“Love is The Doctrine of This Church”
The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, October 4, 2009
In 1941, Susan Minns, a dedicated Unitarian and member of King's Chapel in Boston, established in her will a bequest to fund a series of lectures in honor of her brother, Thomas Minns. As stated in the document, Miss Minns wished for 6 lectures to be given annually by a Unitarian Universalist minister “in good standing” on a topic of general religious interest. A committee was set up, consisting of the ministers and selected members of King's Chapel and First Church, also of Boston, to select lecturers from suggestions made by Unitarian ministers. (Nowadays, the committee accepts proposals directly from would-be lecturers.)
The inaugural series of Minns Lectures was given in 1942 by Walton E. Cole, and was entitled “Realistic Courage;” former lecturers have included such distinguished and well-known ministers as A. Powell Davies of All Souls Church in Washington, DC; Arthur Foote, who was the son of Henry Wilder Foote who served First Church New Orleans 1902-1906; James Luther Adams, theologian who taught generations of UU ministers at Harvard University; and Dana MacLean Greely, who served as one of the first Presidents of the Unitarian Universalist Association following merger.
You may note in this list an absence of women lecturers. It took fully 20 years for the Minns Committee to select a female minister; the honor for that went to Dorothy Spoerl in 1962. Another 15 years went by before the second woman was chosen, Doris Hunter, in 1977. Sadly, fully 19 years passed before the next, Laurie Bushbaum in 1996. Fortunately, women have been chosen more often after that: in 2000-01, minister and historian Alice Blair Wesley, author of the lectures this sermon series is based on, entitled “The Spirit & The Promise of Our Covenant”; and our friend and post-Katrina partner Kim Crawford-Harvie was asked to give a lecture on the history of Arlington Street Church in 2003. This year’s Minns Lecture will be given by Susan Ritchie. It is to be hoped that future selections will be more gender balanced; however, as near as I can tell, there has never been a lecturer of color – an omission I expect will be rectified soon.
My colleague and mentor Alice Blair Wesley, who I first met when she taught UU history at Leadership School at The Mountain in the late 1980s, calls herself only a “lay” historian, because, she says, she has only been able to do her research haphazardly, in between serving UU churches and being a wife and mother. Alice is too modest by half. Her book, Myths of Time and History, has been used extensively by UU schools, congregations, and ministers as a primer on how our Unitarian Universalist theology is influenced by our history. Alice is passionate our history, believing that present-day UUs need to know about our past in order to be fully a part of Unitarian Universalism today.
I agree with Alice, and it is also true that the Worship Team has received requests from church members to have more services on UU history. For both of those reasons, I have chosen her 2000-01 Minns Lectures as the basis for a series of 6 sermons on the theme of covenant in the UU context, how it came to be, and what it means for us today. The sermon series will be interspersed throughout this worship year; I hope you will find them useful to your spiritual journey.
The story of the understanding of covenant within Unitarian Universalism begins with the historic church pictured on the front of your Orders of Service. In fact, this church’s story is so foundational to the idea of covenant for UUs, that Alice Blair Wesley requested that the Minns Committee shift the venue for the first lecture to what is formally known as First Church and Parish, Unitarian Universalist, in Dedham, Massachusetts. It is an interesting tale, and Alice tells it well.
In 1637, a small group of English colonists, about 30 families, petitioned and received permission to take over a parcel of land in the “wilderness” 9-10 miles south and west of the New England colonial center of Boston. There they founded the new village of Dedham, designing first a system of governing themselves. Having then, as Alice says, “pens built for animals, initial crops seen to, houses [built], furniture unpacked or freshly pegged together and so on,” they turned their minds to religious matters. They would need a church.
But what kind of church, and how would they do it? Thrown together, of differing tenures in the colony, from different places in England, and with a lot of work to accomplish in order to establish themselves in this new place, the folks of Dedham didn’t know each other. In order to make decisions about the kind of church they would start, they did something that was both revolutionary and radical, and terribly simple and neighborly – they set up a series of Thursday meetings at each other’s homes for the purpose of (and here I quote from the records of First Church, Book I, now kept in the archives of the Dedham Historical Society): “lovingly to discourse and consult together…and prepare for spiritual communion in a church society, that we might be further acquainted with the tempers and gifts of one another.”
