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Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Dan Harper. Delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Santa Cruz County, Aptos, California. The sermon as actually delivered differed in some respects from this text.

Sermon

One of the fun things about preaching in another Unitarian Universalist church is that I get to check out what other congregations are like. I love to exchange pulpits with other Unitarian Universalist ministers because every church that I visit does several things better than my church does, and then I steal those good ideas and bring them to my church.

And in return for those good ideas that I steal from the churches I visit, I often try to brings some news of what our church is doing.

Here’s what’s going on with us: Our church was established by the Massachusetts Bay colonial government in June, 1708, and so we have been having a year-long birthday party for the church’s three hundredth birthday. As part of our three hundredth birthday, we have been researching the history of our congregation. The congregation started out with the typical Puritan theology of Massachusetts Bay, but it liberalized significantly beginning about 1750, so that by 1848 the church called John Weiss, a radical free religionist and post-Christian Transcendentalist, as their new minister.

I will not say that everyone in the congregation would consider themselves to be post-Christian or non-Christian, because they didn’t. But I will say that it was not some specific theological position that held them together, and I will add that they were willing to tolerate both Christian and humanist minister. Since 1848, our church has had a mix of Christians and humanists and other theological positions.

Naturally the question arose: if the congregation was not bound together by theology, what was it that was strong enough to keep them together for three hundred years? The answer was quite simple: covenant bound us together.

And what, you may well ask, do I mean by “covenant”? Well, to begin with, covenant is the center of our religious tradition. As Unitarian Universalists, we are less concerned about what individuals believe:– we can believe in God or not; we do not require anyone to subscribe to a specific creed or dogma. Instead of being organized around specific beliefs, we are organized around a set of promises that we make to one another, and that set of promises is called a covenant. There is no requirement for us to have a written covenant. Yet in our tradition there is always a covenant at the center of our congregations, whether it happens to be an explicit written covenant, or an implicit unwritten covenant.

In our church, we have not had a written covenant since the ministry of John Weiss, that is, since the 1850s. Yet while we have no written covenant, we have always had a strong implicit covenant. When I arrived at the church, I got curious about the implicit, unwritten covenant. What was it? I listened to members and friends talk about what the church meant to them, and I read through the church bylaws, and other formal documents. Based on what I had heard, and what I had found that had been written down, I wrote up a rough version of our unwritten, implicit covenant. I started reading my rough version of this covenant before the worship service each week. As time went by, people would gently correct me — tell me things I had left out, things that didn’t belong, tell me how to word things better. After about two years, this is what I was reading each week:

“Here at First Unitarian in New Bedford, we value our differences of age, gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, and theology. We are bound together, not by some creed or dogma, but by our covenant: We come together in love to seek after truth and goodness, to find spiritual transformation in our lives; and in the spirit of love we care for one another and promote practical goodness in the world.”

This is how I tried to articulate the promises that we in our congregation make to one another. Mind you, my version was pretty rough and far from perfect! Then our Committee on Ministry got involved, and they held a series of open meetings, interviewed people, did more research, and they came up with a better written version of our covenant, which goes like this:

“We come together as a religious community upholding freedom of conscience, right relationship, and the inherent worth of all people. We value our diversity, and pledge to care for one another in the spirit of love and to promote justice and kindness in the world.”

You can see that this new written version is smoother and more concise (it was written by one of the poets in our church); and next Sunday, our congregation is going to vote on whether or not this will become a formal, written covenant for us. But no matter how that vote goes, what’s written down isn’t what’s most important about a covenant. Any written covenant merely puts into writing a set of promises that already exists at the core of who we are as a congregation. A covenant describes our way of being together as a religious community. And in our tradition, the way we make ourselves into a religious community is through our covenant, that is, through a set of promises that we make. It may be easier for everyone if we put our covenant into writing — it definitely makes it easier for newcomers to figure out who we are — but really what’s important about any covenant is the way we live it out in real life.

I think I can make this clearer to you if I tell you where our idea of covenant comes from.

