For a few years on my spiritual journey, in the early 1980’s, I fancied myself a Roman Catholic. Like many others coming out of the sometimes sterile Mainline Protestant traditions, I fell in love with the beauty, the art, and the music of the mass, of the great cathedrals, the appeal to the senses, smell and sound and color. The powerful and Spirit-full winds of Vatican II were blowing. A priest named Matthew Fox was writing about original blessing instead of original sin, developing what would come to be known as Creation Spirituality. A few brave bishops seemed to be opening the door to tolerance, if not an actual welcome, to members of the LGBTQ community. Who knew? Women priests? Married clergy?
We all know how that story ends, with reactionaries and Opus Dei and a return to the way things were, with drawing lines and deciding that those who embraced change were the enemy, though of course the world had changed anyway, whether they liked it or not. The result was that each generation since has been less and less engaged with the church, has drifted further from the faith, the rites and sacraments emptied of meaning, just an excuse for a family party. Were it not for Latinx immigrants, the Roman church would be as empty as so many Protestant churches, and with that tap seemingly squeezed shut, they can expect national declines to match those of the Baptists.
I still love the beauty of the mass, even if I no longer have room for the hocus pocus, the misogyny, the authoritarian structure. I continue to appreciate one theological development from that period, what the Vatican called its consistent ethic for human life. As articulated by the Roman church, the faithful Christian, obedient to the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill,†would oppose war, capital punishment, and abortion, all for the same reason. I am completely pro-choice, but I’d prefer to live in a world where access to sex education and birth control rendered abortion a rarity, for I am unsure of the mystery of life. You can’t undo an execution when you later discover that you got it wrong, and we have so many proven cases of wrongful conviction that the entire prosecutorial system looks suspect. I concede that there are circumstance where war is a necessary evil in the world as we know it, yet I dream of a world unknown where justice and love render AR-15s and weaponized drones obsolete. Like St. Martin of Atlanta, I believe that “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.â€
There is one problem, however, with the Roman church’s consistent ethic. It is built on the sure foundation of one of the Ten Commandments. Except that the commandment as we read it, as generation after generation understands it, as memorized in Sunday School back when we taught that sort of thing, is wrong. It does not say “Thou shalt not kill.†It says “Thou shalt not murder.â€
In fact, the 613 Mosaic Laws include quite a few that call for killing, the ultimate sanction, for all sorts of offenders, up to and including rebellious teenagers. And while the thought may have crossed your mind at times, and I’m betting it did, we don’t actually kill them. Ground them, take away the car keys or the cellphone or the Xbox, maybe, but dragging that mouthy moody beast that lives in the room formally occupied by your sweet and loving child out into the street and bludgeoning him or her with stones is not permitted.
The Ten Commandments are a mix of religious law and civil law, for the ancient Hebrew nations, first the United Kingdom of David and Solomon, then the divided Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, aspired to be theocracies. There were no artificial separations between faith and life. What you believed about the transcendent, about the divine, guided how you lived and how the nation was governed. As we saw during our recent study of the Minor Prophets, those who behaved unethically in the market were called out.
Some argue that the Ten Commandments are just a common sense ordering of society, nothing mysterious and divine about them, though it is hard to fit the prohibition on idols and on taking the Lord’s name in vain into that schema. Besides, today everything is negotiable, the religious parts and the common sense civil society parts. No idols and no other gods, except of course the nation and the flag, because through some equation I’ve never solved, God’s option for only one nation and race in ancient times skipped seventeen centuries, from crucifixion to Constitution. Thou shalt not commit adultery, unless you are a rich white man, or well, pretty much anyone at this point… because who gets married? Thou shalt not steal, unless done through a lawyer with fine print, a little insider trading. Thou shalt not kill, unless the other person has brown skin and made you nervous. Thou shalt keep sabbath… well don’t get me started on that one. You are the folks that are actually here, after all.
What were Ten Commandments are now some suggestions, non-binding.
