As such, I've been thinking of covenants. With whom do we share covenants? How do covenants draw us forth into a new way of being?
Here is the sermon I preached - keeping their names out, of course.
Blessings,
Joel
May the words of my
mouth …
In coming back to the Boston area from the west coast I am
once again reminded of how some things change: There are new buildings where I
don’t remember them, and some business have disappeared.
I’m also reminded of how some things
don’t change: like the way people drive.
In coming back to the Boston area from the west coast I am
once again reminded of the long history this place has with European contact.
On the West Coast, something is old when it’s 150 years old. That’s new out
here.
In coming back to the Boston area for your wedding,
I’m reminded of ethicist and theologian Margaret Farley’s observations in Personal Commitments: Beginning, Keeping,
Changing:
Civilization’s history tend to be written in terms of human discoveries and inventions, wars, artistic creations, laws, forms of government, customs, the cultivation of the land. … At the heart of this history, however, lies a sometimes hidden narrative of promises, pledges, oaths, compacts, committed beliefs, and projected visions. At the heart of any individual’s story, too, lies the tale of her or his commitments.
We are here today to celebrate the commitments – the
covenant – that this couple shares with one another, as they start out their
married lives. This is the kind of thing that Farley wonders about – the daily
human-scale commitments:
What did Sheila do when she married Joshua? What will actually happen in the moment when Karen vows to live a celibate and simple life within a community dedicated to God? What does Ruth effect when she signs a business contract? What takes place when Dan speaks the Hippocratic Oath as he begins his career as a doctor? What happens when heads of state sign an international agreement regarding the law of the sea? What happens when Jill and Sharon pledge their love and friendship for their whole lives long?
We give our word. That is what these actions Farley mentions
are all about. We give our word – sending it out, carrying our integrity, our
fidelity, our faithfulness, our truth.
Our word is still ours, but it now calls back to us from the
heart of another person, or a circle of people, within which it now dwells.
Such a commitment does not predict the future or set it in stone.
Rather, it makes a certain kind of future possible.
Bride and Groom, you have known each other for a very long
time. And your relationship to and with one another has grown as well. Ponder
the love that you felt towards each other when you first kissed. Four years
later, did that love feel the same? [Groom nods, Bride shakes her head.] And when
you became engaged, it was different yet, was it not? And this morning, as you
are about to exchange your vows – your covenant – with one another, that love
has grown, it’s changed, and it has matured. A year from now, five years from
now, years from now, that love will continue to grow and blossom and mature.
And what will the future bring?
Wendell Berry writes in Standing
by Words: “We can join one another only by joining the unknown … [Your
union] is going where the two of you – and marriage, time, life, history, and
the world – will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your
life to a way.”
Your vows, then, are not describing what you expect or need,
but rather how you intend to walk
hand in hand, the way you intend to go, and to be.
And you don’t go alone.
Oh, the words remain yours. The covenant remains yours. But
now they speak not only from each of your lips, but are called back from one
another’s hearts – each of yours – but also all of ours who are here, too.
Bride and Groom, take a moment and turn and look at all those
who have gathered here to wish you well. Look at the community of support that
surrounds you in love.
Listen to the music – remember that the first hymn Praise to the Lord, the Almighty was
played not only at your, Bride’s, baptism, but at your two brothers,' too. That this hymn was sung at your parents’ wedding.
Or the linen altar cloth? How a young woman in her early
twenties, while working in a linen factory in Germany bought this cloth, how
years later she then gave it to her new daughter-in-law as she was starting out
life in the United States. How that daughter-in-law, your grandmother, you Oma,
donated it to the church here when you were baptized.
Or what about the engagement ring upon your hand? How the Groom had a conversation with his grandmother about how he was saving up money for an engagement ring. She gave him the ring her father gave her when she turned 30, so that he (the Groom) could ask for your hand in marriage. In the process, blessing you both.
We love, not just in words, but in actions.
Covenants call us into such loving action. Covenants call us
into a way of being in relationship with one another. A relationship based on
fidelity, intimacy, commitment and accountably. They call us to bear one
another’s burdens as our own. They call us to meet our struggles in a plural
voice.
As a colleague of mine, Rebecca Parker says, covenants are
“freely chosen life-sustaining interdependence.”
In a world in which independence
rather than interdependence is
stressed, living out your covenant in the midst of your marriage becomes a
spiritual practice. Like all good spiritual practices, marriage invites us to
be open and vulnerable to each other. Like all good spiritual practices, it
calls us to be patient with one another, even though we aren’t particularly
feeling that way. It sustains us, nurtures us, allows us to grow – and even
changes us.
We start with these aspirations (like those found in the 1
Corinthians passage) that we long to uphold and act out – even though we know
we are not very good at them.
For we know (as Victoria Safford writes) “A covenant is a
living, breathing aspiration, made new every day. It can’t be enforced by
consequences but it may be reinforced by forgiveness and by grace, when we
stumble, when we forget, when we mess up.”
Like all good spiritual practices, it calls us to a way of
life. No longer as one, but as two. Two to share in the joys – making them all
the more so. Two to share in the sorrows and pain – making them less. Two with
which to travel together on this road of life.
As Victoria Safford writes:
When we celebrate the love of beaming couples … we speak not in the binding language of contract, but in the life-sustaining fluency of covenant, from covenir, to travel together. We will walk together with you, friend; we will walk together with each other toward the lives we mean to lead, toward the world we would mean to have a hand in shaping, the world of compassion, equity, freedom, joy and gratitude. Covenant is the work of intimate justice.[1]
Amen.
[1]
Safford, Victoria, “Bound in Covenant: Congregational covenants are
declarations of interdependence.” UUWorld.
Vol XXVII No 2 (Summer 2013). 26ff – This article inspired the sermon, other
quotes from this article.
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