Based on 2000-01 Minns Lectures by Rev. Alice Blair Wesley
The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, October 25, 2009
A few weeks ago, in the first sermon in this series based on the Minns Lectures by my colleague and friend Alice Blair Wesley, we saw how our religious ancestors in Dedham, Massachusetts in 1637, worked up to founding what is now First Church and Parish, Unitarian Universalist (pictured on the front of your Orders of Service), by meeting weekly in each other’s homes and lovingly discussing together what kind of church they wanted and what its focus would be. While assuming a basis in Christianity (which we’ll look at in a future sermon in this series), their first concerns were “questions as pertained to the just, peaceable, & comfortable proceeding in the civil society.”
This was a revolutionary act, never before attempted in the history of religion – that a soon-to-be congregation would concern itself with the conditions of the society around it. Without precedent, the people of Dedham – our forebears – realized that a free church could only function in a free society. They also decided that everything in their church would be firmly based in a spirit of mutual love.
After today’s service, we will, as countless UU congregations have done in the 372 years since the founding of the Dedham church, follow the example of our ancestors in Dedham by gathering to listen and learn from each other on a particular announced topic, in our case, about the Gordon sisters and the window that was made in their honor and recently reinstalled in our church. We will follow a format similar to theirs, of taking turns to speak from our hearts and consciences, maintaining throughout a spirit of love for each other and for this church, hoping to be, as they would say, “edified.” As food for thought for this sermon and for the Town Meeting to come, let me quote Alice Blair Wesley:
I don’t claim these 17th century ancestors of ours got everything right. I subscribe to the blind-spot theory of human nature, that all of us make mistakes we can’t see as mistakes at the time. But I think our understanding of our own beginnings is distorted [if] we focus too single-mindedly on their mistakes.
It’s important when we look back at the folks of Dedham to realize that while they were inventing a new kind of church organization, it didn’t arise in a vacuum. They were reacting against what they had experienced in England – legally enforced church attendance (you were fined or worse for not going) at stultifying, dull, uneducated, irrelevant services. At same time, as part of the spreading Protestant Reformation, lay people who were literate were able to read the Bible in their own language, and some university students and teachers were seriously studying the Bible and publicly preaching about the earliest days of Christianity, when things were vastly different.
Lay people went to hear these exciting new preachers and were discussing what they heard. The bishops of the Church of England, as Alice says, “went bananas” over all this running around to hear new preachers and all this discussing. They ordered people to stay home, and they removed from pulpits any preachers in the new style. To get around the ruling, lectures were started on market days in the public square, but when the bishops got wind of these, they were shut down as well. The people’s talking was dangerous, not just for bishops, but for the government as well. As King James I was fond of saying, “No bishops, no king.” (And he was right, too, wasn’t he?)
But the spirit of love could not then nor ever can be contained. Frustrated and threatened by life in England, people in search of freedom emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here they set up congregations as they wished – with learned clergy (as opposed to the ignorant curates back in England) and with no bishops over them. But the colonists were always aware that they were dependent on the charter granted by the king, and that at any time, for any reason, the king’s armed ships could arrive and take away everything they had wrought. This is at least in part why the people of Dedham were so concerned with having an orderly society – legal disputes and scandals might end up in the English court system and thus bring the unwanted attention of the king to their experiments. Despite their professed adherence to the spirit of love, a perhaps understandable spirit of anxiety pervaded the early colony (which might help explain such drastic errors as the exiling of Anne Hutchinson and the Witch Trials).
In their new home in the “wilderness,” the colonists continued their habit of running around to hear different preachers, and ministers of different churches in different neighboring villages would lecture on weekday afternoons, with discussions going on well into the night. The governor of the Mass Bay Colony, worried that people would be too tired to do the hard work of clearing the land, farming, and building new houses and villages, tried to ban the lectures, but was swiftly brought up short. Folks said, in effect, we didn’t come all this way for you to act like a bishop. Governor Winthrop and the churches worked out a compromise: lectures and the after-discussions would be held on Thursdays afternoons only, thus freeing people up for work on the other days of the week. (Interestingly, the tradition of Thursday lectures continued in New England Unitarian churches until late in the 19th century!)
