What Binds Us? Sunday, September 27, 2015 Yesterday I went back to my college for a tree-planting ceremony. Like every class since Wellesley was founded, we d planted a class tree in our sophomore year. But unlike every class tree, our tree died last winter after its roots drank up too much road salt. So the College offered to plant another one for us, and my class officers decided to make it a mini-reunion. Since I d organized ceremonies for these kinds of occasions when I was the UU Chaplain at Wellesley, they asked me to plan the program. I looked back over old programs and found that a hundred years ago students used to write silly odes to the tree sometimes even to the shovel, so I suggested that we ask our classmates to see if they could write an ode to the tree or a lament for our dead tree or a haiku for the shovel. And they did. But we also had people asking to bring readings about trees, and one of my classmates asked if she could read Shel Silverstein s book The Giving Tree. Do you all know this book? It s about the life-long relationship between an apple tree and a boy. The tree gives him her branches to climb, her shade to rest in, her apples to eat and later to sell, her branches to build a house, and her trunk to build a boat. The tree gives and the boy takes. You either love this book or you hate it, and as you may have guessed I m one of the people who hates this book. I think the model of self-sacrifice that it presents is not healthful, and especially with the added twist that the tree is portrayed as female, I think it can perpetuate harmful stereotypes. At the end of the story, after the tree has been cut down, the boy, now an old man, comes back to her after having been away a long time and she apologizes that she has nothing left to give him for she is now only a stump. But since all the boy needs now is a place to sit and rest, he sits on her stump. It s not a bad image in the book, but I once saw a church school dramatize the story, and their play ended with the girl playing the tree down on her hands and knees with a boy sitting on her back. As always for me, whatever I m thinking about for my sermon illumines everything else in my week, so I started thinking about The Giving Tree in the context of covenant. Perhaps had the relationship between the boy and the tree been a covenantal relationship, not a contractual relationship, things between them might have been healthier and happier for the Tree. A contract lays out what each party agrees to do and if one of them doesn t follow through there are consequences the contract may be dissolved, one party may be fined. A contract assumes that once things have been set, nothing will change that what is wanted and what is offered will remain the same. So in the relationship between the boy and the tree, their unspoken contract was that the tree offered fruit, shade, and lumber in return for the boy s companionship. If she had stopped giving, the boy would have stopped coming to visit her. As in their relationship, a contract also often has an imbalance of power. 1
A covenant relationship is not so black and white. It assumes that each party will grow and change in fact that s the purpose of a covenant to help each become more whole. In a covenant a new entity is formed there s the two parties and then the larger unit they become. In a marriage ceremony, for instance, two people enter into a covenant to love and nurture each other and to form a new entity - a couple - which will grow and change as the individual spouses grow and change. Often when a couple I m marrying is using a unity candle in their ceremony, they ll ask me if they should extinguish their individual candles after they ve lit the unity candle, and I tell them always No. Marriage doesn t erase them as individuals; rather their individual flames must burn brighter for the marriage to succeed. There are no terms offered in a covenant, though it may be broken, because the assumption behind a covenant is that as things change or as one party isn t able to keep a part of it, forgiveness and second chances will be offered. As in Wendell Berry s poem, when we engage the other, even though it may be scary and require us to change, our songs grow richer and entwine to make a new melody. Like a marriage, our church community rests on covenant. In fact all our UU congregations rest on covenants and our Unitarian Universalist Association itself is made by covenant among all these covenanted congregations. Our tradition of covenant goes back to our Puritan ancestors. When they arrived in the new world, they did away with the bishops and hierarchy of the Church of England. Their congregations were based in the authority of the gathered community, and those communities weren t organized around a statement of belief, as the Church of England but around a covenant, a statement of how they would be together. Their covenants used slightly different language from ours today but like ours their goal was to walk together in peace to explore the ways of truth and justice. And their understanding of covenant went right back to the passage from Leviticus which is part of the explanation of the covenant Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, the covenant between the Israelites and God. Yahweh promises to be their support and guide, to lead them out of the desert of slavery into a land of fulfillment, and they promise to show their love and regard for Yahweh by honoring and caring for others. It s summed up in that line at the end: Love your neighbor as yourself. This is a radical change from previous divine/human relationships. Before, they were contractual. You make sacrifices to me, perform the rituals my priests have set, and I will favor you. No sacrifices or rituals, no favor. Thank of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They can stay in the garden only as long as they don t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Once they eat, they re out no second chance, no forgiveness. That s a contract. But with Abraham and Sarah, things change a relationship begins to form between the people and their God, and that relationship comes to fullness in the covenanting Moses makes with Yahweh. What 2
