The Lay and Liberal Doctrine
of the Church:
by Alice Blair Wesley
Lecture 4 of the 2000-01
Minns series of 6
The Theology and
Anthropology of Our Liberal Covenant
Love
is the doctrine of this church. . .
Thus
do we covenant with one another and with God.
These
familiar lines are the theme of this year’s six
An amazing thing happens when we human beings
communicate, using
words, on the most ordinary of occasions. Certainly,
miscommunication is frequent, among any people.
But that fact is easier to explain than that we ever communicate - or transfer meaning -
at all, which we do, with astonishing precision, every day! We do so, even though the meanings of our
words change, all the time, though not at anything like the same rate.
Often,
old words come to carry new meanings, right along with ancient meanings,
without confusion and very quickly. For
example, think of the new meanings and the much older meanings now carried by
these words: enter, touch, send, return,
save, scroll, click, icon, mouse, bite, memory, dot, window, web. Somehow, we are able easily to distinguish
the new meanings from the old, according to the context of usage.
Somewhere,
a few years ago, a few computer geeks assigned new meanings to all these old
words. And, a few years later, tens of
millions of us have so integrated these new meanings that we can use
them metaphorically. You could dash off
a note to a friend you haven’t seen in years, and tack onto the end, this
sentence, “Every
time I think of you, I click on save.”
Just
10 or 15 year ago your friend might well have received that sentence as
gibberish. But now he or she would not
write back to ask, “What do you mean - you ‘click on save’ when you think of
me?”
If
he did ask, an explanation would go something like this: “I love you, faraway Friend, and I will love
you in future, so much do I treasure memories of you from our past. But these days, if I said so straight out, I
would sound too mushy,
goopy. So, I will use the
working of a computer as a metaphor, for my mind and heart. Computers, of course, are high speed,
electronic machines, without mind or heart so far as we know. But the way a human mind works is somewhat
like the way a computer works. And, for
metaphorical purposes, we can bracket - or set aside - the computer’s
unlikeness to a human being. I focus on
a certain restricted likeness, and I represent a human being as working
like a computer. I say, ‘When I think of you, I click on
save.’ And you will correctly interpret my words
as pointing to two realities, 1) my
abiding affection for you, and 2) our
shared understanding that a light-hearted tone is right for our time. Of course, neither affection nor the right
tone of a message is at all like a computer.
Still, you get my point: I am
glad that you - though a long way off - are part of who I am. ”
We
use metaphors in our speech many, many times every day. Their effectiveness comes of our human
ability to compare things, to see how they are alike and - for the purposes of
communication - to suppress their unlikeness and focus on a certain likeness. Thus we communicate meaning in one area of
our lives, with reference to another.
Isn’t
this marvelous? A ten-year-old who never
heard of metaphors and has never once thought about how they work, a child in
our time could send - to a buddy his
same age or to his grandmama - a note saying, “When I think of you, I click on
save.” Yet only if the new meanings, of
a whole cluster of words, can be distinguished from old meanings in a nano second
by tens of millions of others in the same culture, according to the context of
usage.
In
a real sense, then, even a private note, sent and received, is not just a
private transfer of meaning between two people.
Rather, it is one communication made possible by these two individuals’
participation in each other’s lives and by their participation in a third
reality, a vast and dynamic network of meaning, in which all of us, who live in
the same world and speak the same
language, live and move and have our being.
Though we may seldom - or never - think of this vast and dynamic network
of meaning, we are utterly dependent on it, all the time, for the expression or
understanding of any meaning at all. We
can distinguish a private note within this third reality, so far exceeding
ourselves. We cannot separate a private
note from its much larger context . The private note could not be except that it
is part of the other. The private note
is not a separate or separable thing of itself.
I
ask you to focus on this third reality, this network of meanings. There are prevailing patterns in it. These patterns are interactive with us; that
is, with our usage the patterns are modified over time. But, though they change, there are, always,
patterns. With reference to language, we call these the rules of grammar. We usually try to teach these rules to
children in school. But the fact is, toddlers learn them without instruction. Two-year old Susie says, “I want a cookie,”
not, “Cookie a want I.” Even toddlers know
that to
communicate using words, we must act in accord with prevailing patterns of the
network, its rules. We cannot
arbitrarily scramble our words. You could not
meaningfully write to your friend, “Save click think you, on when I of I.” Our freedom of speech is conditioned. Our freedom stands under judgment. To speak creatively and freely, we
must act in accord with patterns of
meaning we did not make, or else ruin the possibility of free speech.
