Gathered Here: Our Covenantal Bond

A Sermon delivered to the Columbine Unitarian Universalist Church

22 April 2001

Michael P. Corrigan

“Gather the Spirit”... “We Gather Together”.... “Here We Have Gathered”... “Gathered Here”.... I gather that by now you have begun to see a theme for today’s gathering—sorry I couldn’t resist. I won’t continue to quote hymn lyrics at you, in case you were wondering...but it might be an interesting occupation to go through the hymnal and see how many hymns use “gatheredness” in word and theme. It’s kind of the reverse of the old joke about UUs reading ahead (instead of singing) to see if there are words we can’t sing, isn’t it?!

In case you don’t have the time or the inclination to pick up a hymnal for the fun little activity I’m suggesting, I’ll tell you—and it will probably come as no great surprise—that there are numerous hymns that talk about “gatheredness,” since “gatheredness” is one of the theological underpinnings of Unitarian Universalism. We cannot speak of our heritage as liberal religionists without talking of “gatheredness” and gathering. Gathering is an active verb that describes collecting, harvesting, grouping, conjoining, holding together...all corporate concerns, since gathering also implies that there is more than one thing to be amassed. And in fact, here you—all of you—have gathered this morning, at the usual time and in the usual place, as you do week by week. And I have gathered here with you, as I agreed to do this morning. Gathering, then, is active and intentional—you have to decide to do it—and it’s based on certain assumptions of how we might find the world and our relationship to it. For the farmer, gathering the harvest follows on the assumptions that soil has been tilled, seeds planted, and crops irrigated and fed and nurtured to maturity. Parents might well see themselves in that metaphor, as perhaps might anyone who has ever created something from gathered materials, time, energy, and commitment.... Gathered materials, time, energy...and, perhaps the most important element—commitment—an agreement made with a certain understanding of the intention of keeping it, as best we can. We “pledge our troth, or trust...” in Tom Owen-Towle’s words. We make promises, with expectations of a particular outcome— that there will be crops to gather; that our children will grow to be strong, productive, self-directed, wholly-human beings; that our work will have purpose and meaning, that our religious community will sustain and nurture each of us...as we sustain it by our commitment to it, and nurture others in it, and outside of it, because of our experience within it.

In theological language, that agreement, that promise made with expectations of keeping it, as best we can, is called “covenant.” If “gatheredness” describes our foundational identity as Unitarian Universalists in community, then covenant is the very warp on which we weave that community, that “gatheredness.” When we covenant as a religious community, we commit ourselves to establishing and living in a relationship of trust, a relationship of “loyalty by faithfulness of vows...fidelity, internal discipline and mutual responsibility...” to our common humanity and to our active existence as part of the interconnected web of all life. In short, we promise—we covenant—“to hold and be held by one another,” because we recognize that “we are not self-sufficient pilgrims...we are not solitary figures, we are communitarians.” And here we are, back again in the circle, or perhaps the spiral, of universal truth, to “gatheredness,” to intentional community in which we yolk ourselves in “serious, abiding commitment”—to one another and to all of life. I believe it is this “gatheredness” based on covenant with one another that makes Unitarian Universalism a unique and richly endowed faith tradition.

Ah...faith tradition.... The word tradition implies—no, it simply oozes with—historical connectedness, with the weight of heritage, with the possibilities of inheritance that make many Unitarian Universalists perhaps just a bit uncomfortable. After all, wasn’t it all that tradition, that panoply of ritual and dogma and creed and practice that made me leave...well, you fill in the blank. Yet, Unitarian Universalism has a heritage, a “foundational story and vision,” as religious educator Tom Groome calls it, whether we know it or not. And that foundational story is the framework on which we Unitarian Universalists build, and rebuild, our own stories of our faith journeys. Well, then, what is our foundational story and vision? The story of our covenantal bond is a long one, so, settle in, hunker down, and give me three or four hours to summarize it for you this morning.... Just kidding!

