by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

We bring a lot with us when we come together here on Sunday.

I’m reminded of this when I read the prayer requests people write down and put in the prayer urns in both galleries. They are then taken and read and prayed over by our lay ministers every week.

A request for healing from cancer.

For a job change

A request for a man and his relationships—that they may develop and be life-giving.

Prayers for the family of one who died at age 22 of Grave’s disease.

For a safe and healthy pregnancy.

For strength and comfort in divorce

For courage in facing and dealing with depression

For self awareness.

Prayers for one whose mother died of suicide.

Please pray for me that I do not drink alcohol today.

Church is a place where we bring the events of our lives. It is a place where we mark the passage to time. It is a place where we live with the dual reality that we are alive and that we will die.  We are reminded that just as others have come before others will come after us.

Church, hopefully, is a place where we are able to put our lives into perspective, a place where we are reminded that what we might be struggling with today someone else has struggled with before and still struggles. I often have the reaction when I read the prayer requests to step back and see that whatever it is I am worked up about in a given week may not be all that serious compared to what some others are experiencing.

Church is a place in the midst of all of this that we are to be reminded that we are not alone. It is a place where we join with others and in that joining recognize that our voice is stronger when it is in communion with others.

Church is a place where a great deal is possible. But it is also a very human institution. Churches can mirror the best and the worst of the people in them. They can be full of pettiness and hurt. They can also be full of compassion and love and hope.

Which leads us to the question: So what is it that holds us together?

What holds us together is covenant.

Covenant, most simply, means “to come together.” Covenant, more specially, means “to come together by making a promise.” When two people join in marriage they promise to love and care for one another.

This is one way we say it here: Love is the spirit of this church and service its law. This is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love and to help one another.

When the women of the Ladies’ Sewing Society founded our church in 1865 they adopted this preamble:

“We, the friends of Liberal Christianity, pioneers of that Christian Faith in this new land, do here unite for the purpose of strengthening each other in the same, and pledge ourselves, God helping, that by prayer and earnest effort we will use every endeavor to promote and advance the cause.”

As Unitarian Universalists we enter into covenant willingly, of our own choice. We emphasize that we come together as a free faith, that we make choices about our lives.

In 1644, our Puritan ancestor Richard Mather wrote: “Our covenant may be implied by constant and frequent acts of communion performed by a congregation…the falling in of their spirits into communion in things spiritual...”

Theologian Rebecca Parker holds up this as a lovely phrase, “the falling in of their spirits into communion in things spiritual...” and says that it is important for us to recover this dimension of covenant. She calls it an antidote to our radical individualism. We need this older sense that covenant is brought into being by grace and sustained by practice. Our verbal promises are the frosting on the cake, not the cake itself. They may help us keep the covenant we are in, but they are not the covenant itself.[1]

She says that as Unitarian Universalists, we most often speak of covenant as a verbal statement of promise between individuals who exercise their power to choose, and thus bring community into being. There are historical reasons why we think this way. It is an expression of the dominance of an individualistic understanding of human existence. Individual first, then community.

These are days when we find ourselves searching for meaning maybe more than ever. And we think first of ourselves as individuals. This is reinforced by the fact that we live in a culture that most of all values us as consumers. We are what we have and it is easy to see our lives valued by how many material goods we have or how much it is that we produce. What happens over time is that it can become pretty apparent that consuming more doesn’t necessarily correlate to more satisfaction in life.

What we see around us is all kinds of separation. We see wars that claim so many innocent lives being fought over natural resources. We see widespread destruction of the earth and waste of the earth’s resources. Now again it is election season and we see willingness to do whatever it takes to win. It doesn’t matter how honest or dishonest the campaign ads might be.

It is important to be together these days. It is important to be reminded that we are not alone in the world. Being together in covenant calls us to live in right relationship with ourselves, with others, with the very earth that we inhabit.