Right
there we have an illustration of the great paradox of covenantal anthropology
and theology: Authentic human freedom is
by necessity lawful freedom. Moreover,
the patterns or laws or rules of the network are not rightly understood if they
are seen as there to restrain or inhibit or control us, although we will be
barred from participating in meaning if we disregard them. Rather, these patterns make meaning
possible. We rightly see ourselves as
wonderfully gifted with discernment, gifted in that we can perceive these
patterns and learn more of them and be more creatively
free within them. I hope you see that I
am now pointing to an analogy, a likeness:
The patterns of meaning which make language possible are analogous to
other natural laws. Though the universe
within which we dwell is dynamic, not static, it is lawful. That is, there are consequences of obeying
and of breaking natural laws; the universe is responsive to human beings, in
that at least some the patterns vital to us as human beings change over time,
in response to our usage, but there are, always, patterns we cannot flout
without loss of meaningful life. I am
also lifting up certain
features of an anthropology, a notion of what it means to be
human. Namely, as a race or species of
creatures, we are both limited, or governed, by reality greater than ourselves,
and free. We are supported by and gifted
by the way things are, and we are obliged, responsible for for what we do with
our gifts in our freedom. We can be
appreciative and obedient, creative and constructive, and if we are, these
actions will have consequences. And we
can be willfully or mistakenly destructive and mess up our own freedom; if we
do these actions will have consequences.
Because authentic
human freedom is, then, of necessity, lawful freedom, and because we receive
the possibility of freedom as a gift of the way things are, an authentic covenant is a glad promise to live freely together, insofar as we are able, in
accordance with the laws of reality that make our freedom possible. This is true whether the agreement is between just two, as
in a union of marriage, or whether the agreement is among millions, as in a
free nation, or whether the agreement is among members who gather to be a free
congregation. Any authentic covenant will be
based on a mutually shared understanding of the patterns or laws of a third
reality. The third reality of a covenant
is, not just of the network of a language, but of the whole of
being. Using a metaphor taken from the
realm of ecology, we UUs have recently taken to calling this third reality “the
interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.” God is a shorter name for that reality
greater than all, yet present in each.
A little more about language. “When I think of you, I click on save.” I have spoken of three realities of this one
little sentence, 1) abiding affection, 2) a light-hearted tone and 3) a vast web of
meaning, patterned yet also ever changing, a dynamic network of meanings. I trust no one would say, “But those are not
realities.” Because,
of course, they are. They are
self-evident realities of our experience, part of our everyday lives, though they are
measureless realities. We cannot locate
the edges, the limits, of these things.
That is, we cannot define them, as we can a house or a tree or a
mountain or a computer. We can only
speak of a measureless reality by comparing it with some limited, measurable
reality. That is what we do when we use
metaphors.
One
example: Consider the word base. We speak of the base of a house or a tree or
a mountain. We speak of the basic binary
mathematics of a computer. We are
talking about measurable things. But
suppose your sister is puzzled by a friend of yours and by the fact that you
have begun going, often, to her church. And so she says to you, “What is the
basis of your affection for this person?
I find her basically calculating, cold as a computer. And that religion of hers - what is it based
on?”
I
trust you hear the metaphor in these questions.
Does affection or a religion rest its weight on a base, as a house or a
tree or a mountain does? No. Affection and religion don’t have weight,
except metaphorically, in comparison with some measurable thing. Nor is human temperament a function of a
mathematical design, except metaphorically, in comparison with a machine. Yet a metaphor is effective so long as we
focus on the likeness of measurable and measureless realities and bracket - set
aside - their unlikeness. On the other
hand, though a metaphor may have worked well for many, many people for a very
long time, it will break down and be useless to us once we focus on the
unlikeness of things
we are comparing.
