(Audio of this sermon)

Sermon: The Ground of our Hope

Rebecca Parker writes:

Covenant is a weighty religious word and an old one, evoking the stories of the Hebrew bible in which God makes a Covenant with the Jewish people. Entire dissertations and tomes have been written about the meaning of covenant but instead this morning we will begin with a favorite story by Robert Fulghum about a ripped brown paper lunch bag sealed with duct tape and staples and several paper clips. He writes:

This is a story all about covenant — the covenant is the promise, the trust symbolized by a ripped lunch bag full of treasures. I give you my heart, my most precious stuff and you do your best to see it, to understand it and to keep it safe. And you give me your ripped lunch bag. And when we misunderstand or mess it up or throw the whole thing into the trash because we didn’t realize what we were given, we will try to recover it and keep going. That is covenant.

A covenant is a promise. It is based on something deeper than contracts or rules or laws. It is based on our need to be faithful, our need to be in relationship with one another, and our need to make promises, even though we will absolutely break them, because we are human.

Unitarian Universalist congregations have long used the term covenant to describe the relationships between members to one another. We say Unitarian Universalism is a faith of covenants, not creeds. What this means is hat we are held together, not by the beliefs we hold in common or believing in certain things at all, but by the commitments or promises we make. The nature of our faith is determined not by our beliefs but by how we have given our hearts and to what or to whom have we given them. This is the fundamental question of covenant — to whom, to what, have you given your heart. The question of whose are you? Who do you belong to? What do you belong to? Who needs you? To whom are you accountable? To whom do you answer? Whose life is changed by the choices you make? Whose life is all bound up with your own? Asking these questions brings us to covenant, because it reminds us that we are not alone. Our lives are inextricably tied up with the lives of others. Being part of a faith acknowledges that and then it asks the question: “Given that we are connected, given that we belong to each other, how are we going to live?”

That last part, how then shall we live, is essential because a covenant about far more than words, though often covenants are written down or spoken. But covenants, if they are real, aren’t just words, they move us, they guide us, sometimes they restrain us too.

But covenants get broken, we break them; others break them as well and how we respond, how we recover from broken covenants is perhaps one of the most important things we can learn as human beings. People often come to see me at those moments of promise breaking — when they have been unfaithful to a vow they have made, when they have been untrue to their best selves, to the person they want to be and maybe they were. These are painful times, these moments of broken covenant. But one of the questions I have learned to ask over the years is: IS this the right covenant? Is this the right promise for you now? Because sometimes the most heartfelt promises we make are impossible to keep;

I remember a couple of weeks after my kids were born, I ventured to Costco by myself to buy diapers. I was still a little shaky and I should have known better than to go to Costco, where I don’t do well even in the best of times — I never seem to learn these lessons. Anyway, there I was buying a giant box of the tiniest little newborn diapers and I ran into a mother and her toddler also in the diaper aisle. The toddler was having a pretty typical toddler tantrum and the mother was frustrated and yelling at him. In my highly emotional post-partum state this was completely unbearable to me. I burst out crying and vowed to myself and my tiny babies a sacred, sacred oath that I would never yell at them, never even speak to them meanly and certainly not when they were hungry or tired or losing it in the Costco. They were two weeks old. They had not done anything to try even my first nerve yet much less my last one. Ask them how that promise has gone.

But I have learned over the years, as I have broken that covenant time and time again, that it was not the right promise; it was not useful or helpful to even try to keep it. Our covenants have to be the right ones. And even the right ones don’t always last a lifetime. And even when they are the right ones, we cannot keep them perfectly. This is painful but it is just true so the repair part matters almost more than anything. The part about being able to say I am sorry, to gather up what has been broken, to glue it back together if we are able, to vow to try to be more careful and to keep going.

What I didn’t know back then and am just starting to learn almost 15 years later is how often my promises to my children would need to change as they changed. And what I have also come to believe is that my ultimate covenant to them is to help them make their own ultimate promises, to help them decide who and what they will belong to and to point them in the direction of life giving things.

The Jewish theologian Martin Buber who wrote so much about finding God in relationships, in trust between people, said that “The human being is the promise making, promise breaking, promise renewing creature. ” Breaking our covenants is part of the human condition, but so is trying again, so is believing again, so is committing again. Maybe that is the most important part -- being willing to hold onto hope, to hold to our belief in covenant, to point each other and ourselves back to that force of Love that does not break faith with us.

In the tiny congregation I served now almost 20 years ago in a small town west of here, there was no paid staff except for me and a young teenage girl whom we will call Stephanie who came to work for me a few hours a week. Stephanie had been referred to me by a local therapist who was a friend and who told me that Stephanie could use an adult mentor and that she had a hard home life. I could use someone to file and make copies so I hired her and we slowly grew to know each other. Stephanie was incredibly intelligent though her performance at school was pretty terrible. She was a poet though she did not show me any of her poems for over a year but when I did get to see them they were beautiful, powerful, full of pain and strength and hope. Both of her parents were drug involved, her father in and out of prison in the time I knew her. Her younger brother for whom she was largely responsible also incredibly intelligent but showing signs of mental illness. I knew Stephanie could go to college, if she had some support. I knew she could be a writer, or whatever she wanted to be. But her life had been so full of broken promises and it had shaped her and what she believed was possible. I learned a lot from her, including that sometimes the hopes we have for the people love are not the same as their hopes for themselves, and that every person has to decide for themselves who and what they belong to, who and what they will be in covenant with. We cannot do that for anyone but ourselves.

Over the years I knew Stephanie she dropped out of high school, she struggled with addiction, she became pregnant and I lost track of her. Then a few years after I came this church she found me online and asked me to perform a wedding ceremony for her and her partner. They were newly sober. Their son was a toddler and they had another baby on the way. I married them right in this room in fact. And prayed hard that things would go well for them and I worried hard that things would not go well.

I tried to contact her a few times but her email had changed and years went by. I ran into her several years ago, driving home from a wedding in Western Massachusetts and I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts. This was in a tiny town not far from where she had grown up. She was working behind the Dunkin Donuts; she looked tired and older than she was. It was late and there was no one else in line so we got to talk. She told me her first marriage had ended badly, but she was remarried now and happily. Her two boys were well. She said, I’m still sober. I still write poetry she said. Then she looked into my face and said, I am fine. I have what I wanted. It took me a little while but I realized embarrassment and humility and gratitude that her covenants, her ultimate promises were her own.

I don’t think I was wrong to hope for her, to believe in her, to tell her she was bright and beautiful and talented. But in the end none of that belonged to me and I needed to let it go. What matters is her own commitment to her life, the promises she is making and breaking and remaking and living out. Even love does not give us the right to choose these for another person and I think Stephanie was hoping I could understand this, that I keep my faith in her.