And so, out of their experiences in England and with their understanding of how early Christianity had been organized and practiced, gained from reading and interpreting the Bible for themselves, our religious ancestors in Dedham – and in other New England free churches, where we don’t have such a clear and explicit written record – put their primary religious loyalty in the spirit of love at work in their midst, and made sacred promises to each other about how they would be. Thus they covenanted with each other and with God as they understood God.
What was that covenant? What else did they promise? Alice identifies these in her “8 key points” – that they would be faithful to the spirit of love; that they would have no outside authority; that they would reason together to discover truth as best they could; that they would discipline themselves and each other when needing to be reminded of their promises; that membership would be open, and that it would be intentional, not automatic; that remaining a member would not mean believing any particular thing, but acting within the covenant; and finally they understood that there was no contradiction between common sense and their religion. (Other parts of that original covenant will be covered in future sermons in this series.)
It all sounds so normal and familiar now, it’s hard to think back and cast ourselves into their place, and realize how strange and dangerous and revolutionary this all was. Even today, in churches with episcopal or presbyterian polity, decisions by lay people, however much in the spirit of love and however well reasoned and however arrived democratically, can be overruled by bishops or presbyteries. (One recent local example comes to mind: there is absolutely nothing the UUA can do to close this church if the lay members don’t vote to close it.) Even today, there are sincere religious people who argue that you cannot be a “real church” without a set list of creeds and doctrines to adhere to. There are religions that people are born into – and while we sometimes casually speak of “birthright UUs” the truth is, you can’t be born a UU, you can only choose to be one, by signing a Membership Book of your own free will.
Back to our ancestors in Dedham, they did yet another thing that was radical. They opened church membership to any person willing to be bound by the covenant. Once the church was established, they welcomed into equal membership the richest people in the village and their servants, men and women, young apprentices and the elderly, people of every occupation. “Whatever their status in the civil society, in the church all members took part in the discussions and every member had one vote.” (ABW, Lecture 2)
The original Dedham church covenant is long, too long to be memorized and certainly too long to be included here. But of a similar vintage is the covenant of their older sister church in Salem, Massachusetts, written in 1629, and it’s emblematic of covenants by other New England free churches:
We covenant with the Lord and with one another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth.
Today’s Unitarian Universalist churches ought to learn from the processes that brought about those old covenants. We should periodically come together to ask ourselves the deepest questions, such as “What are the realities of our lives to which we really want to be faithful? What would such loyalty look like in the real world? What might happen if everyone in our society had these priorities? Whose need for mutual love would be fulfilled, whose would be left out?” And from the answers we would craft and renew our covenant with the Divine, with each other – and with our ancestors in the free church. Whatever words we would come up with, in the end, I’m sure, with Alice Blair Wesley, that one thing would be obvious: We belong to, and at our best want passionately to be, loyal to our long free church tradition and to keep it love and strong in our time.
We are able to study the founding of the Dedham church and learn from its deliberations only because they kept such meticulous records of their meetings. They did this as a gift to us, as it says in Book I of the records:
for future ages to make use of in any case that may occur where in light may be fetched from any examples of things past, no way intending to bind the conscience of any to walk by this pattern…
As Alice says, “How’s that for a liberal understanding of the proper use of any history?” They wanted us, their heirs, to learn from their example, but not to feel constrained or oppressed by it. They bequeathed to us our interest and vital concern in the civil society around us, they showed us how to organize a church in the spirit of love, and they modeled for us the vital importance of sacred promises in the things that really matter. All we can say is, “Thank you.”
BENEDICTION (adapted from the Pilgrims’ Covenant)
Let us pledge to walk together
in the ways of truth and affection
As best we understand then now or may learn them in days to come,
That we and our children might be fulfilled,
And that we might speak to the world
in words and actions of peace and good will.