Let’s
look at one example of a broken religious metaphor. Recently, some UU ministers were having a
conversation. One got to talking, whose
UU church is in a predominantly Lutheran part of the country. As you may know, most Lutherans address their
minister as Pastor Luopa, or Pastor Morgan, or just Pastor. Well, this UU minister was saying how awkward
she feels when folks out in the larger community - even people who aren’t
Lutheran, Catholics - address her as Pastor Jones. She doesn’t want to correct them. That would seem nit-picky and make them feel
awkward. Still, she feels funny - phony
- letting people call her that when our UU members never would.
Other
ministers tried to ease her discomfort.
They said things like, “But we talk about the pastoral side of
ministry. All our students for the
ministry have to do CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. When we have to be away, we ask a colleague
to be on call for emergency pastoral care, and so on. So, don’t worry about it.”
But
another minister said, “I hate the word pastor.
Pastor is Latin for shepherd.
People in UU churches are not sheep.
I never let anybody call me that.”
I
thought, O dear! Why is this good man so
prickly about a word? I’m pretty sure
Lutherans don’t think of the people in their churches as sheep. But in their anthropology, Lutherans have
historically focused attention on the common need, of all human beings and
other creatures, for loving care. When
Lutherans call their ministers Pastor, that’s the likeness to many living
things they’re focused on. Lutheran
pastors are leaders of groups of people for whom loving and caring are very
important. We in our tradition have
historically focused more on the need of human beings for independent
thinking. When humans can’t think with a
measure of independence, we
act like sheep and can be herded about. It’s not that we want our ministers to be
unloving or uncaring! But in our
anthropology, we focus on the unlikeness of people and sheep, herd
animals. So the metaphor of the minister
as shepherd, or God as shepherd, has broken down for us. We can’t use that
metaphor, or if we do, we’re restive with it.
It doesn’t feel right. The tone
is wrong.
Well, my attention had
wandered. I was not - sheetlike -
following the conversation, but thinking my own - independent - thoughts.
But a bit later the same minister, who had declared so strongly that UUs
are not sheep, was again speaking. He
was recommending, for reading in a worship service, a favorite poem of his
titled, “Be Like a Duck.”
I
thought, Gee! This colleague thinks it’s
bad to be like a sheep, but
good to be like a duck. I ‘d better listen.
He read us the poem. It was about
a duck gliding along on a placid lake on a beautiful day. I would say the message of the poem was something
like this: We can trust the
interdependent web of existence of which we are a part, even though, sometimes,
all about us is trouble and confusion.
At the core of our being, we can be, religiously, in spirit, not fearful
and distressed, but like a duck gliding along on a placid lake on a beautiful
day.
Hm,
I thought. The message of that poem is
very like another. “The Lord is my
shepherd. . . He leadeth me beside the
still waters. . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
. . ., thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
The
aim of valid religious, metaphorical language - though it be
of shepherds and sheep or lakes and ducks - is to communicate the meaning of
measureless realities which, though they be measureless, are very important,
everyday realities of our lives.
Traditional Covenant Language: To What Everyday Realities Did It Point? The
word covenant has come to us by means of the Bible. The covenant is a metaphor taken first in our
cultural history, not from the phenomena of language, but from the realm of
politics. In the very ancient Near East,
politics seldom rose above the level of a protection racket. Various war lords, or just
gang leaders, having acquired a following of tough guys and some weapons, made
their living by raiding defenseless farmers and herders, stealing their crops
and animals. In an agricultural
economy such raids, especially repeated raids, meant a very hard life indeed for many
people.
Eventually,
a war lord might come along, strong enough to call himself a king. This king and his army would round up the
smaller gangs and do them in, or bring them into his army and discipline
them. No more freelance raiding. Then the king would call together all the
heads of families and clans of the region he had pacified, and say something
like this:
“My
name is Great So-and-So. I am the king
of your world. With my great power I
have put down your enemies. Thanks to
me, you may now live and prosper in peace, on certain conditions. You will send me an annual tribute. Whenever I require your service in my army,
you will send at once the number of men I call for. And you will sign a covenant, promising to
keep faith with me, your king. Just so
nobody forgets, you will store this writing in a
sacred place, and you will come together like this, annually, and read it out
loud to the whole population, so that everybody will know: You are my people; I am your king. You keep your word; I’ll keep mine, and
things will go well with you. Break your
covenant with me, and I promise I will make you very, very sorry.”
