Living in Covenant

Last week, in this place, I stood before you and made a pact with you. I received your words of caring and support and the implicit challenge that comes in accepting opportunities for spiritual and ministerial growth. I accepted your charge and your blessing. In return, I offered to you the best of what I am and what I have, promising my willingness to learn, my respect, my pledge to mutual affirmation. I promised a fidelity to the learning agreement I have with this congregation and I promised to strive to fulfill all of the aspects of ministry you have called me to fulfill. Together, we entered into covenant. I thought today, then, might be a good time to reflect on just what it means to enter into a covenant.

            The dictionaries I’ve consulted tend to note little difference between a contract and a covenant. They both include the idea of mutual agreement. They both are entered into at the outset of a project. They both constitute a kind of promise. The OED states that covenant includes an aspect of solemnity that contract seems to lack. The American Heritage Dictionary emphasizes that the agreement is binding. One way to begin this exploration might be to go deeper into this language of contract and covenant and perhaps that way will yield good fruit, but I suggest we hold it in, abeyance for now.

      In September, in this sanctuary, this congregation welcomed Matthew Pomerantz into this spiritual community in a dedication ceremony. We made a pledge to little Matthew that we would be an extended family for him, opening our arms in protection and offering a way in the world that we intend to be helpful in his meaning—making. His parents, of course, retain primary responsibility for Matthew’s health, growth, nurture, and education, but he has God-parents too, who on that day pledged to extend this sense of family, to provide a buffer when needed, to provide an extra layer of protection and safety and an added resource for healthy growth and spiritual affirmation. And we extended our pledge to make a larger circle, to support the work of family and extended family and to be a bridge, as it were, to the larger circle of humanity, strangers who are not yet friends and strangers who will remain strangers. We entered into a covenant with Matthew to provide for him in small and subtle ways as he makes his way through childhood to maturity and into a wider world.

      In the Judeo-Christian tradition into which I was born and which I try to understand better in my time at seminary, the word “covenant” is mentioned early. In Genesis 9:13, the one called “Jahweh” or “Jahovaveh,” the one envisioned as the Creator of all, says to his people “I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.” The bow in the clouds I take to be a rainbow, that tenuous flickering thing of ephemeral beauty connecting the clouds to the earth, acknowledging the necessity of rain in the sustenance of Creation. 

As well, the rainbow has, even is, an aesthetic, testifying to the beauty in necessity and the necessity of beauty to make life full and meaningful. And it goes deeper still-- in our words testifying to “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part”-- our seventh and crowning principle. In this covenant is mutuality-- the Earth and the sustainer of the Earth mutually acknowledge that there is a fragile balance here. As Earth’s stewards, we affirm that we will honor and respect the need for care in our civilization-making: our respect must be borne in our actions more notably than in our words. God will sustain us if we sustain God’s Creation. 

The word “coven” is an old word from the Scottish dialect, meaning a coming together, a meeting or gathering. It’s used these days in the Wiccan tradition, a tradition we honor in the Unitarian Universalist faith. The word “covenable,” meaning “agreeable” comes from it directly and there is an apparent connection with “covande” the root word, also from the Scottish, of “covenant.” It’s not too far a stretch to understand this process of covenanting an agreement as growing from this ancient word for gathering, for meeting. We gathered last week, then, for our commissioning ceremony as an extended coven. It’s heartening to see the strands of our traditions coming together in this way. 

Among the joys celebrated here last week was the recent marriage of Ed McGinley and Judy Bacon. The celebration of marriage is a commitment ceremony we may say-— both terms convey a sacred intention of mutual love and mutual forbearance. The parties to each engage in covenant, pledging to reach out to each other, not in the begrudging way of the secular contract where bare minimums are agreed to for the sake of a hoped-for mutual benefit, but in a larger spirit that assumes that the benefit of both is of greater worth than the benefit of either alone. 

A covenant is a promise based on hope. It looks forward in a joyous way to the future. It expects great things and it is enthusiastic in seeking those things. And it expects travail and it expects to find the resources that will carry it beyond travail. It pledges to be rooted to something and to till the soil and to sweat and to weep and struggle and to overcome. It does not anticipate an end and its toil is its celebration because it is rooted in love. 

In the beautiful reading by Thich Nhat Hanh that Janet shared with us today, we saw and felt the spirit of interconnectedness of all things in the world. Thich Nhat Hanh practices a meditation of mindfulness, an aspect of his Buddhist tradition. 

The heart of the dharma, the teaching of the Buddha, is often expressed as The Four Noble Truths. One: Life is full of suffering; two: the cause of all suffering is human desire; three: the cessation of suffering is attainable; and four: the cessation of suffering is reached through an eightfold discipline of morality, meditation and wisdom. This attainment is called nirvana. 

      Buddhists, it seems to me go to the very root of the problem of living and address it by making a covenant with life itself. Most forms of meditation begin with making a connection between the mind and the breath, reducing life to its first essential element: breathing. There is a covenant expressed in the choice to reduce ourselves to our most basic level: we believe the life is rooted in the breath and we honor that rootedness with our conscious attention, an attention that elicits a deep intrapsychic relationship which gives birth to a sincere gratitude for the gift of the simple act of breathing, for the gift of life. We pledge ourselves to our living and our living pledges itself to us in rhythmic response. 

In so pledging, we commit ourselves too to the reality of suffering. We do not deny it, we do not run away from it, we do not avoid it, we do not try to rationalize it: we experience it. Buddhist teaching, in most traditions, emphasizes the desirability of experiencing suffering in the sangha, the spiritual community. The community is in covenant with the individual. The connection with the breathing of one’s self is extended to an awareness of the breathing of the community of practice. We root ourselves in a deeper experience of humanity: the sharing of suffering lessens the load for each. There is a morality embedded in the fabric of this inter-relatedness: it goes without a name and it does not seek to be named: it simply is. And there is a wisdom that emerges. There are various ways to express that wisdom in words, but often it is in tears and embraces and the recognition in the eyes of another that contain the wisdom and allow us to know better what community is, what its function is and how to live authentically within it. In living out the dharma, we become the sangha and the Buddha is reincarnated. 

We make covenant in the church community in ways large and small. When we invite visitors to join us for coffee hour and to sign the guest book, we are offering a covenant—— we will give of ourselves to you, a stranger in our midst, one whom we do not yet know, but one, because of the worth and dignity we believe is inherent to you, we will want to know and live in community with. 

The words of the Chinese proverb, this week’s wayside pulpit message, are “If you cannot find it in yourself, where will you go for it?” One response is: “I will go for it to my spiritual community, my sangha, my church. 

When, two weeks ago, we arranged ourselves in a “more or less” circle around this sanctuary, we honored the memory of those who came before us, founders of this church and this tradition; parents and loved ones we honor were called into the circle while we passed around the flame of a living spirit: we acknowledged our part in a covenant with those who came before-us. To honor our forbears is essential, I think to a covenanting community. 

And in the social convention of coffee hour, we renew our covenant, in plans and stories and jokes and the work of the hands and the spirit. 

To live in covenant means to make a commitment of the heart. To live in covenant means to give freely, trusting that gifts will flow our way in return. To live in covenant is to make a pledge, uttered or silent, to contribute because there is goodness inherent in the contribution. To covenant in a church community means that our actions, our thoughts, our plans, our committee work, our financial gifts all grow from the same place and lead toward common goals of justice, equity and compassion, of mutual acceptance, of responsibility, of encouragement to growth, and in our tradition, the always hoped-for goal of a world community of peace, liberty and justice for all persons.