Our foundational story, however, is a compelling one for anyone like me, with inclinations toward the historical, and I believe for anyone who’d like to know how their own story fits into the foundational story of Unitarian Universalism as a liberal religion for the 21st century. To see the connections between our foundational story and our own stories as liberal religious communitarian pilgrims, we’ll have to leave this century for a bit. Come back with me then a few hundred years to the Reformation of sixteenth-century Europe—a fascinating time and place to explore, if you happen to thrive on the kind of chaos that creates completely new social orders, that is.

Most of us, I suppose, have heard something about the Reformation and its major players. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Hulderich Zwingli, and the legion of political and religious figures such as the Roman Popes presided over the final division of the ancient western Christian establishment—the Roman Catholic Church, which was both a religious and a political power. Most of us also know that as the reformers laid out their theologies before the Church, they were also supported—or opposed—by the rulers of the duchies, the principalities, and the empires that dominated the sixteenth-century European political scene. It happens as well that the concept of “nationhood” was just forming as the reformers were at work. I won’t speculate on whether it was this burgeoning consciousness of “nation” that drove the Reformation or vice versa. The important thing to understand is the assumed link between religion and temporal government.

By the mid-sixteenth century, just after Martin Luther’s death in 1546, there were Lutheran lands and princes, and Calvinist Presbyterian lands and governments, and the Church of England had been established by the Tudor King as the new state religion. Yes, I said “state religion.” In case you were wondering what happened to all the common people during this period, they were, in a way, the most important, if perhaps the least considered, factor in the “magisterial Reformation.” Without Lutheran people (or Calvinist or Anglican), it’s hard to have a church. If the magisterial Reformation, and by that I mean the political and religious movement that divided Europe (and consequently much of the rest of the world) into Roman Catholic and Protestant, had been only a theological debate among learned scholars in European universities, the religious and political geography of Europe and the world would look much different today. In fact, as the Reformation proceeded, as rulers of vast territories and small principalities chose a religious stance, the majority of the people they ruled also “chose” that stance. As was the prince, so were the people, in matters of religious practice. Obviously, one did not really choose one’s religion, unless one happened to be the ruler...or a member of the dissenting minority of “heretics”—those who would choose for themselves their religious faith, and perhaps pay the ultimate price for the freedom of conscience exercised to make that choice.

In every place in sixteenth-century Europe—from the moors of England to central European cities such as Münster, to the plains of Poland and the mountains of Moravia and Transylvania—there were such small groups of dissenters who were choosing their faith on much different criteria than their rulers. Some of these dissenting groups, these “gathered churches,” had been around for a century or two before the Reformation, some began to gather and form with the impetus of political and religious ferment during the sixteenth-century. It is this “wing” of the Reformation, the “radical” Reformation, that we usually hear so little about.

Paradoxically, it is in the soil of the “radical” Reformation that Unitarianism grew and spread from northern Italy to Poland, where it flourished for nearly a hundred years, much of it under great persecution and duress, to Transylvania, and ultimately westward to the Netherlands, England and to the New World. We hear very little in general history courses—or even seminary church history courses—about the “radical” Reformation, and it isn’t really my purpose this morning to give you a history lesson. Others, including several Unitarian and Universalist historians like George Hunston Williams and Charles Howe, have studied and written about our movement, and their works are available and accessible. In fact, there are books and study guides available from the UUA bookstore, if you are interested in creating an adult religious education experience to explore our historical heritage and its implications for our faith tradition today...and tomorrow.

My purpose this morning is to bring to you our foundational story, which is, as I have said, one of “gatheredness” and covenant. Our foundational story during the Reformation is one of conscientious dissent from orthodox Trinitarian theology. For us today, the theological wrangles about One God in three persons—the Trinity—are far less salient than the way our Unitarian ancestors perceived themselves as “church,” as a community of faith, gathered and covenanted, with strong biblical and theological foundations. Needless to say, their understandings of church differed significantly from the more “mainstream” magisterial Reformation, in several readily identifiable ways.