Now, unlike the honorable serial predator from Alabama, I have no interest in placing a carved version of the Ten Commandments in front of the courthouse, nor do I believe it makes any sense to strictly adhere to a legal code that is at least 2600 years old, if not older, which is a good thing, because we couldn’t and don’t. While they are extraordinary for their time, they still belong to a context, worked in that context. But the Ten Commandments do represent an idea so central to human existence that we would not exist without it. Society exists because we surrender some of our autonomy, control some of our impulses, and learn to cooperate. Those who are unable or unwilling to adhere to this social contract, to cooperation and civility, are sometimes labeled mentally ill or just plain evil, though sometimes they are celebrated.
In the civil realm, the state of equilibrium between autonomy and cooperation is called an “open society,†articulated by the philosophers Henri Bergson and Karl Popper. Last Sunday’s New York Times profiled the most influential proponent of an open society today, the hedge fund billionaire George Soros. His Open Society Foundation promotes crazy ideas like individual liberty, pluralism, free inquiry, government accountability, and ethnic tolerance.
Soros, a native of Hungary, was one of many young Jews hidden in plain sight by faithful Christian families during the Holocaust. There is an irony that opponents of an open society, those who profit from the deadly machine of racism and fear, simultaneously use the classic antisemitic tropes of the greedy Jew, dollar signs and a long nose, and also accuse Soros of having been a Nazi.
The entire project of moving to an open society has suffered tremendous setbacks, in the US and abroad. At the same time the sense of community and cooperation has crashed, buried in an avalanche of self-centeredness and screen time, the world is swinging to an authoritarianism that is tribal, barbaric, that views the individual as nothing more than an expendable tool to be used in the pursuit of profit and power.
The understanding of open society as a balance between autonomy and cooperation, between individualism and selflessness, really gels during the Enlightenment, the same age that gave birth to both our form of civil government and our form of church governance. Those systems have evolved, as Thomas Jefferson rightly pointed advised, adapting to meet the needs of a changing and increasingly complex world.
In Blue Hill, we blend direct democracy with representative democracy. Major decisions, from budget to polystyrene bans to the purchase of Salt Pond property, or not as the case may be, are all made by the body as a whole. Other matters, minutia and the mundane, as well as legally confidential matters, are handled by our elected representatives. I sometimes disagree with their decisions.
Take, for example, the new crosswalk. As most will know, just a few weeks before school ended, the crosswalk at the corner of High Street and Tenney Hill, just east of the church, was relocated about 15 yards uphill to the west. And as I knew would happen, being a keen observer of human behavior, the many children walking from the two schools to the library chose not to walk the extra thirty yards, instead jaywalking where the old crosswalk had been. The new location doesn’t add much distance for me, since four of the five times I cross Tenney Hill each day, my Golden Retriever, Oscar, and I are moving between home and church. But with no sidewalk in front of the Legion Hall, we are left to choose between walking in the street or walking across very uneven terrain, and I have brittle bones. The situation, as it exists now, will be a complete disaster when there is snow on the ground.
I’ve thought about a letter to the editor, showing up during the public comments portion of a meeting of our select-persons, because in the current state, the relocated crosswalk is just plain dumb, making a dangerous crossing even worse. But here’s the thing. I trust that they have a plan. Even if I’m expendable, I trust that they will do what is right to protect school children and, of course, Oscar. They are good people, smart people. Where I place myself on the continuum of autonomy and cooperation is up to me, and I choose not to fight over every single thing I don’t like. I’m all for civil disobedience where appropriate, for protests and disruption, but it isn’t always appropriate.
While congregationalism developed in the same 18th century context as the New England town meeting, it can rightly be traced back to today’s reading, theologically rooted in the Mosaic covenant, to the earliest understanding of what it means to be a people of God. The Judeo-Christian religious heritage, Congregationalism, and the United Church of Christ all depend on covenant. Like our contemporary understanding of marriage, covenant is the voluntary entry of two autonomous parties into a binding relationship. This is important. The parties must have autonomy. The relationship must be voluntary. And it must be binding. Anything else is not covenant.
The Mosaic covenant is the exemplar for this way of relating to the divine, is the axis upon which the entire Hebrew religious trajectory spins. We understand the relationships between God and Abraham and between God and the House of David as covenantal Some theologians seek to elevate God’s promise to Noah to the level of covenant as well, but this fails, not only because that story is appropriated from other Ancient Near Eastern cultures, but also because it is one way, it lacks another key trait of covenantal relations, reciprocity and accountability.
