  I was an observer, not a participant, and what I observed is what I took to be a Jewish congregation about to begin its worship.  The Rabbi – who undoubtedly not coincidentally looked exactly like Nancy McDonald Ladd – was feeling anxious about what she knew was going to happen.  And just before she entered the sanctuary she had an idea, and called over a few of the congregation’s children.  She gave each a small, flat piece of wax and asked them to bring it to her when she called on them.

I don’t remember anything about the beginning of the service, but during the sermon portion, the Rabbi held up a small, think, black-bound book that was clearly one of their sacred texts.  She called it “the Tishuba,” and she began a litany saying, “the Tishuba calls us to <this>, and the Tishuba calls us to <that>.”  I don’t remember all of the this-es and that-s, but I do recall her saying that the Tishuba called them to welcome people from the transgender community, and to work with undocumented immigrants and refugees.  And after she named each of these callings, she asked one of the children to come up and melt their wax onto the cover of the book, so that in not too long the face of it was complete obscured with blobs of differently colored wax.  When it was, she held it up and said that this was no longer a generic Tishuba, it was now their Tishuba, they had made it their own, so that now, instead of saying, “the Tishuba calls us to …”, she would say, “our Tishuba call us …”

I woke from this dream with tears pouring down my face.  And that day I got to wondering what our “Tishuba” might be.  We don’t have a sacred book to point to, we share no holy writ.   We don’t even share all that many rituals and traditions throughout our movement.  And then I thought about the flaming chalice.

As we prepare to light the chalice at the beginning of the service I often say that it is “a sign and symbol of our faith.”  During World War II, the Unitarian Service Committee was in Europe, among other things helping Jews and other persecuted people to find safety.  Other organizations there had a logo, something to put on business cards and letter heads, but also something to signify who they were.  The Service Committee commissioned a man named Hans Desutsch, a German cartoonist who’d fled German, to create for them a symbol, and he created the first flaming chalice.

This symbol, this flaming chalice is more than just, as someone once disparaged it, “a candle in a martini glass.”  And it’s more than just a light to illuminate and affirm the views and positions we already hold, or to provide warmth for us to bask in in our self-satisfied complacency.  No.  It is a beacon, a beacon that should be leading us forward, out of our sanctuaries, out of our congregational buildings, out, even, of our devotion to our false fights, and out into the world that so desperately needs its light.  It is our Tishuba.

And our Tishuba calls us to leave behind the false fight of who has the authority to make what decision to have, instead, the real conversation about what the right decision is;

Our Tishuba calls on us to leave behind the false fight of whether Joys and Sorrows and spoken, or written, or eliminate completely to have, instead, the real conversation about whether we are really listening to one another – not just for those things we agree on but where we truly differ;

Our Tishuba calls on us to leave behind the false fight of Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter to have, instead, the real conversation about the system of White Supremacy that saturates our society and in which we are all complicit, and what we can do to dismantle it and build a new way in the world;

It calls on us to leave behind the false fight of whether to use God language, or not use God language, and to have, instead, the real conversation about what is holy, and what is sacred, and what the holy and sacred call us to do;

Our Tishuba calls us to leave behind the false fight of who’s right and who’s wrong, so that we might have, instead, the real conversation of who we are and how we can be together and how can model this for the world.

When I woke from my dream I thought that the word “tishuba” sounded familiar, so I looked it up.  Google told me that Gora Tish Uba is a city in western Kazakhstan.  But the similar sounding word “teshuvah,” is a Hebrew word which means “repentance,” or, “returning.”  The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are sometimes called The Days of Teshuvah, and it is said that an observant Jew will do teshva each and every day, searching for the ways they have fallen short, committing to not make the same mistakes again, and making amends when amends are appropriate.  (Those are the three aspects of teshuvah.)

I find it meaningful that that which was calling that congregation – and which is calling ours – is the idea of repentance, or returning to our true selves, of emptying ourselves of our hubris so that we might humbly engage with that holy abrasion we experience in real relationship.  To paraphrase the Reverend McDonald Ladd, this holy abrasion of the spirit is only born in deep relational encounters across differences, and we, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those very encounters. 

The stakes are high, my friends – higher than many of us have had any idea – and there simply isn’t time to waste on our fake fights – no matter how important they may seem – and our instance on having things the way we want them to be.  We must leave these behind – must leave these behind – so that we can do the oh so necessary work the world calls us to.

I’m going to give Nancy the last words:

[T]he world does not need another place for like-minded  liberal leaning people to hang out together and fight about who’s in charge.  The world does not need a place where you or I or any single one of us is going to get what we want.

What the world needs is a movement like ours to step more fully into our higher calling - to serve as an instrument for encounter - with one another, with the holy and with the world.  So that we might love more fully, and speak more truly and serve with greater efficacy, in such a time as this.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

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