The most obvious, perhaps, is that our Unitarian ancestors firmly believed that religion and its practice is a matter of personal conscience and conviction, and that no one, no matter how politically powerful, could coerce another into sincerely held religious attitudes and faith. Our ancestors did, however, believe that people could be persuaded through the appeal of reason and discourse to examine their religious convictions and the source of them, and be moved to change them.

The source of religious conviction for our ancestors in faith is, I’d guess, a little less clear, because it isn’t frequently spoken about in UU circles. Our Unitarian ancestors believed in the radical equality of each member of the “gathered church.” The source of that equality was the conviction that the indwelling spirit of truth—they might have said the “Holy Spirit”—resides in every one of us, and that when we are moved by that indwelling spirit of truth, we can be, and in fact, we must be “truth-tellers” for the good of the community of faith. Our First Principle reflects this conviction of indwelling truth in more contemporary words: “the inherent worth and dignity of every person....” The religious conviction of the indwelling spirit assumes that there is a community of faith in which to tell, and together live out, our ever-growing and implicitly, ever-changing perceptions of truth. It is in community— not as “solitary figures [but as] communitarians”—that we can most perfectly assemble our individual truths into a glimpse of the ineffable Truth.

The “gathered church,” then, is a corporate church, a community of faith, not formed by sacramental initiation, a set of commonly-held (or at least commonly assumed) beliefs about the nature of God, salvation, and human destiny, or even, for most of us, by cultural and familial heritage. Rather, “gathered” communities of faith are formed of individuals who, by the leading of their indwelling spirit of truth, make promises to one another with expectations of particular outcomes. In short, we covenant to be together in community a certain way, and to learn to go within ourselves and listen deeply for our own indwelling spirit, in order to bring out the truths we know inside us, for the good of the community.

The Reverend Gordon McKeeman, as Tom Owen-Towle recounts, “reminds us that the derivation of the word community, although related to communion and communication, comes literally from the Latin munio, meaning “to arm.” Therefore, with the prefix con, meaning “together,” community happens whenever there is shared growth and security, a context of mutual succor and vigilance. Authentic Unitarian Universalist religious community consists of compassionate arms engaged in firm, fair, friendly wrestling matches rather than in bloodbaths of back-stabbing. Arms huddle together in times of sorrow and swing open in moments of rejoicing. Arms reach outward in justice-building and peace-making, not merely inward in narcissistic embrace. Arms offer forgiveness, the gift of a second chance. Arms defend against arrogance and shallowness, outside agitators and inward saboteurs. Our Unitarian Universalist congregations constitute the joining of hearts and heads, souls and arms, and they depend on us stakeholders pledging our troth...” —covenanting together in shared commitment to our foundational vision of “gatheredness” and the wider Truth that is gathered from our individual truths.

And Unitarian Universalist minister Mark Morrison-Reed reminds us that “the central task of religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice. It is the church—the “gathered” community of faith—that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, as we share the truths of our own indwelling spirit with each other, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.”

And so today, this [snowy spring] morning, here we have gathered, gathered side by side, believing that “our separate fires will kindle one flame”—one flame of Truth, one flame of commitment, one flame of community covenanted together in the belief that our indwelling spirit moves us to relationships of wholeness, justice, passion and compassion. “We gather in peace, gather in thanks, gather in sympathy now and then; we gather in hope, compassion and strength; we gather to celebrate once again.” And what we celebrate, whether we acknowledge it or not, is our heritage of faith as liberal religionists, as the church freely gathered...freely gathered, but not without cost, and that cost is our commitment, our covenantal bond, that promise made with expectations of keeping it, as best we can. We would be one, in “that high cause of greater understanding of who we are and what in us is true. We would be one in living for each other to show to all a new community.” We would be one, “gathered here in the mystery of this hour,” and we would be one, as we struggle for justice, “not on our own, but as members of a larger community, in which our individual vision widens and our strength is renewed.”

So let it be.

Amen, Blessed Be, Shalom.