A covenant is a solemn promise that we make to one another. One of the interesting things about ‘covenant’ is that the word is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, a covenant is a written agreement. As a verb, to covenant means to make those mutual agreements. When we enter into a covenant, we covenant together.
Today’s message deals with the meaning of covenants and their importance. Covenants appear within many religious traditions, including the Judeo-Christian tradition from which Unitarian Universalism arose.
Noah’s Ark
One of the most well-known stories in the Judeo-Christian tradition is a story of covenant, the story of Noah’s Ark. Noah and the ark are found in the Old Testament book of Genesis. God decided to destroy the world, which had grown wicked in God’s eyes. But Noah and his family were righteous, and Noah was obedient, so God promised to save them. God gave Noah the instructions, and Noah built an ark for him and his family members and gathered pairs of animals to take on the ark. After they had boarded the ark, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, and the waters rose. The flood lasted for 150 days. Every living creature on the earth died except for the ones on the ark.
Mark Woods writes the following in the publication Christian Today: “In Genesis 9:12-17, after the floods have gone down, God says he will make a covenant with human beings and that the rainbow will be a sign of it: ‘I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between man and the earth… Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.’”
Woods continues: “But why should it be a rainbow? One reason is that there’s a sort of poetic appropriateness about it. Rainbows appear after storms as the light from the sun hits the water droplets in the air and breaks into the different colors we don’t normally see. A light rain may still be falling, but generally speaking you know when you see the rainbow that, no matter how fierce the storm may have been, it’s over.”
The rainbow remains for many a symbol of aliteral promise that God made to Noah and the survivors of that destructive flood: that God would not again annihilate the people of earth by flood waters.
The Covenant with Abraham
The other major covenant discussed in the Old Testament is God’s promise to Abraham that he would be a father of nations. You may recall that Abraham was the man who held such an unwavering belief in God that he obeyed God’s command to kill his only son, Isaac, as a sacrifice. When God saw that Abraham was willing to follow through on this command, God spared Isaac and blessed Abraham, and he had many, many offspring, even though he was a very old man at the time. Abraham is now known as the father of three major religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – which are considered the Abrahamic faiths after Abraham.
In the article “God’s Own Covenant,” Daniel Casni writes: “The theme of the covenant in the Old Testament is at the starting point of all religious thought, distinguishing Judaism from all the surrounding religions that were aimed at the worship of idols and gods of nature.” Casni says, “Yahweh is the Lord who fulfils his promises given to Israel.”
Covenant is a defining concept of the monotheistic Judaic religion. Covenant is what marks the Jewish people as “God’s Chosen People.” As the religion of the Old Testament gives way to the New Testament, the original covenant between God and God’s followers has been fulfilled through Abraham’s descendants. God issues a New Covenant of grace through the sacrifice of Jesus, which creates a special relationship between God and God’s people, at least for those who believe in this New Covenant, generally known as Christians.
To continue in Casni’s words: “In the Bible, the theme of the Covenant is interwoven with the fundamental idea of God’s salvation of man through the establishment of intimate communion with him. … Such a relationship between »master« and »servant«is characteristic of the relationship between God and Yahweh and Israel.” In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the covenant is characterized by a master-servant relationship, a relationship of obedience.
Covenant for UUs
Covenant is regarded differently within UU congregations. Our covenants are between individuals who enter freely into agreements. UUs covenant with one another as equals, as peers. As UUs, our congregational covenant binds us together in relationship as we promise to try to be our best selves and to uphold our values within our church and outside its walls.
You may have heard it said that Unitarian Universalism is a covenantal faith, not a creedal faith. A creed is a set of fundamental beliefs. In creedal traditions, a creed is usually confessed or recited together formally. For instance, some of you may be familiar with the Apostles’ Creed, which starts: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty…”
Creedal religious communities usually recite their creeds, their fundamental beliefs, together during worship services. But UUs do not subscribe to a shared set of beliefs. We may all believe different things about the nature of our existence, the reason we are here, and where we’re going. There are many differences between us. Like described in the video “We Are Unitarian Universalists,” we “have different beliefs but shared values.” Our covenant, then, is what unites us. When we join this congregation and when we say our liturgical covenant together during each Sunday Service, we affirm the way we treat one another and the kind of people we strive to be.
Here is where our UU covenantal faith shares a practice with other religious traditions. The author Casni writing about covenant makes this assertion: “A covenant is a contract between all who are bound by common interests and responsibilities … which is concluded by a certain ceremonial act.” Signing a pledge is one such common ceremonial act. When a person joins our congregation and becomes a member of UUCP, they sign our Membership Book. Signing the book is a gesture of their agreement to be in covenant with us.
After signing the book, incoming members also participate in a New Member Ceremony where we all recite our congregational covenant together and commit to right relations and engagement in this community. For the new members, they are entering into covenant with us while we existing members are renewing our covenant. It is a meaningful ceremony. If you haven’t been part of a New Member Welcome Ceremony before, we have one scheduled on April 7 and will be welcoming into membership at least two new members.