You probably know that the idea of covenant is at the center of three major world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three of these religions trace themselves back to the figure of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible. Abraham, says the Hebrew Bible, made a covenant with the god whose name cannot be pronounced, whom we’ll call Adonai. Let me tell you the story of Abraham and his covenant with Adonai (for those of you who are Bible geeks, this is in Genesis 12-18, 20-22):

The story begins in most ancient times. There’s that flood, where Noah built the ark; somewhere in there there’s the Tower of Babel; anyway, one of Noah’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandsons was a man named Abram, or Avram. (If I counted right, that’s ten generations from Noah to Abram; it would be as if Noah was the first members of our New Bedford church, and Abram was one of his descendants living today.)

As the story opens, Abram is living in a place called Haran with his wife Sarai, and his father Terah. Terah dies, and Abram decides to move into the land of Canaan — he and his family are semi-nomadic, they live in tents and move around a lot. But how does Abram decide it’s time to move into Canaan? Adonai — this is the same god named Adonai who told Noah to build the ark because there was a flood coming — Adonai appears to Abram, and tells him: “Go you forth from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land I will let you see. I will make a great nation of you and will give you blessing and will make your names great…” (Everett Fox trans., Gen. 12.1-2) In other words, Adonai promises certain things to Abram — blessings, greatness, and so on — if Abram will promise in return to do what Adonai says, beginning with going into the land of Canaan. This is the beginning of Adonai’s covenant, or set of promises, with Abram.

Abram tells everyone to pack up, and they all move into Canaan. When they get there, Adonai appears to Abram and says again, I’m giving this land to you and your descendants. So Abram builds a temple to Adonai, which probably was a platform made out of stones, an altar to offer up burnt offerings.

Then there was a famine in the land, and so Abram had to go to Egypt, and he underwent all kinds of adventures there, but Adonai looked out for him the whole time. And Adonai kept promising Abram that the land of Canaan was going to belong to him and to his descendants. Problem was, Abram had no descendants; he and Sarai were in their nineties, and they didn’t have any children. But Adonai tells Abram not to worry, and promises yet again that all this land will belong to him and to his descendants. And Adonai makes more promises — he adds to the covenant with Abram — as follows: Abram has to change his name to Abraham, and his wife’s name to Sarah; Abraham has to make sure every man in his tribe is circumcised; Abraham has to promise that he and all his kinfolk and all his descendants will keep Adonai as their god, and obey Adonai. In return, Adonai promises that Abraham and Sarah will have a son; they will have lots of descendants, who will make great nations; some of his descendants will be kings; he and his descendants will own the land of Canaan in perpetuity.

To which Abraham responds: “Whaddya mean, Sarah and I are gonna have a son? I’m ninety-nine years old, for Pete’s sake, and Sarah is ninety. How are we gonna have a child?” But Adonai says, “Trust me.” So Abraham trusts him, goes back, and makes all his male kinfolk and all his male slaves get circumcised. Then Adonai, being all-powerful, makes sure that Sarah gets pregnant. Abraham and Sarah are overjoyed when they have a baby boy, whom they name Isaac.

Then Adonai tests Abraham. Adonai appears to Abraham, and tells him: OK, you have to sacrifice Isaac to me. Sacrifice, as in kill your son, and offer him up as a burnt offering on that altar you made for me. Sacrifice, as in murder your son because Adonai tells you to do so.

(At this point in the story, I can’t resist interjecting a little parenthetical comment: I am glad that the children are up in the Sunday school, and not with us right now to hear this story. I really don’t want to tell one of our children about God telling someone to kill his child; it sends the wrong message to our children. We really want to be careful about the Bible stories we tell to our kids. Now back to the story:)

So Abraham says, Yes, Adonai, whatever you say, and he takes Isaac out to the stone altar, lays Isaac down under a big pile of firewood, and gets ready to kill him and burn his body. At the very last minute, Adonai stops Abraham from killing Isaac, and makes a sheep appear magically, so Abraham kills the sheep and turns it into a burnt offering instead of his son.