We do not have a creed and have long abandoned the theocratic aspirations of the Puritans. We exist as a free church in a free society, autonomous individuals who choose to enter a committed relationship as defined by a series of covenantal statements included in your Order of Service, covenants that were adopted and refined over a course of more than four decades. The foundational covenant of this church is “We come together as followers of Jesus to worship God and walk in God’s ways as they are made known to us.†But it is supplemented by covenants for inclusive language, against prejudice. You cannot be an unrepentant racist and be a member in covenant with this congregation, nor can you be a homophobe. Some will be shocked to discover that the covenant adopted in 2000 requires that we look beyond our local community to the wider world. To be honest, I was a little surprised myself to rediscover that language.
I have been blessed to have been formed as a minister in one of the nation’s oldest Congregational churches, to have studied Congregationalism at Harvard, the conceptual heart of our movement, to have successfully served in congregational settings. I continue to study Congregational history and practice, from the covenants and compacts that bound colonial churches together to the role of covenant in every setting of the United Church of Christ. I have studied and watched that history, as congregationalism, like the old New England town meeting, found a blended system of direct democracy and representative democracy to work best in a changing and complex world.
Christ calls leaders out of community today, just as he did in ancient Galilee. Every single person in that community of disciples voluntarily surrendered a little of their autonomy in exchange for hope and security, for the certain promise and the good news that God is good, each placing God’s way and the way of the community above their own. Love God first. Love your neighbor second. Love yourself last, but do love yourself as well. Discipleship was about relationship, about selflessness. Congregationalism, too, is about love and relationship. It never worshiped reason or popularity, was never a democracy, for our goal has never been enacting the will of the majority, but always and only discerning and enacting the will of God, as difficult as that may be.
In the middle of the last century, Congregationalism became corporate, mirroring civil society, bureaucratic, bloated, inflexible and resistant to change, micro-managed and second guessed until the Spirit had left the building like a sequined Elvis. I have rejoiced with colleagues and in my own ministry as churches have rediscovered covenant, rediscovered how to trust leaders, how to get along with one another, as they have embraced and empowered spiritual artists and religious entrepreneurs. I have been uncomfortable, too, when we have had to relearn accountability the hard way. This re-grounding in covenant has been matched by simplification and covenant renewal in national and conference settings of our church.
This covenant thing is not easy. It requires sacrifice. Gandhi famously listed worship without sacrifice as one of his great seven social sins.
Covenant is the opposite of everything we are taught, every value of 21st century monetized America, is the opposite of “I want†and “I like.†The Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann writes “I understand covenant in our time and place to be a radical alternative to consumer autonomy, which is the governing ideology of our society and which invades the life of the church in debilitating ways.â€
Covenant requires trust and trust requires we know one another, and that is hard to do if we are never together,and when we are together, our hearts and minds are elsewhere, our eyes on our smartphone.
While we can debate the details of Exodus, the Hebrew people understood themselves as being defined by their voluntary and sometimes contentious covenant with Yahweh. This is the heart of our faith, that this divine mystery we name as God chooses to be in relationship with the created, with creatures like us. It is the testament in New Testament, which is just a poor translation of the word covenant. And we, members of a non-credal and evolving tradition, understand ourselves as being defined by our covenants, our voluntary covenant with God as known to us in Jesus, our covenant with one another, the very definition of church.
At our 12th UCC General Synod, Brueggemann summed up covenant as “a way of being committed to each other as God is committed to us, a way of being defined by, accountable to and responsible for each other. God has made that deep and abiding commitment to us. And we affirm that our pilgrimage together is marked by such a costly, disciplined and abiding commitment.â€
Committed… like not dragging that smart-mouthed sixteen year old out into the street with a stone in your hand. No, seriously. I don’t want to make visits to the penitentiary. Committed, like showing up and sticking in even when it is, as Brueggemann notes, costly, even when we don’t get our way, even when the cross and the crosswalk aren’t exactly where we want them. Committed, like listening for the Spirit in the silence and in the storm, like seeing the face of Christ in the face of your neighbor. For the face of Christ can be seen in the face of your neighbor.
Amen.