The rains have come and the parched and thirsty earth has been drinking in the life giving moisture.
The rains have come … and the cool days and the cooler nights. After the unparalleled intensity of heat this summer, our human spirits welcome this turning of the season…
Even the summer lovers among us, like myself, feel thankfulness that our mother still nurtures us, that the promise of the turning seasons is being fulfilled once again.
The promise is being fulfilled once again.
If past patterns hold, there will be more bright sunny days and more warmth before fall arrives in earnest. But right now we are living a promise fulfilled. A promise embodied in the life-giving rain.
Last week I spoke of covenant being a promise, but not fundamentally a spoken promise. Covenants can be expressed in words…the words are what we often think of when we speak of covenant. But covenants are lived. Covenants are embodied in the decisions that we make and the practices we follow. Covenants are practiced.
I want to spend some time this morning reflecting on promises and predictability in the world. On how we practice our promises…how we embody them…and the impact of our promises…the question of whether our promises have agency…whether our promises have an impact…or more specifically, the nature of the agency…our promises can hold.
This sermon has an ambitious arc…
Let’s see how far we can get into this conversation.
Julia Griffiths, in her moving testimony last week, spoke of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, to make the point that the Earth loves us…just look at all that we have been given…the Earth loves us.
And that belief is an answer to a fundamental question: Is this world a welcoming, a friendly world for us…or is the world a dangerous place.
The song that the choir just offered…You’ve Got a Friend…says yes to welcome…even though “people can be so cold.” A “yes, but” answer.
Kimmerer and the dominant strains of most indigenous traditions come down firmly on the welcoming side…on the beauty and wonder of creation, on abundance and on the need for gratitude.
I’ll get to the argument on the “this is a dangerous world” side in a few moments.
The world is a welcoming place. A predictably welcoming place.
How do we respond? What is our role in our covenant with the Earth? What practices reflect the promises we make in response to the earth’s abundance?
Kimmerer speaks of the practices of the peoples who lived on the Oregon coast long before Europeans arrived.
Those peoples lived primarily from the sea, fishing off the coast during much of the year.
When the fishing canoes were gone too long, “the families [would] go down to the beach to light a blaze among the driftwood, a beacon to sing them home to safety. When the canoes finally approach[ed], laden with food from the sea, the hunters [were] honored in dances and songs, their dangerous journey repaid in faces alight with gratitude.”
The people lit a beacon, a light, to sing them home to safety.
And so too, those peoples made ready for the arrival of their brothers who brought food in the canoes of their bodies…the salmon.
If the rains were late and the water low and the Salmon had not yet arrived, the people would set the grass on Cascade Head a-light, burning the headland. The flames, contained by the wet green wall of the forest which did not burn…the flames rose above the headland, 1400 hundred feet above the surf, saying to the Salmon: “Come back, my brothers. Come back to the river where your life began.”
In the morning after the burn, the headland was gray and white, dusted with ash…but the Salmon came…welcomed by the people who waited several days before taking any fish from the run…taking fish only after many thousands of fish have made it up stream. Then they took one fish and made a feast, and returned the bones of that fish to the river, pointing the skeleton up-stream so that its spirit could continue the journey home.
Kimmerer concludes: “The [salmon] are destined to die as we are all destined to die, but first they have bound themselves to life in an ancient agreement to pass it on. …to pass it on… In so doing, the world is renewed.”
They have bound themselves to life… in an ancient agreement…an ancient covenant, if you will…an embodied covenant…offering self so that life can go on and the world can be renewed.
Kimmerer does not claim to know how those earlier peoples felt. “Only fragments of the story of [the burning of Cascade] Head remain with us. The people who knew all the stories were lost before their knowledge could be captured and the death was too thorough to have left many tellers behind.”
Did the actions of those peoples and their rituals of welcome and of gratitude have agency?
Did their careful approach have an impact?
is that what ensured that the cycles of life were completed…did their actions, their habits…their embodied promises…were they the causes of sustainability and renewal?
Did the salmon even notice the flames on the headland? Was that change of light what called them toward the river?
Most of us would question that. Though, in the back of our minds, we might…just for a moment…remember how sensitive to changes in light even we are as the seasons change around us. And how a light in the distance can signal welcome and home to us when we have been wandering in the dark…the physical dark or the dark night of the soul.
We might even put aside the way fire has become a threat to our overpopulated way of life and imagine a time when fire was seen as a resource rather than an apocalypse.
But back to the question of agency.
Even if we put aside the question of direct causation for a moment…most of us would be skeptical of that…
But here is the thing. The fire on the headland may well not have changed the salmon’s behavior. Placing the skeleton of the first salmon back in the water pointing upstream…may have had no impact on the spirit of that salmon…regardless of whether you believe fish have spirits or not…
Here is the thing…the people’s action had agency for them…those rituals had impact on their spirits…if only reminding them of the blessings they had received and the appropriate response of gratitude.
And those rituals were not completed just once…but every year. So that the response of gratitude and respect for the creation that sustained their lives…
That covenantal response became habit and infused the lives of those peoples with an attitude of gratitude and the understanding that we live through blessings and that we can return those blessings.