If you’re like me, your first reaction will be: What a gruesome story! — how could Adonai test a father in this way? — and how could a father actually consent to sacrifice one of his children? Based on such a reaction, we might conclude: The whole reason Abraham is willing to kill his own son is because of his covenant with Adonai; because of the promises he has made to his god Adonai. This does not make covenants seem particularly attractive.

But before we jump to conclusions, let’s stop for a moment and do a more considered analysis of the story. If we put aside traditional Christian and Jewish notions of god for just a moment, we realize the story is not quite as simple as we might have though. First of all, it is clear from the Hebrew Bible that Adonai had competition, that there were other gods and goddesses out there. Abraham didn’t have to choose Adonai; he could have chosen another god, or no god at all. Abraham chose Adonai freely, and furthermore it seems to me that Abraham went into the covenant with his eyes wide open; he knew that the benefits Adonai offered would come at a high price.

And if we pause to give this story even more careful consideration, we would have to ask ourselves why we are taking this story so literally. Is this story any worse than the fairy tales we read to children? Think about the story of Hansel and Gretel, where the witch eats children, which is pretty gruesome. Think about all those other fairy tales where parents kill their children. Yet we don’t take fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel literally; we treat them as a myths, as stories which often contain psychological truths, but which are not literally true. We can treat story of Abraham and Isaac in the same way.

Considered as a myth containing psychological truth, the story of Abraham and Isaac can tell us something important about covenants. You will recall that a covenant is a set of promises where you promise something, and get something in return. Take the implicit unwritten covenant of the New Bedford church: in our implicit covenant with one another, we promise to come together in love; we promise to seek truth and goodness; we promise to transform ourselves spiritually; we promise to care for one another; and we promise to go out and make the world a better place. We promise those things, and in return we get to be part of a community based on love; we get companions to accompany us on the often unpleasant journey towards truth and goodness; we get other people caring for us; and we get help as we try to change the world into a better place.

When I look at the unwritten New Bedford covenant, the first thing that I notice is that these promises are hard to keep. Come together in love? — in every church I’ve been a part of, that has been a promise that has been broken as much as it has been observed: people behave just as badly in church as they do out of church! Companions on the journey to truth and goodness? — that means people telling me when I’m being stupid and avoiding the truth, and letting me know when I have done something wrong; it hurts when people let me know that I’m stupid or wrong. Care for one another? — it’s hard to actually care for one another, especially back in New England where often people don’t want to be cared for, and where the general culture is to keep people at arm’s length and neither ask for nor receive help. Change the world into a better place? — that’s hard work, and we often disagree on how to accomplish that, and besides it takes time away from doing fun things like watching TV and playing video games.

These promises we make to one another are idealistic, and they are difficult to keep. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just swallow the creeds they want you to believe in a fundamentalist church — it might be easier than actually having to live out the promises we make to other people, the promises we make to something greater than our selves.

So we come back to the story where Adonai told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is a psychologically impossible act, yet somehow Abraham brought himself to do it — or at least, he started to do it, until Adonai said, Stop! you don’t really have to kill Isaac. Similarly, we make impossible promises to one another as part of our covenant; the promises we make to each other don’t involve any actually killing of our firstborn children. Yet the promises we make to each other are demanding in their own way because we know that some god isn’t going to come along at the last moment and say, “Just fooling! you don’t really have to treat each other with love, or go off together on a search for truth, or care for others (and be cared for!), or make the world a better place.” We know that we will have to follow through on our own promises.

This is why I find the story of Abraham and Isaac so powerful: because it tells me a psychological truth. The story reminds me that it is hard to keep promises; the story reminds me that it is hard to be a part of a caring religious community. We know that even though we make promises to one another, they are promises that are hard to keep; and because we are imperfect human beings, we will occasionally break our promises to one another. And yet, the story tells us another psychological truth: that even though at times it will seem impossible for us to keep our promises to one another, we can find a way to do it; and we can find a way that won’t involve killing anyone.