That
way of keeping down gang leaders and war lords became the traditional way kings
established and kept order throughout the region. A scholar, George Mendenhall, early in the
20th century, found such covenants all over the ancient Near East. Sometimes, perhaps, this was a good enough
arrangement, if the king and his generals did not get too greedy. But, as the history of the world amply
demonstrates to this present day, where peace and prosperity, for the vast
majority of the people, depend on the moderate desires of human kings and
generals for wealth and power, the people can depend on nothing but oppression
and misery. When those on top get greedy
and want for themselves splendid palaces - while the people live in hovels -
and addicted to ever more power than they need to keep order, the shape of a
monstrous pyramid is the shape of the entire social structure. It weighs very heavily on, crushes, the
freedom of the masses at the bottom.
At
some point in time - at what point is for anthropologists and historians to
argue - some genius, somebody who had seen much of how kings and generals
generally operate, came up with a new metaphor borrowed from the
protection-racket model of politics.
This metaphor is based on an unlikeness:
The King of the Universe is not like these human kings.
“The
Ruler of the realm of all nature is generous, not greedy. He makes the grass and the fruits of the
earth to grow, the rains to fall and the sun to shine for all the creatures of
the earth. Thus he shows his love for all the world. How
can we not love God in return! Moreover,
our Creator causes us human beings to love one another and our land and
animals, as he loves us. We do not need
these human kings. We can enter into a a political and religious covenant with each other and
with the King of the Universe to be ruled by his holy ways of love and
generosity.
“We
must draw everyone into this covenant, even the least and the weakest, even the
gang leaders who sometimes rise up among us.
For if we have not lived by the ways of love, our Creator has made us so
that we can change our ways and start over and do right. Our freedom to change is a gift of his
forgiveness and mercy. If we freely
cooperate, because we love, we can protect ourselves against would-be kings and
other invaders. We can assemble to fight
at the sound of the shofar. But when we
have done what we have to do to protect ourselves, we will return to our homes
and lay down our weapons. Let the
nations around us fight and rage. We
will not. We will live every man under
his vine and fig tree and keep covenant with our God, King of the Universe, and
with one another. All he requires of us
- blessed be he - is that we love him and love our neighbors as ourselves, and
keep the natural, common sense laws of a peaceful community because we love.”
Who
was the genius who invented this covenantal metaphor? Assigned new meaning to the old words, king
and covenant? Was it Noah? Or Abraham? Or Moses? It doesn’t
matter. What matters is that the idea of
a freely entered covenant - with the very nature of loving and lawful reality -
became the root idea of the political religion of a people, the ancient
Israelites. The Israelites told each
other and wrote down stories about their political and religious covenant and
their attempts to keep covenant with one another and with God. They created a literature which nourished
their memories and their hopes. They fed
their own dedication, to a loving and free and cooperative way of life, with
stories of their great King of the Universe and his care for them, as well as
the wrath of his anger when they broke their covenant with him, by doing wrong
to one another. Our modern understanding
of political democracy evolved from our ancestors’ engagement with and adaptations
of Israelite stories. American democracy
was born when members of our own oldest churches in
The
most ancient Israelites were a rural people - probably, in the earliest days, a
polyglot people of many races. For their small country was at the crossroads of great
surrounding empires. They did not
themselves long do without a human king, maybe a few centuries. Then they had the same kind of problems too
much power in the hands of too few always brings. Yet again and again, there also rose up
preachers - prophets, in Hebrew nabi - to speak hard
truth to power. The prophets said, over
and over again, “The
ways of greed and coercion are in violation of God’s patterns. These ways will not work. If you think they will, you are
deceived. They will suck you and the
land with you into ruin. Turn to the
ways of love and justice for the oppressed.
For these ways are the ways of the King of the Universe, whose laws are
loving and just because he is loving and just, and he demands that we be like
him in all our ways.”
Ancient
But
ancient
What
was new about this new covenant? The
meanings of words change, all the time, at different rates, as old metaphors
are broken and new ones are invented. So
I shall try to say what was new about the covenant of the earliest Christian churches, using other words
than those we associate with orthodox Judaism or Christianity. Freedom to use new words to transfer old
meaning is part of the authentic and lawful freedom of a liberal.