To facilitate these meetings, they adopted some simple rules. They would decide before leaving each meeting what question would be discussed the next week; that way the participants would have ample opportunity to thoughtfully consider the issues at hand. At each meeting, the host would begin the session, speaking to the agreed-upon question. Each person present could, as they chose, speak to the issue, raise a closely related question, or state any objections or doubts they might have about what anyone said, in a manner “humbly & with a teachable heart, not with any mind of caviling or contradicting.” The records show that all their “reasonings” were “very peaceable, loving, & tender, much to edification.”
This is an amazing thing. Our religious ancestors, on their own, and for all we know for the first time in religious history, came together, evolved rules for how they would meet together in order to invent a new church. And the rules that they made up sound incredibly familiar, because they are precisely how UU congregations make big (and little) decisions today. How many of us here have sat through numberless meetings of this kind, before and after Katrina, for momentous issues and trivial ones? As a UU minister, I feel like I’ve been to thousands!
The people of Dedham continued to meet in this fashion from the winter of 1637 until some time after the church was officially founded in November 1638. It is extremely telling that although all the folks meeting in Dedham were Christian of some kind, the first topic of discussion was NOT Christ or God or the Bible. It was instead, quote:
For the subject of this disputes or conferences, diverse meetings at first were spent about questions as pertained to the just, peaceable and comfortable proceeding in the civil society.
This means, as Alice points out, a foundational concern of a free church is the justice, peace, laws and regulations – the conditions of – any healthy, free society. Out in the wilderness, out of the anguish of European society in the 1600s, with no direction save their own minds and consciences, these good plain folks – our religious ancestors – knew there could be no peaceably functioning free church if it were not set within a larger society wherein concerns for justice, peace, and reasonable laws can be freely and effectively voiced, without coercion or suppression. Thus we can see from the very beginning that the people of the free church would have as a foundational concern the health of the larger society.
The people of Dedham, with no example to guide them from Mother England, had figured out that the task of the free church was to love God and one another so well that in their study and discussion, dispute and conference, prayer, consultation and more discussion, the members might learn together the divine will of the loving God for the whole society, in terms of justice, peace, and reasonable laws. And so, the members would feel called, compelled, bound to proclaim it and try to bring it about in their whole society.
Not only was there no precedent back in England, discussing such matters, whether in church or in the marketplace, had been grounds for fines, imprisonment, exile, beatings and even hangings. Our religious ancestors, by choosing to do this new thing, were brave in the extreme. (Indeed, no written records were kept of the discussion on civil society, as if even now, 3,000 miles from England, they had been afraid that somehow an agent of the king would find out what they were doing.)
When they moved on to discussing and consulting and disputing, “humbly and with a teachable heart, not with any mind of caviling or contradicting” about the church they wanted, they were in agreement that they wanted a church founded in genuinely deep, religious love (which was, for them, grounded in a union with Christ, something else we’ll look at in a future sermon). The conclusion they came to was this: Members of their new free church should be joined in a covenant of religious loyalty to the spirit of love.
Once the members were joined in a covenant of their own devising, the member’s loyalty in the church should only be to the spirit of love, working in their hearts and minds. No one, whether inside or outside the church, would have any authority over them. Seek and consider counsel from other churches, yes (as we’ll see in another future sermon in this series), but accept rulings or commands contrary to their own consciences, never.
In case you’re laboring under the misapprehension that all religious people of the past cared about (even our religious ancestors) were things like original sin, predestination, and hellfire, not one of those topics arose in the records of the founding of the Dedham Church. Words that occur a lot are: reason and reasoning, deliberation, encouragement, advice counsel, agree and agreement, liberties, and promises.
By far the most commonly used words in the notes made of the 1637-1638 meetings of the people of Dedham in founding their church are: affection, affectionately, embrace, love, loving, lovingly. In the first 24 pages, Alice counted 32 uses of the words affection and love. Why? Because then as now and for as long as human history endures, the integrity of the free church comes down to our loyalty to the spirit of love at work in the hearts and minds of the local church members.
And that is why so many Unitarian Universalist congregations share at one time or another one of the most commonly used readings in our hymnal, the words that we shared for our Chalice Lighting. Let us share them again, remembering our courageous forebears in the Dedham church, and the spirit of love we share with them:
Love is the doctrine of this church,
The quest of truth is its sacrament,
And service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace,
To seek knowledge in freedom,
To serve human need,
To the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine –
Thus do we covenant with each other and with God.