At this point you may well ask: Why not just forget about these old fairy tales? Why not just do away with covenants, and even religion, altogether?

Ralph Waldo Emerson allegedly said, “A person will worship something — have no doubt about that.” When you find out what someone worships, then you will have a measure of that person. In our society, there are lots of things to worship: People worship money and consumer goods (I’ll bet most of us do this, to a greater or lesser extent); and if someone worships consumer goods, you have the true measure of that person, someone who worships something impermanent that will wear out as soon as the warranty ends. People worship sports and pop musicians and celebrities; and there you have the true measure of those people, because they worship figures of fantasy who will fade away when they are no longer pretty, or musical, or able to play sports well.

The point of our covenant is that we are worshipping something greater, more permanent, and much more significant. When we establish a covenant, we are saying that we shall worship that which is greater than our selves, which some of us call God and some of us prefer to call the highest and best in humanity. When we establish a covenant, we are saying that our worship is not done on bended knee and with a great show of ritual, but rather it is done is our daily lives, in the way we live out our promises. When we establish a covenant amongst ourselves, we are saying that we want to establish goodness and truth that our children will carry on after us, goodness and truth that will last for generations.

In this way, our covenant lies at the center of our religious community. We can ignore each other’s religious beliefs. But people certainly notice what I do with my life, how I live out my values. The point of a covenant is to establish a community that helps me live out my values; a community that supports me when I am weak or suffering or when I don’t have the strength to live out my values. A covenant provides a community in which I can (and will) transform myself, so that I can in turn go out and transform the world into a better place.

All this goes back to that old, old story about the covenant that Abraham made with Adonai. At first, it seems like a crazy story. But when you think about it, you realize it’s telling us something important: it’s telling us that if we want to live out our highest values in the world, it will not be easy to do so, and we know we won’t be able to do it alone.

This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois, on Saturday, September 18, and Sunday, September 19, 2004. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2004 Daniel Harper.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This sermon was preached many years ago, when I was an interim associate minister. The congregation who heard this sermon is now a completely different congregation. I post this here, because it’s an example of one kind of sermon that interim ministers used to preach.

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Readings

The first reading is from the Christian scriptures, from the first letter Paul of Tarsus wrote to the early Christian community at Corinth:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” [1 Cor. 13.4-5 (NIV)]

Second reading from The Almost Church by Michael Durall

Sermon

During the young people’s story, you heard me say that I am an interim minister, and you heard me say a little bit about what it means to be an interim minister. I’d like to be a little more explicit as to what it is I do as an interim minister. What I start out doing as an interim minister is help you address problems that may have accumulated; where it really gets fun is when I get to help you dream about the kind of church you’d really like to be…. but let me start from the beginning:

Obviously, a central part of what I do will be to carry out the normal duties of ministry in this congregation. I am here to preach among you, to be a pastor with you, to speak upon occasion with prophetic voice, and — because I am a teaching minister — above I am here to teach. It is perhaps worth mentioning that my ministry is with all ages: babies, children, youth, young adults, middle-aged people, and elders.

But an interim minister does more than simply carry out the normal duties of ordained ministry. Among the possible tasks of interim ministry, two stand out for me right now: to help this congregation — you folks sitting here — understand and honor your past and present; and to help this congregation, to help you, prepare for a new permanent minister and to anticipate the future with zest. And I’d like to take this time with you to lay out some of the issues in these two areas, as I see them.

Right now, I’d say the most important thing we must do together, you and I, is to understand and honor this congregation’s past. We should start by going all the way back to Caleb Buckingham, who started a Unitarian Sunday school in Geneva when it was a rather wild frontier town, and before there were any churches at all here. Caleb Buckingham paved the way for Augustus Conant, who came to Geneva, helped to build this church building with his own hands, and became the first minister here. I note with pleasure that the very first ministry of this church was, in fact, a teaching ministry — a heritage of which we can be proud. I also note that Augustus Conant’s ghost is said still to remain with this building, keeping a watchful eye on us, the inheritors of his good work.