Covenant calls us to live in a way that is loving, that is just, that is fair. Covenant is a living, breathing way of being in the world. And as it asks our spirits to fall into communion it calls us to live in a way that might sustain us in times such as these. Covenant reminds us that life has been given to us and that we need to make it possible for future generations to live and to be sustained.

It calls us away from our illusion of separateness. It is easy to focus not on how we are connected but on how we are different. It is easy to focus on what is wrong and not what is right. It is easy to see ourselves as superior and not to see how we, too, might be responsible when relationship is broken. 

But covenant reminds us that we are part of something much larger. It asks us to be with our brokenness that we might be better able to heal the brokenness of the world.

A story. There was a man who had been a devout Jew. As a boy and young man, he had joyfully worshipped his God in the village shul, and he kept all of God’s commandments and laws.

But when he entered his twenties, the man turned away from God, he rebelled against his law-laden religion, and went off to live in a faraway city. Once there, he chose a secular life, and in an act of clear defiance against his tradition, he had bold colorful tattoos inscribed over the surfaces of his arms and chest. Each time he admired the tattoos in the mirror he felt liberated from his restrictive past.

But, one day he awoke and yearned to turn back to his God, to reenter his community. In keeping with tradition, the man knew that he would first have to undergo a mikva (or ritual bath) in order to purify himself before God prior to entering the temple. He returned to his village and hurried excitedly to the mikva.

Once he had disrobed and was poised to step into the bath, a community leader blocked his way and angrily admonished him that, according to strict Jewish law, no one who had demeaned and mutilated himself through the act of being tattooed was permitted to enter the mikva for fear that it would defile the water.

The tattooed man sat dejected on the edge of the bath and began to softly weep. Would he never be reconciled again to his God or to his community? Would his tattoos forever be like the proverbial Mark of Cain, preventing his redemption?

A second man came upon him crying and bent down to inquire of his suffering, and the tattooed man explained his plight. The second man held out his arm, upon which one could clearly see a crude row of blue identification numbers that been tattooed there, against his will, by the Nazis at Auschwitz. The Holocaust survivor took the tattooed man’s hand and gently said, “Come. Let us step into the bath together.”

We live in times when we are asked to step out of our comfort zones. We are asked to always remember the stranger and welcome them in. We live in times when we need one another. We need to have for ourselves a way to come back to our center, to our own sense of wholeness.

We need to recognize our brokenness, that we let ourselves down, that we let others down. We have to recognize that our actions are often not perfect. But we also recognize in that same moment that we are enough. We are called to live in faith that what we offer will be enough.

Living in covenant, living in relationship with something larger, we are reminded of that. We are reminded that over and over again is the invitation to live in the world, to be part of the world, to not be separate and isolated but to live as one.

The church is a collection of people—we bring all of our gifts, all of our brokenness—to join together. The church is a place that helps us find our way in the world. It is a place that points us in the right direction.

Author Anne Lamott recalls about a story told by her minister in her book Traveling Mercies.[2]

“When she was about seven,” her minister said, “(my) best friend got lost one day. The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, ‘You could let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.’”

"And that," Lamott concludes, "is why I have stayed so close to (my church) – because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home."

As a community we act as a kind of compass for one another. We are here together to see that we are headed in the right direction and to have a place where we can make corrections as needed. No matter how scared, no matter how alone we might be, it is a place we can return to. But in the end we strive to find our way home in the world to do and be what we are called to do and be in the world and to keep finding our way in the world. We come together and hear our voices, no matter how tawny, and know that we are in the right place.

That is the gift we have been given. For this gift we give thanks and pledge ourselves once again that it might flourish.

Prayer

Spirit of life, be with us this day. Be with us in all our days. Call us always into right relationship. Call us into a fullness of being. Remind us that we are not alone. Call us to do what we must do to heal the broken world. Help us look to a new time. Give us courage that we make manifest a world that is just, a world grounded in love. Amen.

Benediction

It is good that we are here together in this place. Go into the world mindful that you are not alone. Live in courage. Live in love and hope. Amen.