A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Today and next Sunday, we wrap up what will be a series of 6 services on covenant based on the Minns Lectures given in 2000-01 by UU minister and historian Alice Blair Wesley. Alice used the historical records going back to 1637 of the Dedham, Massachusetts, congregation to look closely at the UU idea of covenant – how it began, how we almost forgot it, and how we can recapture and revitalize it for our time. I hope the series has given you some nutritious food for thought on the importance of covenant for religious liberals and how we form our congregations and keep them healthy.
Today’s sermon focuses on a part of our religious history that goes back to the time of Oliver Cromwell, a time of foment and revolution both political and religious. Because there were so many radical ideas coming out of the English civil war, with some of Cromwell’s Protestant army advocating a complete socialist reorganization of the country (and yes, as Alice says, left-wing political socialism was born in the left-wing independent churches that are our ancestors!), English church leaders and Parliament – even dissenters who hated the idea of bishops – began to lean toward a form of church governance that would create a representative body to rule over churches and keep radical ideas from spreading. This, in effect, would start a presbyterian form of church organization (small “p”) for the Church of England.
And so by order of Parliament, 174 members of the English Protestant clergy and 32 members of Parliament, presumably all Protestant as well, met in Winchester Hall in London to agree on what would be the faith and form of the church in England. (The dead giveaway here is the inclusion of those members of Parliament.) Two respected New England theologians were invited, but, presuming their opinions to be in a very small minority, they prudently declined to attend. The assembly met in the summer of 1645 and published their final results in the fall of 1646. Their document came to be known as the Winchester Confession of Faith, and, as expected, it included prescription of presbyterial church order to govern and hold in check unruly churches.
The Winchester Confession is quite detailed, having 33 chapters, telling folks what to believe on topics ranging from Scripture and God (oddly, scripture was before God, which might tell you something), to the role and mission of Jesus Christ, to repentance, saints, marriage, divorce, the role of civil authority, and on and on all the way to the Last Judgment. When the document reached the colonies in New England, it caused quite a stir among the free congregations there.
In response, and at the request of the Massachusetts General Court, New England churches sent both lay and clergy delegates to an assembly held at Harvard College; this group became known as the Cambridge Synod because of the town in which Harvard is located. They came up with a document about half as long as the Winchester Confession – only 17 chapters – and that also lacked the form of church government prescribed by the Confession. This document is known to us as the Cambridge Platform, and it is a founding document of our liberal faith.
In it, our religious ancestors asserted that the congregational way of being together religiously goes back to the most ancient of times, to the family of Abraham and Sarah. In our language, they proclaimed that the right and true way for people to come together is in free congregations bound by the spirit of love and without any form of hierarchy or coercion. Thus, the substance of the free church is the holy spirit of mutual love, and the purpose of everything the gathered members do is “mutual edification” – that is, mutual learning and teaching concerning the ways of love in community.
To gather such a free church, the members needed, says the Platform, 3 things: (1) personal experience of the spirit of mutual love between the individual and God; (2) to be individually drawn by the spirit of love into a covenant with other members to love faithfully; and (3) – and here’s the radical part that even today isn’t heard of in more conservative religious groups – to elect all officers lay and ordained. For our ancestors, as for us, there is no need of any higher authorities, or, in the language of the day:
[I]t is not left to the powers of men, officers, Churches, or any state in the world to add, or diminish, or alter any thing in the least measure therein.
No, thank you very much, but we religious liberals will be our own bosses, and will not be having any outside supervision, whether interference of the civil government, bishops or episcopacy, presbyteries, district executives, or even from the UUA Board or staff or officers.
Interestingly, another strange sentence is in the Platform: The term Independent, we approve not. That certainly sounds weird to our modern ears, for it seems that UU congregations are nothing if not independent. But our ancestors had experience with what were then called independent free churches, and the term meant congregations that had no concern with what happened outside of themselves. The forebears of Unitarian Universalism distinctly rejected that option. First, as we have seen in a previous sermon, they strongly believed that healthy congregations had an interest in the civil, nonreligious matters around them and in the well-being of the secular world, and second, they held a fervent belief that liberal congregations needed to be in active, ongoing relationship with one another.
