SERMON: "Now is the Time"
Rev. Paul Beedle
October 14, 2007
This morning, Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country are celebrating “Association Sunday” – from the point of view of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, headquartered in Boston, it's one piece of a major fundraising campaign to “Grow Our Faith.” You'll find an envelope in your order of service that tells you all you need to know to give to this campaign. What you put in that envelope will go toward advertising campaigns, and providing growth consultants to congregations and Districts, and hospitality trainings for congregations, and support for campus ministries, and grants to congregations and districts for projects aimed at “Growing Our Numbers.” “Growing Our Numbers” is one of five goals of this five-year campaign. The other goals – about which we will hear more anon – include: “Growing Our Diversity,” “Growing Our Leadership,” “Growing Our Spirit,” and “Growing Our Witness.” If you'd like to know more about this campaign, look for the “Now is the Time” Campaign Case Statement on the Unitarian Universalist Association's website, uua.org.
Nicely coordinating with this fundraiser is an advertising campaign that the Association worked out with TIME magazine. Here's the October 15th issue, with its full-page ad opposite the “Life” section of the magazine. Another ad will appear in the November 5th issue, with a listing of 8 articles about religion or faith-and-society in the TIME online archive. So, you see, now is the TIME.
I decided to let you decide for yourself whether and how much to give to the “Now is the Time” campaign, rather than try to arrange to give away the plate offering to it or some other such thing. I knew some time ago that this campaign was coming, and had we moved into our new building when we expected to, I might be feeling that “Now is the Time.” But since we didn't, I don't. And that feeling strikes me as an excellent point of departure for talking about the core and foundation of our faith.
At the start of every worship service, we affirm that “love is the doctrine of this church” – concisely describing the foundation of our faith. On the white recyclable cover of your order of service are two further expressions of it. Inside the front cover is our congregation's Values & Vision statement, adopted just this year; and on the back cover is the covenant subscribed to by the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, to which this congregation belongs. Behind these words stands a collective experience and practice of faith – each was developed through a process that engaged a large number of people – and behind those processes stands a history and a tradition. As our celebration of Association Sunday, I'd like to retell some of that history.
I will rely upon – and quote from – the fine work of my colleague Alice Blair Wesley, who about 8 years ago was asked to deliver the Minns Lectures. The Minns Lectureship was endowed in the 1940s by a member of First and Second Church in Boston. Each year the Minns Committee – drawn from members of that church and from King's Chapel – chooses one “Unitarian minister in good standing” to deliver six lectures. Over the decades the Minns Lectures have presented some of the finest work of our most thoughtful clergy. Alice's lectures are a thorough and accessible brief account of our heritage and how it applies today. They were published under the title “Our Covenant” and can be found online at the bookstore on uua.org, or at amazon.com.
Alice talked about how our Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors started their churches. One typical congregation was organized in the 1630s by “a series of weekly neighborhood meetings, [called] `lovingly to discourse and consult together ... and prepare for spiritual communion in a church society, ... [and to become] further acquainted with the (spiritual) tempers and gifts of one another.' ... Anybody in town who wanted was welcome to attend. They adopted a few simple rules for their meetings. ... They would decide before leaving each meeting what question to discuss next week. That way people were more apt to share considered thoughts. ... [They would] speak [their] own understandings or doubts. No arguing. The record reports that all their `reasonings' were `very peaceable, loving, & tender, much to edification.'” They took such care about the process of these meetings because they believed “that the strongest – maybe not the only – but the strongest, clearest, most authentic voice in their whole society – for justice, peace and reasonable laws – would come from the free church, once it was established. Why? Because they understood the divine will of the loving God of the Universe to be for justice, peace and good laws in the whole society. The task of the free church could be summed – in their terms – as loving God and loving one another so well that in their own study and discussion, dispute and conference, prayer [and] consultation ... members might learn together the divine will of the loving God for the whole society ... [and] would be called, compelled, bound to proclaim it and try to bring it to bear in their whole society.” They wanted to establish their new society in the wilderness upon love rather than power, and they wanted to get it right so that power would not sail the sea from England to scuttle their work. They wanted to show the world that people are capable of living as love demands.
Alice offered this updated statement of their understanding of faith and the free church: “More than any other single reality, what redeems and enhances human life is the spirit of mutual love. The good news is: We can learn from experience – our own and others' – what the spirit of mutual love feels like and when it is present among us. And we can, in response to that learning, organize ourselves into a free church: a group religiously dedicated to giving the spirit of love a fine chance of working, among us, for our own sakes and also for the sake of the world around us.” And “if the free church is about the working of the spirit of mutual love, then that fact ought to shape the organization of the church, everything from how you join, to what joining means, to how church decisions are made. ... The covenantal organizational pattern of the free church ... is ... grounded in an understanding of how the power of mutual love deepens and works among individuals in free religious groups ... loyal, before all else, to the spirit of love.”