I’ll skip through most of the rest of the 19th century, pausing only long enough to recognize Celia Parker Wooley, one of those pioneer women ministers the Unitarians and Universalists can be so proud of. She was here from 1893-1896, and lived in what we now call Pioneer House. (Parenthetically, I am personally convinced that her ghost still inhabits Pioneer House, the house in which she lived while she was minister here. While I am no believer in ghosts, I had an interesting experience with doors opening and closing in Pioneer House this summer, and it did seem to be more of a feminine presence than masculine. Perhaps she and Augustus Conant are both keeping a watchful eye on us.)

But it is the more recent past that I feel we need to attend to, so I will skip most of the twentieth century — skip over the amazing ministry of Dr. Charles Lyttle, who reawakened this church in the mid-20th C. — skip over Don and Betty King — pass over the coming of Lindsay Bates in 1978 — and move up to the 1990’s.

Some eight or nine years ago, this congregation hired —————— to be Director of Religious Education. She began as a religious education assistant, and moved into the job as Director of Religious Education when her predecessor left. She stayed here as Director of Religious Education for around eight years. Her tenure here was distinguished by the growth of the church school from perhaps fifty or sixty children and youth, to something over 150 enrolled children and youth. Beyond her work with children and youth, her adult programs are said to have been truly excellent, and indeed attracted some adults to become a part of this congregation.

Then —————— left this congregation rather suddenly in January, 2004. As is true whenever a long-term staff member leaves a congregation, there are those people who still mourn her departure, and there are those people who feel her departure has opened up new possibilities. From what I gather in listening to you, there are those who still don’t understand why she left. For now, that is all I have to say about —————— because it will be up to you to tell the whole story; it will be up to you to understand, and to come to terms with, her departure. As an interim minister, I am only here to help you tell this story yourselves.

As if the departure of a long-term staff member wasn’t enough change, the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva faces even more change. Last year, a third worship service was added; this room simply cannot accommodate all the people who want to come and worship here. It’s exciting when a congregation starts to grow, there’s an excitement of being a part of something that lots of other people also want to be a part of — you start to think, hey, maybe we’re doing something right here! — but growth creates stresses and strains as well, and adding a third worship service is a stress and a strain.

On top of all that, the church’s leadership has decided to experiment with adding a second minister to the staff. This, my friends, is a major change. Lindsay Bates has been here a long time, on the order of 26 years, and now you have another minister. Not only that, but the other minister you have right now is me, and boy am I different from Lindsay — I’m really tall, and I’m a minister of religious education (whatever that means), and instead of standing nicely at the pulpit I roam up and down the church as I preach.

Change is usually uncomfortable, my friends, and this old church is facing an awful lot of change right now. If I were a long-term member, I’d be feeling uncomfortable right now — excited, but uncomfortable too!

But wait, there’s more; yes, we have gotten to the most uncomfortable topic of all; the topic we talk about in hushed tones, preferably behind closed doors, and never when the children are around. No, I’m not talking about sex, I’m talking about money. (Compared to talking about money, sex is easy to talk about!)

Ah, yes — money. We don’t like to talk about it.

We’re a growing church, so we need more of it (but we don’t like to talk about how we need more of it, which means we fall behind in collecting money so we need still more of it). And generally speaking, Unitarian Universalists give less money — er, less of it — to their churches than any other denomination except Roman Catholics (which means we always need more of it, so we’re always having to talk about it, which makes us more uncomforatble because we hate talking about it).

Well. Enough about money for now [fan self]. I’m exhausted.

Finally, on top of everything else, we find an unrecognized but really big problem looming over all Unitarian Universalist congregations. We heard about that problem in the second reading today, to wit: the cultural and religious landscape around us is changing rapidly; while we continue to cling to ways of doing church that evolved during the 1950’s for an entirely different religious and cultural climate. Every other problem we face: ——————’s departure, the growth of the congregation, the addition of a second minister, (ahem) money — every other problem we face is deeply affected by the changes in the society around us.