Jesus
thought like a sociologist and a linguist.
That is to say, he understood that the metaphor of the covenant with the
King of the Universe had become hopelessly confused with the language of coercive governmental
regimes. His people were now thinking of
the King of the Universe as more like than unlike human kings.
So,
Jesus basically said,
“Look, you are obsessed with Caesar and his power. Bracket Caesar. Set Caesar aside. Sure the government controls much of your
life, far too much. But no human ruler,
not even the Roman Emperor, can control all life. You want to know what is holy? What we can count on? What we ought to be most faithful to? How we
ought to shape our own lives, insofar as we can? Look at the flowers of the field and the
birds of the air. Look at how seeds
sprout and grow. Focus on these
things. Appreciate and be grateful for
the generous ways of God the Father (rather than the King of the Universe).
“Above all look at ordinary, everyday human
love, of parents for their children and children for their parents. And look inside your own heart at your
ability to change, to go from treating others as crassly and meanly as Caesar
treats you, to the more normal, healthy ways of a loving spirit.”
And
Jesus and his disciples spoke politically; that is, with regard for organization. They said, “Lord knows, it is not always easy
to figure out what are the ways of love!
But even within this empire, we can form covenanted congregations we
decide to enter, one by one, and help each other live in a context far larger
than the puny
What
would Jesus’ message sound like if addressed to our time? I think, something like this: “Look, I know some of you think all the power
that matters is in the human hands of Wall Street traders, the grossly
deceiving advertising industry and the grossly shallow entertainment industry
of
Our Contemporary Liberal Covenant
I
begin this section by giving utterance to some questions. I put it to you that there is one correct
answer to every one of them. The correct
answer is not an explanation of anything, but rather a fit, an appropriate
exclamation. The correct answer to all
these questions is: God! I don’t know!
How
big is the universe in which we are this moment alive?
How
long will it last?
Why
- not how but - why is there such an event as human life?
Every
person we know is more than we will ever know; we never even know all of
ourselves. How is it we so often forget
that we dwell all our lives in mystery?
Why
do human beings so urgently need to love and to be loved?
Is
love just a human requirement, or is it a feature of
the whole universe?
Why
is it, even when we human beings have all our bodily needs met, we can become
so alienated that we hate our own lives, and are only terribly bored or angry
or lonely or frightened, though the world holds much that we could not help
loving, if we but noticed and paid attention, let these things speak to us?
Why
is it we human beings can come to love things and devote all our energies to
gaining access to things patently bad for us, even poison, like drugs or
alcohol, or to acquiring far more money than we need, or far more power over
others than anybody needs, or status, or fame - when none of these things turn
out to be worth what we have to do to get them?
How
many events are going on right now which will greatly affect us in future, of
which we presently know nothing?
Why
is it that we are gifted with such imagination that we can learn of and
understand and love realms of reality and other cultures in which we have never
set foot, and yet we may also be led by our imagination into delusion and
craziness?
How
is it that we can sometimes see patterns in the way world works, and sometimes
not? How many times do we wrestle and
wrestle with some problem, work and work with the data, and then suddenly, just
see meaning we didn’t see earlier? “We
say, “Why didn’t I think of this before?”
Or,
we hear somebody else’s good idea and we say, “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Or,
we are reminded of something very important, which we already knew, and we say,
“How on earth could I have forgot?”
Language
itself can serve as a metaphor. It is
metaphorically correct to say reality addresses human beings, speaks to us, and
summons our love and our understanding and our humility - when we are open,
passive, receptive to what it has to say to us. Thus the compound meanings of the word logos in
Greek. The logos is the word reality has
spoken to us; the logos is natural
law; the logos is reason or logic
greater than all, yet present in each.
The
questions I read are not
questions we human beings just make up on our own. Rather, to be human is to be engaged in a
ceaseless dialogue, a conversation, not only with each other but, with the
nature of reality. Reality addresses us,
and we respond with questions. Or, as Martin Buber once said, we may have it
backwards when we suppose we pose these unanswerable questions. It may be that God always poses the ultimate
question, as in the Book of Job. “Where
were you when I created the world?” The
only correct answer is, “God! I don’t
know!” And strangely, the rational
humility of that answer is not humiliating, but salutary, healing and
empowering. A rightly humbled Job can
get up from the ashes of despair and get on with a blessed life, taking
advantage - whatever has gone before - of the new possibilities reality
constantly presents to us.