we think of as The Old Testament God, the god of vengeance, is mainly from the early books when the relationship between God and human kind is contractual. After the covenant is made, the imagery and language God uses becomes more nurturing the prophet Isaiah imagines Yahweh saying I have engraved you on the palms of my hands. By the power of their covenant, Yahweh changes, the people change, and the union between them grows and changes. That s a covenant. So what do the words we say every Sunday, say about us? First, these words are not unique to our congregation. James Vila Blake who was the minister of the Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois, wrote it for that congregation in 1894. Other congregations picked it up, and a recent survey of congregations found that 41 of our congregations still use it today. So as we say it, we are bound not just with one another, but also with other Unitarian Universalists. Do you think about the covenant as we say it each week? It s deceptively simple, but really awe-inspiring as you unpack it, and a little scary in what it commits us to. First, it roots us in love. Everything we do here must be inspired by love. Whether it s our worship, our education for children, our spiritual deepening programs for adults, our social justice projects, our governance, or our care for our building and our grounds it all must come out of a spirit of love. And it all must be geared toward service toward feeding those who are hungry in body and those hungry in soul. And as we here live out that love and that service, we must do it in peace while seeking truth in love. Peace and truth aren t always a natural union. Sometimes speaking truth, even in love, can lead to conflict, and conflict doesn t feel like peace. Sometimes we may feel that we can t speak our truth in love and still remain in peace so we may be tempted to silence our truth or to walk away from the congregation because we are afraid of disturbing the peace. But silence doesn t make for peace and walking away doesn t lead to truth. Peace isn t about the absence of conflict peace is about conflict worked out in words of love and care and leading us to a new, larger understanding of truth and a new larger vision of service. Saying our covenant together Sunday after Sunday re-commits us to staying in relation with one another, to working out our differences, and being open to all the invitations to grow in love which come to us as individuals and as a larger whole. This covenant lived out will change each of us and change our church in ways we can t always imagine, which we can t always control, and which aren t always easy, but are necessary if we are to sing our songs fully. Without our covenant we would be a club or a civic institution or a service organization all of which can be joined and left as you wish. Our covenant makes us a church, a community of men, women, children, and youth, pledged to one another as in a marriage, to love and to cherish, to honor and to comfort, in sickness and in health, in sorrow and in joy, pledged to encourage our individual flames and the larger flame we all share to burn with ever growing heat and light. 3
This is what binds us not an unchanging statement of belief, not a contract to be fulfilled, but a promise, a promise to ourselves and to one another to support and encourage each other to live out of our hopes, not our fears, to use our gifts to bless ourselves, one another, and our world, and never to stop exploring what it means to be human. For: Love is the spirit of this church, and service is its law. (Join me:) This is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to cherish the living earth, to seek truth in love, and to help one another. I Go Among Trees by Wendell Berry Readings I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight. What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear of me leaves it. It sings, and I hear its song. Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song. After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns, the trees move Leviticus 19:9-18 9 "'When you harvest the ripe crops produced in your land, don't harvest all the way to corners of your field, and don't gather the ears of grain left by the harvesters. 10 Likewise, don't gather the grapes left on the vine or fallen on the ground after harvest; leave them for the poor and the foreigner; I am ADONAI your God. 11 "'Do not steal from, defraud or lie to each other. 12 Do not swear by my name falsely, which would be profaning the name of your God; I am ADONAI. 13 Do not oppress or rob your neighbor; specifically, you are not to keep back the wages of a hired worker all night until morning. 14 "'Do not speak a curse against a deaf person or place an obstacle in the way of a blind person; rather, fear your God; I am ADONAI. 15 "'Do not be unjust in judging - show neither partiality to the poor nor deference to the mighty, but with justice judge your neighbor. 16 "'Do not go around spreading slander among your people, but also don't stand idly by when your neighbor's life is at stake; I am ADONAI. 17 "'Do not hate your brother in your heart, but rebuke your neighbor frankly, so that you won't carry sin because of him. 18 Don't take 4
vengeance on or bear a grudge against any of your people; rather, love your neighbor as yourself; I am ADONAI. 5