Sacred Promises

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“Sacred Promises: A sermon” by Rev. Roberta 9/20/2009

On September 14,1974 a couple of 22 year olds walked into a Justice of the Peace in upstate New York and got married. It was very low key; just us and our parents and my somewhat confused grandmother and my brother. We didn’t want an elaborate ceremony and we held the reception in a nearby park.

Thirty five years ago we didn’t know much about what it meant to make a sacred vow. We were in love, head over heels. We made some promises to each other, but we had no idea what the real measure of those promises would be. Today, we have a much clearer idea of what it means to say ‘for better or for worse.’ Terrible things happen in the course of every life time. They happen to everybody. The living through those things is what makes us real. Remember the passage in The Velveteen Rabbit when the Skin Horse explains to the rabbit about being real? “When you are real you don’t mind being hurt. That’s why it doesn’t happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Once you are real, you can’t become unreal again.” We have, over the last 3+ decades, become real. We don’t break easily; neither of us require careful keeping. There are places where the loving has worn away the gloss, but we don’t mind.

We don’t mind because we have also learned that in the keeping of sacred vows, wonderful things happen. Things that surprise and delight, things that invite us into awe. Barry and I have been together now for well more than half our lives – several generations of cats have come and gone, baseball dynasties have risen and fallen. When we got married telephones were large things attached to the wall, computers took up a whole room, and America was reeling from the after affects of an ill advised military incursion on the other side of the world. We have cleaned up wet basements after numerous hurricanes, taken uncountable vacations, watched a bald eagle soar over Squam lake. The changes that have happened around us have strengthened our relationship. In spite of all the change we still have much in common – little things mostly that make it easy to be together. We laugh together, we listen to old Beatles songs. We are somewhat awed by the passage of time. I am not old enough to have been married for 35 years! What is most awesome, though, is the ways in which we have managed to remain true to those promises we made in ignorant bliss back in 1974.

As we have walked together through the terrible and the wonderful, we have learned a great deal about freedom and about making intentional choices. There is no such thing as a relationship made in heaven. It doesn’t fit with Unitarian Universalist theology. Free will, whether you believe it to be a natural state or a gift from God, is something that needs to be carefully exercised in order to be meaningful. Good relationships are made in the free exercise of the human mind and heart. For relationships to work long term, you have to want to make them work. And you have to work to make them work.

Along the way Barry and I discovered that we sometimes respond very differently to things – both the terrible and the wonderful. Learning to respect those differences instead of resent them has at times been a challenge. Too often we assume that in order to be compatible we need to associate with what we call ‘likeminded’ individuals. Sometimes what is best for us is to associate with people who see the world dramatically differently than we do. But then you have to be willing to learn from each other. Barry and I have done this over the years by talking to each other and listening to each other. Listening not for the notes of agreement, but for the discordant notes that could either threaten our well-being or merge together into a more complex harmony. We have also talked to and listened to other people – friends and family, ministers and marriage counselors – whatever it has taken to make it work.

We have kept our relationship fresh by being intentional about spending time together – we pencil each other into our calendars, have lunches together. On my day off we try to do something special together. We have always made our marriage a priority even in the face of the demands of jobs and kid and other important matters.

There is a lovely reading by Anne Morrow Lindbergh that is often used at weddings. “A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free like a country dance of Mozart’s. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back – it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.”

We didn’t have the reading at our wedding, because we didn’t know enough to choose it. But we have lived it in the years since. We have learned to hold on to each other, but not too tightly. We have learned to move to the same rhythm even when we are going in different directions. We have learned to create a pattern for our lives that accepts fate, welcomes grace, and allows us each to the freedom to grow and change and still have a safe home base. All of this has happened because of the sacred vow, the covenant, we established years ago.

I wasn’t a theologian back then, so I didn’t realize how important covenant would become to my professional life. Unitarian Universalism is a covenantal faith. We are not bound by a creed, but we are bound, my friends. We are bound by a covenant, a sacred vow, a promise that we make and remake to each other every time we come together. We are bound by that covenant even when we are not paying attention to it; in fact we are most bound by that covenant when we have broken it. Covenants call us to our better selves. They are ethical boundaries, reminding us that though we are imperfect, though we sometimes fail to honor the promises we have made, those promises are worthy of our best effort, and they are worthy of our return when we stray from them. Covenants are most powerful when we have broken them, recognized our brokenness, and reaffirmed them. Our covenants call us to our best selves.

