From Your Guest Minister
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While Rev. Meg Riley is on sabbatical her column is being written by invited guests.
I often wonder if there is much more going on with free will than meets the eye, especially when it comes to finding and joining a spiritual community. We do some research, analyze the doctrines and beliefs of the group to find points of rejection or agreement, and check out the other people involved to see if they seem worth joining up with. We are looking for a gathering of “like-minded people.” We are looking for a progressive Sunday school program for our kids. We are looking for a place that stands against hatred and bigotry and that will welcome a family that looks like ours. We are looking for a good music program or a group of people we can pray with in a way that doesn’t require us to utter words we don’t truly believe. It’s all about us and our minds and our reason, right?
I don’t know. Is that all there is? I don’t think so. I happen to believe that we find community out of a much deeper instinct than an internal check-list we’re looking to fulfill. I call that instinct a calling; a prompting of the soul. When we venture out of the confines of individual concern and into the demands of community, something deep is at work, and I believe that something has a holy origin.
In our congregations we use the word covenant for the spiritual contract that binds us to one another in love, mutual aid, spiritual and ethical growth and reverence. The covenant concept originates in a moment recorded thousands of years ago when God pulls aside a guy named Moses (as God had already pulled aside a couple named Abraham and Sarah, and Jacob, and Noah) and said, “Let me make you an offer you can’t refuse: you are going to be my people and I am going to be your God.”
The original story of God’s courtship of humans was not a subtle negotiation. What are you going to do, ignore a burning bush that is on fire but not being consumed? Moses objected that he wasn’t a good choice to be the matchmaker between God and “His” people, but God insisted. Moses subsequently did a lot of schlepping around with enormous stone tablets that contained the contract between the holy and the human. We know them as the Ten Commandments but the agreement was far more complex and detailed than that one list of conditions.
Serious relations are never easy, and neither was—or is—the relationship God’s people had with the divine or with each other. Some things never change. The original community that received this invitation to covenanted relationship refused plenty at first, misbehaving and rebelling and infuriating this commanding reality, but God did not forsake them. In a detail that always makes me laugh, the people managed to violate their covenant with God while Moses was still up retrieving the tablets that had the ordinances inscribed on them. That’s talent.
We are no less talented today at destruction, defilement, alienation and covenant-breaking, and are therefore no less in need of being made “a people,” again and again and again by the commanding reality that we recognize in our communion with each other and with creation. It is one thing to learn to try to see the divine spark in every person. It is another level of commitment entirely to be in covenanted community with them. The word covenant can be used to describe many contracts and agreements, but covenants made in the congregational context always refer, implicitly or explicitly, to what Rev. Barbara Pescan called the “magnificent, unnamable intensity” that I believe is the source of our instinct to come together in community. It is in our wiring, or perhaps the soul.
What does this continuing, deep, sacred beckoning to be in relationship with the holy (which you may interpret as our values or principles) and with one another require of us right now? Is the covenant concept just an arcane curiosity from an ancient tribal people with rich imaginations that got picked up as an organizing principle for congregational polity, or is it a powerful through-line that binds us to one another,
our history and our deepest communal calling?
I think that a covenant is only as strong as the community that adopts it. It can be a museum piece gathering dust in a congregational record or tucked away, inconsequential, on the last page of the weekly bulletin. It can be a formality that no one knows or cares about, or it can be a defining statement that is given life by frequent repetition, interpretation, and review. It can sit around looking fancy but doing nothing, or it can become inscribed on the people’s hearts to whom it belongs. A covenant should be revised with each new generation, however the community defines generation. When it no longer speaks and resonates for the people whom it is intended to bind together in common purpose and promise, it should be aired out and edited.
Ultimately, our covenants should speak both to us and for us, proclaiming not necessarily our reality as a community—for we are often a mess, depending on the hour or the season—but rather our aspirations. A contract implies a job that will be accomplished within a set time and under specific circumstances. Covenantal promises are based not on certainties and specificities but on faithfulness to the love that calls each one of us out of our separateness to become a people.
- Free and Responsible - May 1, 2018
- From Your Guest Minister - March 1, 2017
- Whatever You Decide Is Perfect - May 17, 2012