It makes sense to me to believe all the
great religious traditions of our world began with somebody’s extraordinary
insight into what, in all this great buzzing banging, blooming, and silent
mystery, really matters most for human beings to love, to understand, to trust
and be faithful to, because it is life giving and life enhancing. If anybody wants to call such extraordinary
insight revelation, it’s all right by me.
The question of revelation is:
Why should one person or one group ever understand anything,
and others not? I don’t know why, but
what is truly wonderful
about extraordinary insights is:
They can be communicated, shared, taught to others who see them, then,
too, and generate whole cultures from them.
Our word religion derives from the same root present in the word
ligament. Without healthy and
importantly true religious insights into the mystery of our lives, we’re like
Ezekiel’s pile of dry and unconnected bones, with no ligaments. A vital religion keeps us tied together, so
we can stand up and move and get things done and live, with love and meaning,
together, when a healthy cult is the heart of a culture.
All
religions must use metaphors to express insights into the nature of reality,
metaphors taken from our everyday experience, because there’s no other way to
express them. Some metaphors may serve
very well and last a long time. But all
of them are ultimately fragile and subject to erosion and distortion. Hence, the need for reform
of the language of every religion, over and over and over.
You
and I stand, as Unitarian Universalists, in the long tradition of the
covenantal free church. We add the adjective liberal and say ours is
a liberal free church, meaning - our everyday world has forced upon us the
recognition that no one religious tradition has a monopoly on right love and
truth. We infer, from our encounters
with other traditions, that there have been and are people of extraordinary
insight, into what really matters for human beings, in every time and clime. Therefore, though the depths of our own
tradition are more available to us - through inheritance - and are the depths
from which we must live, we want to and we will try to be open to others. We are not exclusivists, claiming our way is
the only good way. Yet, we do specially
treasure our own religious tradition precisely for its political relevance, for
its constant reminder to us that human freedom and human health is a function
of how we organize socially, what is the shape of our economic and governmental
as religious institutions.
You
and I stand, as Unitarian Universalists, in the long tradition of the
covenantal free church. We add the adjective humanist and say ours is
a humanist tradition - meaning our everyday world has forced upon the
recognition that valid religious insights, even the most extraordinary, are
always rooted in ordinary human experience of concrete events. To know anything at all about reality in
general - 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, not in a doctrinaire fashion, always with the awareness that we might be
wrong. Faith is best understood, not as
certainty, but as sufficient confidence and trust in what we have been given
and called to do that we can be faithful, together, covenantally. We can - thank God! - be faithful to what we
cannot help believing is true about the way things are with us, and should be
and could be, because it makes sense to us.
And when we break faith and break our covenant we can - thank God! - many and many a time accept opportunity to begin again,
begin anew to live faithfully, starting now.
For this we cannot help believing:
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, new
chances for the practice of authentic, creative, lawful and loving, redemptive
freedom.
I
will try in a few words to state, as simply and straightforwardly as I can, the anthropology and theology of a covenantal, liberal
and humanist free church in our time.
Can I do so in such a way as to win universal approval among us? Of course not. Even so, I trust that our - my and your -
efforts to communicate our understanding of the most important realities of our
lives are almost always beneficial - or as our ancestors would have said - good
for our mutual edification.
We
human beings are promising creatures, in more than one sense. We are born with promise, potential, we do
not and cannot create, with the promise of intelligence, of appreciation, of
creativity, of cooperation - and most importantly - of love. Our very capacities and capabilities are a
gift to us of the way things are.
Therefore, it is appropriate to begin our worship services with songs of
praise and gratitude for all gifts not made by human hands but, by God. Even so, we are and ought to be pretty
sparing in our use of the word God. It’s
a word easily abused, and most authentically used as an exclamation, in face of
the wonder and splendor of our lives, even in the hardest of times.