But more important than that, covenants call us out of ourselves and into relationship. They remind every one of us that it really, really isn’t all about me. I’ll be honest with you. Neither Barry nor I remembers the actual words of our marriage vows. But the strength of that covenantal promise bound us together, two young people who had no real idea of what they were getting themselves into, and held us together even after we found out in the most challenging ways what it meant to say, “we intend this, for better or for worse.” Our covenants call us into relationship because every covenant is a sacred promise made in love.

Love is, of course, the basis of a successful long term partnership of any kind. It is also the basis of a successful faith community. Love is the compelling core of our free faith; it unites us even in the absence of a set of shared beliefs. Both historically and presently, we know ourselves by our doctrine of radical love. If a covenant is based on love, then the relationships that emerge out of that covenant will reflect that love. The community that is built on that basis will embody that love. A covenanted community is the incarnation of love. The covenant of the free church calls us to our better selves, then calls us out of ourselves and into a loving and beloved community. For as long as free thinkers, heretics, those who yearn for a liberating religion that affirms human dignity and recognizes the interdependence of all creation – for as long as people like that, people like us – have practiced this radically free religion, our covenant has been a voluntary affirmation of our willingness to walk together in the ways of love.

There was another time when I took a sacred vow. That was on the day of my ordination. At that time I said to you, even though I didn’t yet know you, “I am aware of the privileges and obligations that this ordination confers on me. I enter into this ministry with a deep sense of commitment, with gratitude to you who have ordained me, and with a sense of joy and excitement. In humility I promise to try always to live my life in unity with the principles by which this act of ordination takes place.” Just as I didn’t know much about marriage when I took my marriage vow, I didn’t know a whole lot about ministry when I took my ordination vows a little over 17years ago. But there were things I did know about our free faith then that I still know now.

I knew that Unitarian Universalism is a religion that is worthy of the very best we have to give. I knew that the great strength of Unitarian Universalism is our radical inclusionary principle; we are committed to creating communities where people with different theologies and philosophies can come together to explore the nature of life and love. More importantly, we come together to find answers to the question of how we can live out our faith in tangible ways. After 17 years I still take delight in being a professional facilitator of that process – insuring that our congregation does the great magic trick of holding in creative tension all of those ideas and hopes and dreams and experiences in such a way that all who are willing can experience spiritual growth and transformation, and can better prepare themselves to offer their gifts of spirit to a hurting world.

What I know now, after all these years of ministry, is that the covenant that calls us into community is an ideal that is all too often broken. I am no longer surprised that Unitarian Universalists are so quick to endanger the health of their beloved communities by allowing gossip and rumor and resentment and narcissism to have free rein. I am not surprised by how often we have to hold each other accountable, to acknowledge our failings, to ask for and offer forgiveness, to begin again in love. A former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association once said that his biggest surprise after becoming president was not how often UU congregations shoot themselves in the foot, but how quickly we seem to reload. But we keep coming back, we keep trying to live up to the ideals of our covenant, we keep trying to be the people who reflect the ideals that we enshrine in our sacred promises.

We live by covenants that call us to our better selves, that call us into relationship, that call us into community. There is one more dimension to our covenants. They call us into awareness of whatever is of ultimate worth to us. That is why I chose to read the Miriam Williamson poem, words often mistakenly attributed to Mandela himself. At a time when his nation needed a bold vision of what a free South Africa could be, what better way to address individual South Africans than to remind them that each and every one of them “was born to make manifest the divine within?” You don’t have to believe in a traditional God to know that there is something noble that resides in our souls and is constantly seeking expression. Finding the divine, within yourself and within your covenanted community, is the essence of Unitarian Universalism. Our other reading, from UU minister Brent Smith, refereed to the gift of our faith as “the freedom to explore and understand one’s own unique and direct relationship with God (or the Ultimate)”. This, he said, “is the purpose and aim of spiritual community, of giving one’s consent to walk with others.” We enter into covenant in order to have the freedom to explore our relationship with the ultimate. We enter into covenant in order to have others to walk with us in our exploration.