The rituals that embodied their covenant opened and shaped their hearts. Those rituals shaped or reflected the way those peoples understood their world. And whether you believe that those rituals were the cause or the result of that world view…the promises embodied in their behavior were bound up …they were beacons pointing the way for them toward a practice of Community that we might well call Beloved.
There is another thread I want to hold up now. That story of burning the Cascade Headland was really about welcome…the fire on the headland was a signal, a beacon for the salmon and a sign of welcome sent by the people.
It was about welcome.
Our First Unitarian vision statement declares that this church is a beacon as well…
First Unitarian is a beacon of hope for us and for our community, a spiritual center in the heart of our city that helps each of us find our moral compass…
A Beacon of hope.
That is serious language.
If you call yourself a beacon of hope…well, that is a very high bar…and the chances of discovering you have feet of clay are…well…
A beacon of hope…
This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine.
Years ago, I heard Bernice Johnson Reagon sing a different version of that favorite…
Gonna let my little light shine, shine, shine
Gonna let my little light shine, shine, shine
May be someone down in the valley, trying to get home.
Somebody trying to get home.
Most of you know Bernice Johnson Reagon as the founder of Sweet Honey In the Rock.
Her music has inspired and empowered people since the last civil rights struggle.
She describes song as a way to extend the territory you can affect.
Singing has agency…especially for communities of people.
Did you know that This Little Lite was a black, a gospel song? It was confronting not a world of abundance, not a welcoming world. The world of This Little Lite was a dark and dangerous world…not a welcoming world.
If you have taken in nothing else that I have preached from this pulpit, remember that we need faith in the power of love because love is the only thing strong enough to overcome hate and fear. The world is still a dangerous place for far too many of us. You need a brave space to help confront a dangerous world.
That song, This Little Lite, helped call up and inspire a collective covenant of courage…a collective covenant…a movement…even though it was one of those “I” songs. “I’m gonna let it shine.” It sounds, on the surface, so individual. Perhaps that is why we hear it so easily…
Reagon, in an interview with Bill Moyers described “I songs” this way:
”A lot of these [old, Black] songs are “I” songs-“… in the black community, when you want the communal expression, everybody says “I.” So if there are five of us here and all of us say “I,” then you know that there’s a group.
And a lot of times I’ve found when people say “we” they’re giving you cover to not say whether they’re going to be there or not. … So “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” means that when the march goes, [when we head over the Pettus bridge] I am going to be there.
So it really is a way of saying “The life that I have, I will offer to this [cause].”…to our collective liberation.
I’m gonna let my little lite shine, shine, shine
Cause there’s somebody, down in the valley trying to get home.
It is not just about us…somebody needs a sign…somebody needs a beacon…somebody’s is trying to get home…
That lyric gives that “I Song” an almost Universalist message.
Because we are all in this together and our most fundamental covenant is with the Spirit of Life, with creation and the on-going process of creation in which we have a role to play.
It is not just about us.
This congregation is beginning the work of imagining what adoption of the 8thPrinciple means. The 8th Principle which affirms a commitment to become an anti-racist and anti-oppressive community.
The various ministries, the various communities within the church are assessing themselves and asking what practices may need to be inspected…and some changed. And what promises we need to make to insure that those changes become part of our lived covenant…our covenant in practice.
What kind of beacon should we light?
Should we begin signing our services? With American Sign Language?
Should we explore our history more fully and ask who first lived on the land on which our buildings stand…and how Europeans actually got possession of it. Perhaps ask what restitution might be owed.
Should we look again at accessibility and what it says about us that someone in a wheelchair has to come onto this chancel by a side door.
Should we ask what it means that there are no out transgender persons on our staff?
Shall we look at our worship, with its Protestant form…readings and hymns and that long sermon… and ask how the wisdom of other faith traditions fits within our practice of Sunday morning?
Or should the question be whether we are just friendly…among ourselves…or truly welcoming of the stranger?
I believe there will be many questions…good and important questions…that can emerge from this reflection. Many of those questions, perhaps like some of the questions I just posed, we haven’t thought to ask. That is the nature of living in a culture…a religious culture in this case. It takes real intention to see the water that we are swimming in. More intention to question it.
I believe that a time when we will begin to return to our buildings and gather in person is a good time for these questions to be asked.
And I know that I will not be around when the answers too many of these questions are discerned…
There will be time to celebrate all that we have lived and learned during my ministry among you. And time, yes, to say goodbye.
But the covenant of this congregation, the story of this community will go on. New questions will be asked. New answers will be found. New leadership will be chosen.
But the mission and the covenant of this congregation will go on.
Love is the doctrine of this church. The fundamental covenant of this congregation is to follow the demands of love…to nurture the individual spirit and together work toward the Beloved Community.
And the practice of that covenant calls this community to value the ministry that we have lived and the complex heritage…the spiritual shoulders on which the congregation stands…
And, to paraphrase our reading by Elizabeth Alexander:
“[This community] will know itself memoried and storied
Here we endure.
Those who have gone before are not lost to us.
The wind carries sorrows, sighs and shouts.
The wind brings everything forward. Nothing is lost.”
We light a beacon with our lives and promise to lift our eyes
To greet those among us and those we do not yet know who are down in the valley…trying to get home.
Topics: Covenant