The Meaning of Covenant
What is it that we agree to when we covenant together here at UUCP?
As we did earlier this morning, we recite each week:
Love is the spirit of this church
And service its law
This is our covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek the truth in love,
And to help one another
Love and Service
To begin with, we affirm love and service. Service flows from a loving heart. We want to help the folks we love, and we also listen to and respect the needs that they express. We hold realistic expectations and understand that we are all human, and we all have limitations.
The Rev. Renee Ruchotzke, a consultant with the UUA, shares an allegory that illustrates the values of love and service. She describes the excitement of a backyard berry patch bursting with juicy, flavorful berries during the summer season. The promise of delicious berries all year long tempts her to buy berries at the grocery store during the off-season when the backyard berry patch isn’t producing anything, but those store-bought berries don’t taste as good as the fresh backyard berries.
Ruchotzke (ruh-HUT-skee) writes: “Our modern, international food supply web has created expectations of fresh fruit all year long. The reality is that growing seasons need to be balanced with fallow seasons. … Consumers have a seemingly endless supply of fresh berries, but they may not notice that the berries come from different parts of the western hemisphere, depending on the month.” Ruchotzke continues: “Sometimes we see consumer expectations show up in our faith communities when it comes to Sunday services, religious exploration, and so on. The work of the staff and other leadership can also be out of sight and out of mind.”
We can take people for granted and not recognize and appreciate the hard work that they are doing, the emotional and intellectual energy that this work often takes, which can sometimes look so easy from a distance.
UUCP is not a spectator sport, to borrow a phrase. We are not here as observers, as consumers. We are participants. Especially given that we are a lay-led congregation, without a minister, and with minimal staff members, it is imperative that we recognize that *we* do the work of this congregation. Our general upkeep, our Sunday Services, our children’s programming – we as the congregants of UUCP are responsible for those functions. Our love for this community and for one another spur us to service.
Dwell Together in Peace
The first element of our covenant speaks to dwelling in peace. Dwell is a word that means to live in a particular way. In this case, to live together in peace, peacefully. Dwelling in peace suggests experiencing a level of comfort with one another, that we feel at peace with one another, regardless of differences that we may have.
A few months ago, I read a book by Krista Tippett called Becoming Wise: Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. This book is actually what inspired me to propose the topic of this service I am giving today. Many of you are probably familiar with Krista Tippett, a journalist and host of the long-running radio program “On Being.” In the book Becoming Wise, Tippett presents interviews and conversations with various thinkers, philosophers, writers, and religious persons that she has spoken with in her work.
In the book, Richard Rodriguez, an essayist and a Catholic, ruminated on the power of ritual in our religious communities. Rodriguez observes that the consistency of our religious communities embraces us through many seasons of life and provides us with strength to go on and even to draw meaning from our suffering. Rodriguez remarks: “The seasons of grief and triumph, the seasons of renewal and sorrow. The power of religion to make us reflective of the lives we are leading seems to me to encourage an inwardness, which I would call intellectual. Consolation of the inner life — that’s no small gift.”
We covenant to dwell together in peace, to foster a space where we can be comfortable and accepted, embraced and supported, and safe to explore our inner life and to go deeper — that is no small gift.
Seek the Truth in Love
The second element of our covenant deals with seeking the truth in love. UUs are known for being seekers and skeptics, which generally means that we are not satisfied with just one answer, so we spend a lot of time seeking truth. Our seeking can bump up against the seeking of others with viewpoints that clash. It is a good thing we can temper our seeking with love, or else we’d get pretty prickly and tough to be around.
To return to Tippett’s book Becoming Wise, one section of the book presents some observations by Vincent Harding, a historian, a devout Christian, civil rights activist, and speech writer for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Harding refers to “democratic conversations.” He observes that democratic conversations open up the question of what it means to be truly human, and here he sounds very much like a UU. He asks, “What is our purpose in this world, and is that purpose related to our responsibilities to each other and to the world itself?”
Harding observes: “We are absolutely amateurs at this matter of building a democratic nation made up of many, many peoples, of many kinds, from many connections and convictions and from many experiences. After all the pain that we have caused each other, [it is a challenge to know] how to carry on democratic conversations that in a sense invite us to hear each other’s best arguments and best contributions, so that we can then figure out how do we put these things together to create a more perfect union.”
Within these democratic conversations, seeking the truth first starts from a place of love and respect, inviting others’ voices, and listening to hear and to understand where others are coming from. The publication Behavioral Covenants in Congregations: A Handbook for Honoring Differences notes that “the vitality and the life source of our faith depends upon our differences as we seek new ways to be authentic and faithful in a time of changing assumptions.”
The handbook presents an example of “seeking the truth in love” as it describes two religious communities in a small Dakota town. Both communities were divided by deep disagreements. Both communities held meetings that began and ended with prayer. In the first community, each participant in the meeting spoke, “everyone heard and gave counsel. The result was an agreement that allowed all of the participants to remain in the community without feeling compromised or defeated.” In the other community, members attended the meeting but then talked and criticized one another behind their backs, and “no one had a say, no one was heard, and community was diminished.”