You’ll remember that I said there’s a second task we must do together this year, and that is to prepare for a new permanent minister and to anticipate the future with zest. I believe the best way to begin working on this task together is to dream; simply because you need to figure out what kind of permanent minister you need. So we dream together of the future, you dream of the church you would like to become….

In my short time among you, I have heard you express two kinds of dreams for this church. Well, really I’ve heard as many kinds of dreams as I’ve heard people talking about their dreams, for we all add our little individual twists when we dream about our hopes for this church. But I feel I can group the dreams I have heard into two general categories.

For want of a better name, I call the first category of dreams the “clubhouse dreams.” By “clubhouse,” of course, I mean the very best kind of clubhouse, a clubhouse of integrity and honor. In these dreams, we want our churches to be beautiful safe refuges where we can escape from the vicissitudes of an unpleasant world and spend time with people who are pretty much like us. In these dreams, we’ll convince each other to give just a little more money so we can make our buildings beautiful, and hire just enough staff to care for us. In these dreams, we get volunteers only for those committees we need to keep the church functioning (although if we had any energy to spare, which we don’t, we’d try to do a little more outreach into the community). In these dreams, we create safe little refuges for liberal religion in a world increasingly dominated by fundamentalism.

But I keep hearing another kind of dream from people in this church. I hear vague dreams of a church where we equip our members and friends to go out into the world and… well, go out into the world not to do the usual kind of evangelism, but to do a truer kind of evangelism which we heard about in the call-and-response reading “Hey Ain’t We Got Good News”: more like preaching practiced, than practiced preaching. We dream of a church where “peace and justice are not just words we form with our lips, but realities we shape with our lives.” We dream of a church like the churches we hear of, with people so generous with money that we can give away a quarter or even a third of our church budget to make the world a better place — and still have plenty of money to equip ourselves to go out into the world. Yes, and dreams of a church where we ourselves are transformed — transformed to the point that our lives center on growing hearts that love, minds that seek, hands that serve.

I believe our first reading this morning, from Paul of Tarsus’s letter to the Christian community at Corinth, is about this kind of church. While I consider Paul of Tarsus to be anti-woman, homophobic, and in need of therapy, he was an organizational genius. He wrote that passage to a congregation that was in a time of major change, a time of turmoil; he asked them to hold on to love as force that drove their behavior.

Like the Universalists of old, we dream of a church whose central tenet is love. We dream of a church where we know we’ll be all right some day, where it may take a while to find our ways home but we will get there, and when we get there someone will wipe the tears away from our eyes — which I suspect will mean learning to wipe the tears away from each other’s eyes.– And this is a our second dream: we dream of a church of love.

I have heard these two kinds of dreams from you. I am not here to tell you which dream to follow. Maybe you heard in my voice that I kind of prefer the second dream, the dream of a church of love that transforms us and the world. But I can find nothing wrong with having a church that’s a clubhouse — though, mind you, I’m going to push you to make it the best clubhouse ever.

So now you know a little bit more about what an interim minister does, or rather what an interim minister can do if we work together. We will work together as I carry out the normal duties of ministry. I will be with you as you remember the past, and we will claim and honor the past, we will try to heal any old wounds. We will dream together, as you get ready to search for a new, permanent second minister. And then I will leave.

As you know, the sermon in a Unitarian Universalist worship service is never the final word on any subject. It is always an effort to open a conversation, an invitation to dialogue, to discussion, to correction and completion. I would like us to continue this conversation — but not here and now. I will be here at church this Wednesday evening, at 7:00 p.m., to host an open discussion forum with any of you who wish to come and talk with me. There will be child care available — although I welcome older children and teens to participate in this discussion with you adults. I will have a little opening presentation to frame our discussion together, and then we’ll talk.

This will not be the only time you have to talk with me. I will host these open discussion forums (fora?) on the fourth Wednesday of each month; and of course I am available at other times by appointment.

But let’s be sure to talk with one another. Let us claim and honor the past of this congregation, let us begin to heal old wounds, let us dream together, to the end that you may anticipate the future with zest.

So may we come together as a religious community. Amen.