First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Before we start, I want to make you aware of the special holiday events coming up. Next Sunday, December 13th, Music Director Betsy McGovern will lead a service filled with wonderful music on the holiday traditions bequeathed us by the ancient peoples of Ireland. On December 20th, at the regular time, I will preside over a service about Yule, the Winter Solstice. That evening at 6 pm, for the first time ever, we will hold what we hope will be a new tradition, a Candlelight Labyrinth Walk service. On Christmas Eve, also at 6 pm, we will celebrate the birth of Jesus with the nativity story, a simple open-table communion, and a homily on Christmas for religious liberals. Before and after the service, there will be potluck Christmas refreshments, including hot cider. On December 27, our Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist Intern Charlie Dieterich will host an informal service (VERY informal – he’s inviting folks to wear sweats!) to close the year. That afternoon, everyone is invited to my home for a Holiday Open House from 1-5 pm. And then, on January 3rd, we will once again hold our New Orleans Jazz Funeral for the Old Year, complete with a traditional jazz band. This year, we'll be joined by the other 2 churches in the Greater New Orleans UU cluster. Please spread the word amongst your friends and relations about these holiday happenings.
This morning we continue our ongoing series on covenant in the UU context, based on the Minns Lectures given by my colleague Alice Blair Wesley in 2000-01. This one deals with how words – and religious ideas – change and evolve over time.
As many of you know, Eric and I got a dog this fall, a little Corgi-Rottweiler mix that we named Keely Smith. We are training Keely to do things like “stay” and “sit” and “come” and we all are doing pretty well with it. The other day, I was trying to teach the dog “come” and to help, I put a treat on the floor. She did not seem to see it, and so I did something that is foolish when you are dealing with a pet – I pointed to it. Like any pet, even a very smart one, as Keely IS, she looked at my finger and not what I was pointing at.
Sometimes we UU can be like that too – we get hung up on a word that makes us uncomfortable, ignore what the word is pointing at. Words are metaphors that point to other realities; they are symbols that sometimes, shift meaning or gain new meaning. In Alice’s lecture, she talks about how certain words, such as "save" and "icon" and "bite," have become associated with computers, without losing their original definitions, and she also cites the sensitivity of some religious liberals to traditional religious words like “pastor.” Words not only convey meaning or have double meaning – they can sometimes confuse or obscure meaning.
Within our shared free religious tradition, there are words whose meanings are vitally important and yet which have shifted over time. What does it mean to be “human”? Are human beings fatally flawed, doomed to making wrong choices without superior guidance? Are human beings inherently good, and able to choose rightly? Are human beings essentially communal, or essentially individual?
A connected and equally important religious question is, What or who is God? Catholic doctrine refers to God as “3 persons;” another orthodox definition is “the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe” (Free Dictionary online). A more liberal definition would be Alice’s term “third reality” – the whole of being, or as the 7th UU Principle has it, “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” In fact, Alice says, God is the shortest name we have “for that reality greater than all, but present in each.” (ABD, Lecture 4) God is just so much easier to say.
Different answers have been given at different times to all these questions, even in recent history, and the answers are not academic – they matter. How we think about ourselves as human beings affects how we think about everything, including “God” and our relationship to God. If human beings are “fallen” and depraved, then God needs to save us. If humans are essentially individuals, we think of God the same way, whether or not we believe in God. If human nature is inherently positive, then God is more a force than a being or a person. If humanity is defined in terms of community, then God becomes a kind of glue holding us together.
But we usually don’t talk to one another – or even think to ourselves – in terms of dominant metaphors. We just talk. What can break down our communication is what Alice calls “broken metaphors” – when terms we use become a barrier instead a bridge for our connection.
Covenant is one such word. In the time of our religious ancestors, covenant was clearly understood, coming from the world of the Bible, which in turn got it from the cultural milieu of the ancient Near East. Covenant originally meant a promise, in terms of a people promising to obey and serve a king, who would then protect them from harm, whether from an outside force, or even from themselves. This at first meant a human king, and in Biblical times, evolved to mean – through the use of metaphor – between the Hebrew people and God, and later, with all humanity and God.
As with all metaphors, there were ways in which the covenant between an earthly king and his people and the covenant between God and humanity were alike and NOT alike. Human kings tended to crush the freedom of the people at the bottom; absolute power corrupted absolutely. Power flowed like a pyramid, with a very few at the pinnacle resting on a huge base of oppressed people at the bottom.
But the King of the Universe was not like human kings. Rain and sun shine are for everyone, showing God’s love for the world, inspiring our love in return, love for each other, animals, and the earth. No longer would covenant be, as Alice says, a kind of "protection racket," but something freely entered into, a new way of perceiving Ultimate Reality. Jesus took the evolution of covenant further, refining it so that God was no longer titled “King of the Universe,” but “Abba,” God the Father.
Our religious ancestors, notably the ones we’ve been looking at in the colony of Massachusetts in the late 1600s, took their covenant from little house churches of the New Testament, forming free congregations bound together by the “spirit of love” at work among them, and promising to walk together as best they could. Their religious promises led naturally, as we have seen, to immense changes in their – and our – political world.
Alice Blair Wesley writes: Today, you and I – we, all of us –
stand in the long tradition of the covenantal free church. Our con-temporary refinement of the understanding of covenant is to add the modifier “humanist” – we say ours is a humanist tradition, meaning that our everyday world has forced upon us the recognition that valid religious insights, even the most extraordinary, are always rooted in ordinary human experience of concrete events. To know anything about reality, or God, we make inferences from our limited experience to great encompassing truths, not the other way around. Therefore, even those insights we claim and stake our lives on are to be stated humbly, always with the awareness that we might be wrong.
For us as religious liberals, what we place our faith in has to make sense to us, even as we acknowledge that what makes sense to us is limited and finite and the universe is unlimited and infinite. Thus, we recognize that the covenants we make will need adjustment, will need to evolve, as we gain new insight and new knowledge – and will also need to be remade as we inevitably break faith and break our promises. Alice puts it better than I ever could:
…While the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part judges us and frustrates us, not only as individuals but as peoples, when we disregard or violate its laws, it is also gracious, offering us, over and over again, new chances for the practice of authentic, creative, lawful and loving, redemptive freedom.
These points have implications for both Unitarian Universalist congregational life, and for UU worship. Because of the wealth and richness and beauty of human life, which we did not and could not create, it is appropriate to begin our church events and especially our worship services with expressions of praise and gratitude for all gifts not made by human hands. Because we human beings are both promise-making and promise-breaking creatures, we ought to regularly take time to reflect on how we keep our covenants and our congregations should be places where the spirit of love guides all our actions and plans, where we forgive and begin again in love.
What I want for this church is what I want for our free religious faith: that we take our place as a beacon of both freedom and love, where people of all kinds can be brought together by the spirit of love to reason, to reflect, and to act in the world to bring about more freedom and love for all people. No matter what challenges we face as a congregation, may we always remember that as our first purpose. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLSSED BE!