Here was the distinction between the two communities: The second community received occasional sermons or admonishments to “love one another” but did not voluntarily and formally commit to this behavioral principle. Meanwhile, the first community had a written behavioral agreement in place that was read aloud often and constantly enacted.The community lived in covenant with one another and chose to act accordingly.
Help One Another
Our UUCP covenant concludes with a commitment to help one another. We all need help at times, and helping takes many forms, from assistance setting up for an event to staffing a table or leading a class to lending a listening ear and shoulder to cry on. As I said earlier, *we* do the work of this congregation.
Back in the book Becoming Wise, a Unitarian Universalist chaplain named Kate Braestrup shares her view of God. For Braestrup, “the idea that God is love has everything to do with beliefs or transcendence andeverything to do with actions and people.”
Tippett asked Chaplain Braestrup how she maintains her belief in God in a world full of pain and violence and suffering, including harm done by human beings against other human beings. Braestrup responds that death and suffering are a given for all of us, but people showing up for one another and offering care and love is not a given, so when it happens, those people who show up are embodying a higher power. Braestrup says: “If someone asks, ‘Where was God in this?’ I’ll say, ‘God was in all the people that came to try to help.’”
Braestrup concludes: “The question isn’t whether we’re going to have to do hard, awful things, because we are. We all are. The question is whether we have to do them alone.”
In this covenantal community, we do not have to bear the difficult times alone. We are here to help one another.
Covenant as a Model
But I would argue that we cannot stop there, within our own congregation. The “We Are Unitarian Universalists” video described our UU movement as one that “calls you to put more faith in yourself, your community, and your beliefs.” As we lean into our beliefs, our values, and our covenant, we draw our circles wide and wider still. To harken to the civil rights activist Vincent Harding that I shared earlier, we consider our place in the world, “our responsibilities to each other and to the world itself.”
Our covenant induces us to build a beloved community that expands beyond our walls. The term beloved community was coined by the philosopher and theologian Josiah Royce and was popularized by Dr. King. King used to term to refer to a society where “caring and compassion drive political policies that support the worldwide elimination of poverty and hunger and all forms of bigotry and violence. At its core, the ‘Beloved Community’ is an engine of reconciliation.”
A position of openness, curiosity, and understanding is essential in a diverse and evolving society such as ours, but these types of spaces seem less likely and less common in recent times. It is becoming increasingly apparent that, as a nation, we are divided even on our understanding of this country and what it’s all about. A recent article in The Guardian asserts that there are two mutually incompatible views of the U.S. The first view is that this is a pluralistic society where everyone has equal protection under the law. The second view is that this is a promised land for European Christians.
The second view is held by believers in or supporters of something known as Christian nationalism. The Guardian article observes that the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent IVF ruling belies the court’s commitment to Christian nationalism, “the belief that the U.S. should be an explicitly Christian country and its laws should reflect that.”
I have previously shared about the dangerous rise of Christian nationalism in the U.S. Recent polling indicates that about 30% of Americans support tenets of Christian nationalism, agreeing with statements such as “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.” Christian nationalism is observed in the form of certain recent legal and political conquests such as the overturning of Roe v Wade, the proliferation of efforts targeting sex education and LGBTQ+ rights, and the erosion of separation of church and state protections in schools.
The Guardian article continues: “The post-Roe skirmish over abortion rights illustrates … the Christian nationalist … tendency to not only cast issues in binary terms, but to believe that the opposing side is a force of literal evil.” The article quotes Matthew Taylor, Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies and author of an upcoming book about Christian extremism, The Violent Take It By Force. Taylor says: “There is no dialogue with the other side – in their mind, you never compromise with demons. You exorcise demons.”
At a time when some folks are seeing not fellow people but demons among us, we UUs offer an important, vital perspective, a non-dogmatic religious community that celebrates diversity, encourages seeking, and acknowledges the fallibility of all of us, while maintaining hope and the opportunity for change and growth throughout life.
I cannot say enough about the dangers of Christian nationalism, White Christian nationalism. I cannot stress enough how detrimental this worldview is to freedom, democracy, human rights, equity, diversity, security, and so many of the other values that we treasure and that we need to survive. But to keep this focused on covenant – our covenant serves as a model for how we live here in this building and out in the greater world. Recognizing the humanity in each of us, seeking truth, focusing on service and helpfulness but, above all, love and not hate.
We are not spectators. We draw on our 8 Principles and our history of social witness to center us and to fortify us in the work. We UUs recognize that we are interconnected and that what affects one of us affects all of us. The UUA says it this way: “Covenant is the silk that joins Unitarian Universalist congregations, communities, and individuals together in a web of interconnection. The practice of promising to walk together is the precious core of our creedless faith.”
Text of a talk originally presented 03/17/24 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola
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