Sermon: Covenant – Rev. Eric Banner

A couple of weeks ago the semester started at Iliff Seminary here in Denver, and as one of our services to the larger faith, ministers from this congregation have served as adjunct faculty at Iliff for many years. This spring I am teaching the course for Unitarian Universalist seminarians about what is known as polity, a full semester course that examines the ways we have and do govern our congregations and the relationships between our members and the ministers who serve them. It’s a lot of reading, and a lot of conversation, and each week we focus on one particular topic to help focus ourselves, and this past week we’ve been talking about a single word, covenant. The students have read essays, and historical documents, and criticisms, and if any of you ever want a graduate level education in how churches work, well, just let me know.

But what I wanted to share with you this morning is really just a small piece of the conversation around covenant that has become a significant part of how leadership works in our spaces, and maybe in your spaces, too, as we continue examining the question of what leadership looks like in Unitarian Universalist settings, and why it matters that we have leadership and why it matters that we practice it in ways that take into account the message Sarah Lammert offered in our reading, that we belong to one another.

It wasn’t always so. Back in the 1970s our faith was facing serious questions about what we were, and what we were about. The activism of the 60s had started to fade. The language and culture we had adopted when the Universalist and the Unitarians came together was feeling dated, and the even older language of freedom, reason, and tolerance was not inspiring people as it once had. Into the mix came a proposal, an effort to reclaim a piece of a much older tradition, the idea that it was not enough to be for ourselves alone, or serve as debating societies for interesting ideas, fun though that might be for some of us. So, James Luther Adams, whose name many of you have heard me share before, offered an idea, in a very short essay, suggesting that we should move away from the iron cage of an industrial society centered on the needs of production, to one centered on a few key ideas that he outlined as the covenant of being.

“Human beings,” he wrote, “individually and collectively, become human by making commitment, by making promises.”

Unless you’ve been around Unitarian Universalist congregations for a while, and maybe even if you have been, that word, covenant, can be confusing. It’s not hard to drive around and come across neighborhoods with signs that say things like “a covenant controlled community.” A quick search lists at least a dozen churches in the metro that have the word covenant in their name, and none of them are Unitarian Universalists. And if you grew up in a Bible based religious environment, the word showed up most often in stories from the ancient near east, where gods, and there were many of them, made covenants with particular people to empower or defend them, so long as they did what their god told them to do. It was a this for that exchange, not all that different from a contract, but, you know, with God.

For Adams, “the covenant includes a rule of law, but it is not fundamentally a legal covenant. It depends,” instead, he wrote, “on faithfulness, and faithfulness is served by loyalty, by love. Violation of the covenant is a violation of trust. What holds the world together, according to this dual covenant then, is trustworthiness, eros, love.” It was, for him, and for so many who have come after him, the “element of individual responsibility connected with” shared responsibility that helped us to both make agreements, make promises, and then to live them out in a shared spirit of care, concern, and compassion.

For many of us, religious life and leadership, spiritual life and leadership, and even secular life and leadership, have often been rooted in the idea that there are a set of rules, and those rules tell us what we should do, and how we should do them. And make no mistake about it. Rules matter. Laws matter.

But the thing that has always set our way of being in the world apart is that we start first with the radical idea that consent must be foundational to our lives. We haven’t always lived it perfectly, but with each generation we’ve tried to do what the minister Alice Blair Wesley once suggested was the act of coming together to ask two key questions, over and over again.

What are “(t)he realities of my life to which or to whom I really want to be loyal or faithful”?

and

“How could we help a person wanting to be faithful in the ways” we have spoken of?

For Wesley, for Adams, for so many of us, these questions lie at the heart of the free church model we are part of. Not a tyrannical or corrupt model in which a single person, or group of people, decide for everyone else what they should believe and do, but one in which we come together in the spirit of freedom and love, in the spirit of community and connection, to live out our highest and deepest values, in joy, and possibility, and with a grounding that we share together.

In just a short while we’ll have a congregational meeting, as we do three times a year. At the very beginning of it, those who attend will see the covenant for the meeting, the agreements our Board has developed over years of thoughtful consideration and editing, to get concisely and, if not completely, certainly near to it, at the questions of what values should guide us as we consider what we want from our community in the years ahead.

I won’t read it all here, but it starts this way “To further the living tradition of Unitarian Universalism in supporting the Mission and Vision of this congregation, I promise myself, and covenant with this community and everyone in this space to:” … and then it lists six key elements, focused on how we speak and how we listen.

It’s not the only covenant in our congregation. We also have a covenant of respectful relations, adopted in 2019, that includes a list of promises made to ourselves and to our congregation. Things like “be loving and generous in spirit” and “follow through on my commitments.” To “take ownership and responsibility for my actions and their consequences.” To “treat others with respect, understanding, kindness and compassion,” while also forgiving ourselves and each other “when we fail to keep our promises and begin anew in love and faith.”

Sometimes we get confused about it all, and what it means. Sometimes people treat covenants in congregations like they are contracts, or sticks to be waved at one another, beating people over the head with them for their failings. But they are meant to be something more, or deeper than that. Not a list of rules, useful as those can also be at times, but reminders of our the kind of people we want to be, and the way we want to be with each other. I could be wrong, but I would venture to guess that almost no one has ever had someone come to them saying “you’re out of covenant” and immediately thought “that’s interesting, why don’t you tell me more?”

Covenants, be they between two people, as in marriage vows, or between students in a shared classroom space, or between hundreds of people are not governing documents to be filed with the Secretary of

State, outlining the rules of procedure for anything.

My colleague, the Rev. Peggy Clarke, offers this way of thinking about it all –

“A covenant… is not a creed or an unchanging declaration or the final word on anything. It’s a framework, a way of relating, an understanding between people that we are in this together, that we are partners in the work. It’s an acknowledgment of a relationship that exists regardless of how we behave. A covenant calls us to presence, to trust, and sometimes to sacrifice. It is humble, knowing change is required in response to an unfolding and unpredictable future. It is in movement, always being renewed, always seeking a new harmony with new voices. A covenant is also stable and stabilizing. It is the container within which we exist together, providing walls to lean on, keeping us within boundaries as we engage all the complexities of human relationships.”

Now that is a very different approach than a title deed outlining covenants, conditions, and restrictions that tell you what colors you might paint your house, or how your landscaping must be managed. And it’s a very different way of leading a group, or an organization, or a church, than most of us have every known.

It’s personal, and it’s collective.

It’s aspirational, and it’s ever present.

It’s freedom with, and freedom for.

And it’s always made, and remade, together.

We say with some regularity that this is a free faith, that this is a liberal faith, that this is a faith that knows that revelation has never been, and never will be, sealed. And for us, those words mean something important. They mean that when we ask of ourselves what matters most, that when we ask of ourselves what is worthiest of our time, our money, our lives, and our love, that we always make room for more than just what we were handed, that we make room for what we find, and what we find together, in the depths of our hearts, in the grandness of the world, and in the possibilities yet before us.

So, from time to time, we sit down, and we ask big questions, and we wait long enough for the answers to emerge, answers about who we are, AND who we hope to become. And covenants are tools we use to help that happen. Not carved in stone, or bound in a book to which no pages can be added, but written in the pages of our hearts, and in our conversations with each other, so that when, as will inevitably happen, we fall short of those highest aspirations, we can rededicate ourselves to the work we have begun, but will not finish.

For, as the Rev. Alice Blair Wesley put it so many years ago,

“Ultimately, the only freedom adequate to human dignity is the freedom 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.”

May we make it so.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister