Ah, Democracy!
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
June 7, 2009
Alice Blair Wesley explains how the term covenant – as in our covenant here at Second Parish – came into being in the Ancient Near East. Some powerful king would come along and say:
“My name is Great So-and-So, king of your world. With my great power I have put down your enemies. Thanks to me, you may now live and prosper in peace, on certain conditions. You will send me an annual tribute. Whenever I require your service in my army, you will send at once the number of men I call for. And you will sign a covenant, promising to keep faith with me, your king. Moreover, just so nobody forgets, you will store this writing in a sacred place, and you will come together like this, annually, and read it aloud to the whole population, so that everybody will know: You are my people; I am your king. You keep your word; I'll keep mine, and things will go well with you. Break your covenant with me, and I promise I will make you very, very sorry."
[Alice goes on to say that way of operating can work some of the time, but too often it breaks down because of the greed of the rulers for wealth and power; she continues:]
When those on top get greedy and build for themselves splendid palaces—while the people live in hovels—and get addicted to ever more power than they need to keep order, the shape of a monstrous pyramid is the shape of the entire social structure. It weighs very heavily on, crushes, the freedom of the masses at the bottom.
At some point in time... some genius, somebody who had seen much of how kings and generals generally operate, came up with a new metaphor taken from the protection-racket model of politics. This metaphor is based on an unlikeness: The King of the Universe is not like these human kings. [So they said: ]
"The Ruler of the realm of all nature is generous, not greedy. He makes the grass and the fruits of the earth to grow, the rains to fall and the sun to shine for all the creatures of the earth. Thus he shows his love for all the world. How can we not love God in return! Moreover, our Creator causes us human beings to love one another and our land and animals, as he loves us. We do not need these human kings. We can enter into a political and religious covenant with each other and with God the King of the Universe to be ruled by his holy ways of love and generosity.
[We can assemble to fight in self-defense, but we will not keep a standing army.] Let the nations around us fight and rage. We will not. We will live every one under his vine and fig tree and keep covenant with one another and with our God, King of the Universe. All he requires of us—blessed be he—is that we love him and love our neighbors as ourselves, and keep the natural, common-sense laws of a peaceful community because we love."
[She concludes: …. ] The idea of a freely-entered covenant—with the very nature of loving and lawful reality—became the root idea of the political religion of a people, the ancient Israelites. The Israelites told each other and wrote down stories about their political and religious covenant and their attempts—and their failures—to keep covenant with each other and with God. They created a literature which nourished their memories and their hopes. They fed their dedication to a loving and freely cooperative way of life with stories of their great King of the Universe and his care for them, as well as the wrath of his anger when they broke their covenant with him, by doing wrong to one another. Our modern understanding of political democracy evolved from our ancestors' engagement with and adaptations of Israelite stories American democracy was born when members of our own oldest churches in New England focused their attention on the oldest stories in the Bible and said, “We don't need a human king either. We, too, can be free to live in covenantal fealty, in faithful love, to each other and to God."[1]
So, then, our democratice govenance under a covenant is a very ancient part of our faith tradition, and has remained fundamental to our identity as Unitarian Universalists to this day. The fact that we believe in the democratic process is not an incidental fact about our traditions, like the particular physical structure of our churches, for example, whether they have steeples or not, or whether the ministers wear robes or suits or the music is provided by organs or guitars; our belief that every person is empowered and in fact obligated to make decisions about their religious commitments and the way we live together is at the core of who we are as a people of faith.
I want to offer three observations about our thoroughgoing commitment to the democratic process, its rights and obligations. First, Alice's observation that Israel's – and our own – understanding of covenant starts with the notion that God (or the sacred, however we wish to name it) is not like other rulers. Second, that because we are made in God's image, we are made responsible for our own choices and decisions in every realm of our lives, including how we comprehend and hold ourselves accountable to the sacred. Third, this freedom is not absolute; there still have to be rules and shared expectations to allow us to walk together in freedom; I will outline some of the boundaries we have agreed upon as a faith community.
First, that God is unlike other rulers. Now, I know that some of us have difficulty with the concept of “God” in the first place. It's no surprise to learn that people through the ages have been wrestling with what this notion of “God” is all about. Some of you may remember the series of interviews Mel Brooks did with Carl Reiner which they called “The Two Thousand Year Old Man.” Mel shares his memories of what happened at the dawn of time – or at least as best he can remember them at his age! Carl asked what they thought about God in those days. The Two Thousand Year Old Man thinks for a minute. “Oh, yeah,” he says, “we had this guy Phil, he was bigger and stronger and tougher than anyone, and he beat anybody up who crossed him, so we though he was God. Things went along like that for quite awhile 'til one day there was a big thunderstorm – loud thunder, bolts of lightning, the whole schtick – and we looked up at the sky and we looked at Phil, who was hiding in his cave, and we said 'There's something bigger than Phil!'”
Of course, our forebears filled in the concept a little more than that and came up with comparisons to rulers; God must be some sort of super-ruler, ruler of the entire universe rather than only of a particular kingdom. Others believed that there were many gods, each ruling different realms – the sea, the sky, the harvest, the underworld, war and justice. But in our Judeo-Christian tradition, we have believed that there is one god over all, known by many names within that tradition, as Lord God, the Eternal, the Ancient of Days, Father. And, as Alice Blair Wesley notes, the genius of the covenant idea was that this God was understood to be unlike the rulers of the earth; this God was just and loving rather than greedy and hateful; this God promised goodness to the people if they lived righteously. And so the nation of Israel determined that they would have no king but God. This meant that the Jews refused to bow down to any representation of another God – you may recall the story of Daniel, who was willing to be thrown into a lion's den rather than bow to a foreign image of a god, or the three Hebrew men, Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego (don't you just love letting those names roll off your tongue?) who braved the fiery furnace rather than bow down to an idol. At the time of Jesus, this got played out by contrasting the earthly ruler – Caesar, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Savior of the world – with the heavenly Father God upon whom Jesus called. We follow that usage when we recite the prayer Jesus taught his disciples here each Sunday. Whatever name we choose to use, or if we choose no name at all, we mean to point toward that which Mel Brooks named by saying “There's something bigger than Phil!” For shorthand, we here just use the word “God.”
But to turn to our next point, if God is to be our ruler, than we are truly responsible for our own lives and for living them righteously and to the full. Here's how Alice Blair Wesley imagines Jesus might have taught this truth if he were alive today:
"Look, I know some of you think all the power that matters is in the human hands of Wall Street traders, the grossly deceiving advertising industry and the grossly shallow entertainment industry of America. Well, if you are obsessed with that piece of the world, if all you do, basically, is go to work, watch television and seek out other entertainment, you might think that piece of the world is the whole world. It is not. There is a great deal more to life than working for huge corporations, finding some ever-new distraction or buying ever more things. Be gathered into communities of love. Find, together, what is more meaningful, more loving, more worthy of your attention, and be empowered in devotion to these things. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened to you. The truth will make you free."[2]
It is only together in community, in congregation, in covenant with one another that we can work out how we ought to live, because we need one another to figure it out. Alice Blair Wesley harks back to one of our earliest congregations, in Dedham, and describes how they struggled to come up with a covenant for their church and, by extension, for their community. They listened patiently and openly to the opinions of all as they formulated how they would live together, and they understood (in Alice's words)
… the divine will of the loving God of the Universe to be for justice, peace and good laws in the whole society. The task of the free church could be summed – in their terms – as loving God and loving one another so well that in their own study and discussion, dispute and conference, prayer, consultation and more discussion in the free church, the members might learn together the divine will of the loving God for the whole society insofar as that will relates to justice, peace and reasonable laws. And, if so, the members would be called, compelled, bound to proclaim it and try to bring it to bear in their whole society.[3]
Each member, in other words, had the right to have their say, but the end of the discussion resulted in a society – a congregation – where each might work out their own obligations within the context of a loving and mutually supporting church. This notion that we are each responsible for working out our own understanding of what is right and just in our lives and our societies is suggested by the Apostle Paul when he says in his letter to the Phillipians [2:12], “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” The freedom of our free churches entails also serious responsibility. We are responsible for one another here and we are responsible to one another.
In other words, we have to have rules and shared understandings of what it is we do here in this beloved community and how we do it. And so we turn to my last observation, what we share. I read earlier Jame's Luther Adam's metaphor – taken from the five smooth stones that young David picked up when he went to battle with mighty Goliath – of the five smooth stones of religious liberalism. Adams reminds us that, for us, revelation is not sealed; that new light, new truth, new ways of expressing eternal truths in contemporary language are continously emerging. Second, all relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion. Third, that we ought to direct our effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community; but, fourth, we affirm the necessity of social incarnation – that this community must be lived out in practice in the real world in our daily living and not only in our own heads or between these four walls. Finally, liberalism holds that the resources that are available to us (divine and human) justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.
We also share our seven principles, which I read earlier, expressing the specifics of how we as congregations and as an association of congregations shall live together, moving from our absolute commitment to the inherent worth and dignity of every person, through our commitment to justice, equity, and compassion in human relations; attention to each others spiritual growth, encouragement in our search for truth and meaning, commitment to freedom of conscience and use of the democratic process; expanding this outward to a quest for peace, liberty and justice beyond our own nation to encompass all of humankind; and finally committing ourselves beyond our human sphere to “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”
And then we have the specifics. We use Roberts rules of order in our meetings, more or less formally, to ensure that everyone has a voice in our decisions and that all who come may be heard. One problem with these rules is that not everyone is equally comfortable speaking in front of a large group. Truly intimate sharing is better achieved in contexts like our Covenant groups, which we here call “Connections at Second Parish.” There, as participants have found, everyone is encouraged to speak, and everyone is given compassionate listeners who help them to speak freely. Another difficulty of Roberts rules of order is that they can become altogether too formal. Rev. Robbie Walsh, the former minister in our Duxbury congregation, has spoken here a number of times over the years, so many of you know him. He wrote a wonderful ditty which I generally try to provoke him to sing at our ministers' retreats based on that classic '60's hit, “Charley on the MTA.” I don't have a banjo like Robbie does, but I can tell you that the chorus goes like this (you can chime in if you like): “And did they ever adjourn, no they never adjourned, and their fate is still unlearned. They may meet forever 'neath the rules of Roberts, they're the church that never adjourned.”
The sum of who matter is this: We have no ruler over us; that means we are responsible and accountable to ourselves and to one another; nevertheless we do have a core of beliefs and behaviors that we share.
Amen.