“Show me the patterns of your church organization,” Alice wrote, “and I'll show you what the people of the church find worthiest of their loyalty....” She pointed out some patterns in the way our New England ancestors viewed their churches: “The free church is a group of people who want the spirit of love to reign in their lives. ... The free church is entirely self-governing, free from any outside control whatsoever. ... Loyalty to the spirit of love ... commits members of the free church to the best understanding of truth [they] can attain... Members of the free church discipline one another by reasoning together in love. ... Membership in the free church is open to individuals willing to sign a covenant – or promise – to be together, insofar as they are able, as a beloved community. ... The covenanted free church is an organization you must freely choose individually to join. ... To join a free church is to sign a promise that may sound simple – it should sound simple – but which, if you really mean to `keep covenant' with the other members, brings you into intimate companionship with others who have promised to live with all the integrity you and they can together muster, in all the years of your lives. ... Ultimately the only freedom adequate to human dignity is the freedom to choose to do what love asks of us. And the greatest blessings of life come to us and through us to all the world when, with intimate and freely bonded companions, we are trying together to live with the integrity of faithful love.”
If you've been in this congregation a while, all this should have a familiar ring. Nationwide, we are engaged in a conversation of at least a couple of decades' duration, about our heritage and the core of our faith. We are in the process of reclaiming our roots and building a deeper shared understanding of our faith. That's why the Association's leadership feels that “Now is the Time” to grow and promote our faith – they've been most engaged in this conversation and they're excited.
In that conversation we've been reclaiming the word “covenant,” and that has bothered some of us. Alice explains: “the word `covenant' has come to us by means of the Bible. ... In the very ancient Near east, politics seldom rose above the level of a protection racket. ... Eventually, a war lord might come along, strong enough to call himself a king. This king and his army would round up the smaller gangs and do them in, [and then] would call together all the heads of families and clans of the region he had pacified, and say something like this: `My name is Great So-and-So. I am the king of your world. With my great power I have put down your enemies. Thanks to me, you may now live and prosper in peace, on certain conditions. You will send me an annual tribute. Whenever I require your service in my army, you will send at once the number of men I call for. And you will sign a covenant, promising to keep faith with me, your king. Just so nobody forgets, ... you will read [your promise] out loud to the whole population [annually] ... Break your covenant with me, and I promise I will make you very, very sorry.' ... At some point in time ... some genius, somebody who had seen much of how kings and generals generally operate, came up with a new metaphor borrowed from the protection-racket model of politics. This metaphor is based on an unlikeness: The King of the Universe is not like these human kings. ... generous, not greedy...shows his love for all the world...causes us human beings to love one another and our land and animals, as he loves us. We do not need these human kings. We can enter into a political and religious covenant with each other and with the King of the Universe to be ruled by his holy ways of love and generosity. ... Let the nations around us fight and rage. We will not. We will live every man under his vine and fig tree and keep covenant with our God ... and with one another. All he requires of us ... is that we love him and love our neighbors as ourselves, and keep the natural, common sense laws of a peaceful community because we love. ... [T]he idea of a freely entered covenant ... became the root idea of the political religion of a people, the ancient Israelites. ... The prophets said, over and over again, `The ways of greed and coercion are in violation of God's patterns. These ways will not work. ... Turn to the ways of love and justice for the oppressed. ... [T]his most political of religions lived on into Roman times [when] another prophet began to preach and teach, Jesus of Nazareth. ...The New Testament tells stories of Mediterranean people, ruled by Rome, who entered a new covenant, not as a nation, but as individuals of many nations into the covenant of free congregations. ... What would Jesus' message sound like if addressed to our time? [Alice thinks it would go] something like this: `Look, I know some of you think all the power that matters is in the human hands of Wall Street traders, the grossly deceiving advertising industry and the grossly shallow entertainment industry of America. Well, if you are obsessed with that piece of hte world, if all you do, basically, is go to work and watch television and seek out other entertainment, you might think that piece of the world is the whole world. It is not. There is a great deal more to life than working for huge corporations and finding some ever new distraction or buying ever more things. Be gathered into communities of love. Find, together, what is more meaningful, more loving, more worthy of your attention, and be empowered in devotion to these things. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened to you. The truth will make you free.'” This is what covenant meant to our Puritan ancestors. “Our church ancestors understood the Bible to be mainly about the free and covenanted, social practice of love. ... So they read every word of the Bible asking of the texts, `What was decided here? Whose counsel was sought? Who decided? Which people had to be involved if a decision was to be considered legitimate? What did people in these stories do if they disagreed?'” Alice hopes that we will take up our heritage, looking at the wider range of resources that inspire us with a similar lens. She hopes that we will all be able to say: “Ours is a covenantal church. We join by promising one another that we will be a beloved community, meeting together often to find the ways of love, as best we can see to do. We have found there's always more to learn about how love really works, and could work, in our lives and in the world.”