It is true that congregations were to be separate and distinct, and have no “dominion” over one another, but they were to communicate, to form a community, they were to “take thought for one another’s welfare.” A congregation in conflict not only could consult with neighboring churches for help, they OUGHT to. Indeed, the Platform advised that if a church “be rent with divisions” and did not seek such counsel, that they receive “admonition” from their fellow churches. The Platform advised walking a fine line: “[S]o may one church admonish another, and yet without usurpation…”
The Platform also spells out how to handle internal church controversy. If any individual member forgets themselves and acts in ways contrary to the spirit of love – gossip, harsh words, backbiting, anger, or even violence (nothing that First Church would know anything about!) – an elected leader of the church, or indeed ANY member, was supposed to go speak privately, firmly but tenderly, to bring that member back into the covenant with the spirit of love. In words we might use today, to say to that person, “We don’t act that way here, and we need you to moderate your behavior.” Not think differently or believe differently, but ACT more lovingly. In extreme cases, when the person would not behave more lovingly, the Platform speaks of suspension or even removal from membership.
While these are things are or should be important to us even today, as Alice points out, our ancestors did get some things wrong. They established their so-called “free churches” and were supported by taxes by all citizens – whether they were members of the free churches or not! Other churches could exist, but they still had to pay the taxes that maintained the established churches. This was not corrected until the “disestablishment” political fracas of the first half of the 1800s – and to our shame, our ancestors fought against it heartily, thus coining the word “antidisestablishmentarianism.”
Alice warns: Beware, for patterns that are formed in early life are hard to break for institutions as well as for individuals. The New England churches that had been dependent on the tax subsidies shifted to being dependent on a few wealthy members, and so many of those churches were forced to close their doors during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Healthy churches do not depend on only a few people, or a few fundraisers, to support of the work of the congregation. The work of the church is the work of all the people of the church.
A second error of our religious ancestors was their bringing into their churches an understanding that was not religious at all, but cultural. They were used to an aristocracy in the social world, and they assumed an aristocracy in the church. Some individuals were elected, time after time after time, to be officers and then their children after them. (Even the children of some ministers went on to be ministers of the same church.) If you think about it, this is another destructive pattern inherited from those times. Whether it is GA Study Issues propounded by a few or re-elected Board members term after term, or a small group of unelected influential members, it is not healthy for UU churches to have “aristocrats.”
Alice points out a third mistake our ancestors made in the Platform, and it’s been referenced in a previous sermon in this series. Our early ancestors thought that the impetus to joining a free church would some kind of “ecstatic” religious experience, and the fact is, even back then, not everybody had such experiences. Either they had always been associated with the church and so there was no turn of heart, or their draw to the free church was a more intellectual and rational kind of attraction. So lacking a “falling in love” experience, why should new people join the church? Alice says, “If [current church] members cannot explain what their covenant is and what it means, that church is not ‘meet and fit’ to be joined!”
If we don’t talk about our promises to one another and to the Ultimate – that covenant that we will walk together in the spirit of love as best we know or will discover it together – then we’re left stumbling about what to say when someone asks about our church. We recite the Principles as if they were a creed or as if they set us apart from other religions – which they most assuredly do not. Or we come up our own individual “elevator speech” to try to explain what the heck a UU church is and why we’re a part of it. In the end, none of those are quite satisfying, or even very successful.
Near the end of Lecture 5, Alice Blair Wesley writes passionately:
Will the day ever come when many, many of us can say, Ours is a covenantal church. We join by promising one another that we will be a beloved community, meeting together often to find the ways of love, as best we can see to do. We have found there’s always more to learn about how love really works, and could work, in our lives and in the world. I hope that day comes.
I hope that day comes, too, and soon. AMEN – ASHÉ – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTÉ – BLESSED BE!