We
human beings are promising creatures, too, in the sense that we can only do
great and worthy things - indeed we can only survive - when we make and keep
promises of loyalty and faithfulness to the ways of love, with others. For distinct and different as we are as
individuals, we are also thoroughly social creatures. The options and choices we have as
individuals are effected and affected by those of others; our decisions and
actions and inaction effect and affect many others. None of us can fulfill our promise as
individuals without the faithfulness and loyalty of many others. Therefore, the aim of our worship services is
a renewal of our sense of gratitude for and loyalty to the spirit of love which
summons and creates and re-creates right loyalties within us.
What
is spirit? There’s no saying precisely,
because the reality we are talking about is measureless. Best point to our everyday uses of the word
and leave it to each to make their own analogy.
We talk of a spirit of generosity or a spirit of cooperation. We talk about the esprit de corps in a vital army unit or workforce. We talk about a healthy school spirit. We talk about spirited horses. When a friend is ill, we ask the family, “How
are his spirits?” We do know what we
mean by the phrase spirit of mutual love, and that a free church exists
wherever we enter into a covenant to live in this spirit, together, gathering
regularly for public worship and for seeking truth together, for listening to a
responding to one another, that we might teach and be taught. The mutual spirit of love is alone worthy of
our greatest, our ultimate loyalty. For
when we kill it, we open ourselves to deadly and destructive, evil, unworthy
doing.
We
human beings are also promise-breaking creatures. We violate our covenants in petty, small ways
and in tragic, disastrous ways. Whether
we do so out of sheer forgetfulness or poorly ordered priorities or ignorance
or for motives we ourselves cannot admire, the negative consequences are real
for the whole interdependent web.
Therefore, our worship services need to include time for reflection on our
own failures and mistakes, that we might be people of tender conscience, easily
provoked to turn again toward the ways of love and do better tomorrow than we
have done today. Love is a response to
the loveliness, the charm, the good, the worth of an
other. To be life-long passionately
religious lovers is to learn and practice the precious disciplines of paying
attention and being still, receptive to the lure of that beyond ourselves which
awakens love in us. For when we rightly
love, we rightly spend ourselves for the sake of the beloved and for the just
character of our whole society.
We
human beings, especially in a culture so complex as
ours, are part of many communities. We
need one - our freely, covenanted church community - in which our purpose is to
be reminded of and to take account of the promising character of human beings
in the widest possible sense, that we may answer the summons, the call of
reality to live with authenticity and integrity and joy and resolution. For responsibility is a response to the way
the world presents itself to us when we are paying attention and trying to
discern the word it speaks to us, as mediated by and tested for sense in
earnest and intentional, social dialogue.
It
is certainly possible for people to be in an implicit covenant without saying
so. They just gather and act together,
freely, in love and for good ends.
Recognition of this fact is at the heart of our concept of the church
universal, that measureless company of people whose goodness has been and is
effective in shaping human history throughout history. Yet it is also very important to distinguish
between the church universal and a particular, concrete and local free church,
lest our understanding of the free church become an
empty abstraction, a fuzzy ideal bearing no relation to the everyday lives of
actual people. Our local church covenant
needs to be as clear and explicit as we can make it, that we may teach it to
our children, as the reasonable explanation they deserve of why we do things as
we do in this church, and that we may invite others - as many others as will -
to join us in making and renewing, again and again, our promise of loyalty to
the ways of love that matter most in human life, that we might fulfill our
promise. For the free church
covenant is at bottom the covenant a free society requires. The creative freedom of our whole society
will endure for just the length of time we together understand and teach and
keep our covenant and speak with our own mouths the words of love and truth and
freedom the whole world always needs to hear.
An appendix to Lecture 4: One version of our liberal covenant
Though
our knowledge is incomplete,
our truth partial
and our love uneven,
From
our own experience and from
the witness of our
faith tradition
We
believe
that new light is ever waiting to break
through individual
hearts and minds
to illumine the
ways of humankind,
that there is mutual strength
in willing
cooperation,
and that the bonds of love keep open
the gates of
freedom.
Therefore
we pledge
to walk together in
the ways
of truth and
affection
as best we know
them now
or may learn them
in days to come
That
we and our children may be fulfilled
And
that we may speak to the world
with words and
actions
of peace and
goodwill.