Alice recommended that we take up this heritage intentionally. She warned: “Empowerment, of both individuals and groups, happens within certain patterns of organization. Unless these patterns are both visible and widely familiar, nobody knows who can properly do what, and so nobody feels empowered. Whenever there is too much informality in free church organization, trouble – bad trouble – is either already at hand or coming. ... It is certainly possible for people to be in an implicit covenant without saying so. They just gather and act together, freely, in love and for good ends. ... Yet ... a particular, concrete and local free church, lest our understanding of the free church become an empty abstraction, a fuzzy ideal bearing no relation to the everyday lives of actual people[,] ... needs [a covenant] as clear and explicit as we can make it, that we may teach it to our children, as the reasonable explanation they deserve of why we do things as we do in this church, and that we may invite others – as many others as will – to join us in making and renewing, again and again, our promise of loyalty to the ways of love that matter most in human life, that we might fulfill our promise. For the free church covenant is at bottom the covenant a free society requires. The creative freedom of our whole society will endure for just the length of time we together understand and teach and keep our covenant and speak with our own mouths the words of love and truth and freedom the whole world always needs to hear.” And doesn't she just make you want to say, “Now is the Time”?
Now, I'm right there with Alice. I think she's got our heritage right, and I think she's got right how it applies today. And when the Association launches a great big fundraising campaign called “Now is the Time,” I feel uneasy. And that's a key part of our heritage, too, that feeling. You probably have heard the old joke about the Unitarian walking down a road who comes to a sign at a fork in the road: to the left, Heaven; to the right, a discussion about Heaven. The Unitarian heads for the discussion. And you may have seen a list of famous movers and shakers in history who were Unitarians or Universalists. Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Clara Barton, who founded the Red Cross. Susan B. Anthony. It's not one or the other, talker or doer, it's both. And in our heritage, this polarity was handled in those weekly neighborhood meetings, where folks gathered to “lovingly to discourse and consult together ... [and to become] further acquainted with the (spiritual) tempers and gifts of one another.'” The point of the talk was to agree on how they would be together and what they would do together to be one in the spirit of mutual love.
I can support this “Now is the Time” campaign as it seeks funds to help our congregations “Grow in Numbers.” The Association has been experimenting with publicity and promotion and is gradually learning how to do that well, and I think we need to keep trying and keep learning. I have similar feelings about the “Growing Our Spirit” goal – to support and improve our worship and lifespan faith development ministries. Reclaiming our covenantal heritage is a key to that, in my view. I look forward to the part of this five-year fundraising campaign that will be about “Growing Our Leadership” because so much good work has been accomplished in the last few years to improve support and training for our leaders, both lay and ordained. And the good work in this area is a result of reclaiming our covenantal heritage and really seeking to live it.
What I'm uneasy about is the goals for “Growing Our Diversity” and “Growing Our Witness.” When I survey the list of possible things we might fund in those areas – that list is linked to the “Now is the Time” Campaign Case Statement on the Association's website, uua.org – I feel doubtful about our readiness to commit to many of them on a national level. To fully explain my uneasiness would take a whole other sermon at least, and probably I'm not ready to make a sermon of it because it's hard to create a useful take-home message for your week out of a collection of vague doubts. My gut tells me more dialogue is needed about what exactly is the best thing for us to do now about “Growing Our Diversity” and “Growing Our Witness.” I think there's a lot love has to teach us about diversity that we've only begun to learn. And I know that public witness – taking a stand in the public square as a faith community, locally or nationally – is often a tender undertaking. Each stand we take requires dialogue. What is the dialogue we need to have to make it more natural and comfortable for us to take a public stand? What are the words of love and truth and freedom, the whole world always needs to hear? Alice says we will know them if we “understand and teach and keep our covenant.” Are we there yet?
Next week our monthly collaborative worship service will take up the theme, “Living in Covenant.” October's collaborative worship team and I are planning a service that will invite reflection and dialogue on this keystone of our religious heritage: what it means to live in an intentional covenant to walk together in the spirit of mutual love and live as love demands. The service will provide an opportunity to reflect, and after the service we will invite you to take a short break and then reconvene here for dialogue and deeper sharing. Friends visiting today, this will be an opportunity to really experience our Puritan roots – after their fashion, I am announcing the question for the dialogue before we adjourn today, so everyone can come prepared to share your considered thoughts, and speak your own understandings or doubts with peaceable reasonings – no arguing! Will the strongest, clearest, most authentic voice for justice, peace and reasonable laws come from this free congregation, exactly because we meet in a covenant of love? May our dialogue next week be reasoned, peaceable, loving and tender, much to edification. So may it be. Amen.