So what is the covenant of the First Unitarian Church of Orlando? Or more accurately, what are the covenants? You do have an explicit covenant, voted upon 9 years ago. It is called the Seven Virtues Covenant. It says, “In order to do my part in creating the Beloved Community at First Unitarian Church of Orlando, I agree to cultivate the following virtues: GRATITUDE: An embracing response of the heart to the richness and abundance life offers daily; thankfulness for the natural, rhythmic cycling of it all; the heart of a generous prayer cast wide. GOODWILL: The intention to look at one another with living, rather than accusing, eyes and hearts. MORAL COURAGE: Standing fast in support of religious or social convictions, particularly when doing so may result in ostracism, censure, threats, or harm; the soul work of learning to act in spite of fear. CREATIVE FIDELITY: Walking together without a map, always acknowledging each other’s freedom to change. HUMILITY: Being grounded in what is most essential, speaking gently, transcending self-will, and being honest about who we are. CIVILITY: A voluntary way of living and relating that respects others and reasonable societal norms, listens carefully, and may ask sacrifice and trust for the sake of the larger good. COMPASSION: Being in union with others in their passion and suffering; the spiritual discipline of opening our hearts and deepening our awareness of the interrelatedness of all things and expressing that awareness in the work of healing and service.

Those are good things to cultivate. And I’d like to find ways to bring that covenant back into the day to day and week to week consciousness of your congregational life. The Seven Virtues stands as your official, explicit covenant.

Every organization also has implicit covenants, those things that go without saying but ‘everybody’ knows them. The First Unitarian Church of Orlando is no exception. The problem with implicit covenants is that only the insiders know them. Newcomers may sense that they exist and feel anxious about violating them; they might even try to guess at what they are. But that is hard work when you are trying to enter deeply into the life of a religious community. Implicit covenants make your community more insular; they divide us from them. As an outsider, I don’t know what all the implicit covenants are, but I have guessed at some of them. And it doesn’t surprise me that these implicit covenants do not always reflect the best or healthiest ways of being together. They seem to be about indirect communication – in order to avoid potential conflict you covenant to be extremely reticent about expressing concerns or fears or disagreements directly. I’m all for civil discourse, but there are ways to engage in disagreements directly without being hurtful or getting hurt. You can disagree in love. But your implicit covenant nudges you towards indirect communication, towards talking about rather than to those with whom you disagree. Third party communication almost always degenerates into gossip and rumor and people end up getting hurt anyway. In fact some of the most painful wounds inflicted by UU’s on each other these days seem to come from anonymous email, the very worst form of indirect communication.

I would love to see you renounce the implicit covenants that do not serve you well. And I’d like to see you embrace your most explicit covenant of all – the covenant captured in the song of dedication that you sing every Sunday in worship. That, more than a document that you almost never look at, captures the true spirit of how you intend to walk together. Love is the spirit of this church. Love of self, love of other, love of the gathered community. The quest for truth its sacrament. A sacrament is external evidence of internal grace; to seek truth is to make manifest what is of ultimate worth. And service is its prayer. When we serve others, we are in direct communication with the ultimate.

To dwell together in peace, to seek truth in freedom. This is a promise that you make to each other: that you will practice peaceful means, even in disagreement; that you will insure for each other the freedom to explore without fear or without intimidation; that you will create a safe environment here, filled with mutual respect and affirmation. That is the only kind of freedom that has religious meaning. Not the freedom to do whatever I want and to heck with everybody else. Covenantal freedom assumes mutuality, it assumes that you have the maturity to understand how your words and actions affect others, it assumes that you will make room, in your freedom, for the free search of others.

As you walk together through the years there will be many times when you will need to invoke your covenants in order to recreate and sustain your beloved community. Sometimes it will be easy and joyful. Sometimes it will be more challenging. Remember always that a covenant is not a onetime thing that is said and then promptly forgotten. A covenant grows deeper as your souls grow deeper. A covenant grows more compelling as you mature together and grow in your appreciation of what intentional community can become. When it gets tough, that is when it is most important for you to once again join hands and sing, thus do we covenant with each other. Thus do we covenant with each other.