Half-Hearted Covenant?

Going All The Way
Service celebrated at the UU Congregation of Petoskey, MI, on 20 March 2011
Rev. Chip Roush

FIRST READING        
from “The Open Door” by Helen Keller
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

UNISON READING     #477 by the Rev. Mr. Vivian Pomeroy:
Forgive us that we often forgive ourselves so easily and others so hardly;
Forgive us that we expect perfection from those to whom we show none;
Forgive us for repelling people by the way we set a good example;
Forgive us the folly of trying to improve a friend;
Forbid that we should use our little idea of goodness as a spear to wound those who are different;
Forbid that we should feel superior to others when we are only more shielded;
And may we encourage the secret struggle of every person.

SERMON
How many of you can think back and identify ways that your parents made sacrifices so that you would have a better life than they had? How many had or have a similar goal, for your children? For how many does the definition of “a better life” include not just financial resources, but a good community, and other opportunities and benefits, including living a meaningful life, finding purpose and satisfaction?

The same was true for our religious ancestors approximately 350 years ago. As the first generation of the Puritan settlers began to die out, they worried about their children and grandchildren. They were concerned about their economic futures, of course, but much more importantly, they were concerned for their immortal souls.

You see, only church members and the children of members could be baptized—and you had to be baptized, to go to heaven.

To become a member, a person had to have a conversion experience, and confess that experience to the church. Virtually all of the first-generation members had had what I would call a mystic experience before they left Europe. That was part of the reason their faith was strong enough to sail across an ocean and settle in unknown lands.

But life was very different on American soil. The Puritan children born here had wholly different experiences and different pressures than their parents had had, back in the old country. They were simply not having the kinds of things happen to them that they could report to the minister, and say, “I felt the hand of God…now I know I am saved.”

As the children of members, the first generation born here could get baptized, but they could not join the church until they had a conversion experience. They could live very good lives, full of Christian virtues, but they could not join the church. And if they never joined, if they did not become members, then they could not have *their* children baptized. And thus the original Puritans were earnestly terrified that their grandchildren might go unbaptized and therefore be condemend to hell.

The Puritans gave this a great deal of thought, and they came up with the “Half-Way Covenant.” They changed the rules slightly, so that their children could join the church *before* they had a conversion experience. These were all good, Christian children, after all—everyone knew they would eventually undergo a mystic occurrence. The Half-Way Covenant allowed them to become members in anticipation of their saving experience.

Now, these “halfway” members were not allowed to take communion—that was reserved for full members, still—but at least they could be baptized and their children could become baptized.

A great number of original Puritans were greatly relieved by this; but a few were not. They warned that this sort of half-measure was a step *away* from God’s pure laws. They feared that this kind of leniency would lead to other lax rules and behaviors, until the churches on American soil were as corrupt as the Church of England, which they had fled here to purify.

Interestingly enough, the uptight orthodox rule-followers were eventually proven correct.

The Half-Way Covenant did lead to more leniency. And congregational polity, which allowed each congregation to call its own minister, without direction or interference from any church hierarchy or bureaucracy, allowed things to drift even farther.

Soon there were differences in the customs and beliefs of the various churches. Even the Great Awakening of the 1740’s did not whip up enough emotional fervor to return them all to the “straight and narrow path.” Worst of all—at least, to the orthodox believers—the Great Awakening created a backlash so that our Unitarian ancestors began to stress reason over emotion, and our Universalist forebears began to preach a gospel of Love over a gospel of punishment…and some congregations and traditions just kept becoming more and more liberal.

So, the Half-Way Covenant worked out fairly well, from our 21^st century religiously liberal UU perspective. But the people who created it in the first place, might well be rolling over in their graves, to see what beliefs and practices their well-meaning solution has wrought.

Meanwhile, half-way around the world, and a millennium and a half earlier, the Mahayana Buddhists were having their own conversation about half measures.

In the Lotus Sutra, as translated by Gene Reeves, there is the Parable of The Fantastic City. The way I heard it, there was once a glorious place, full of wonderful and unusual treasures. Now, this place was a long way away, and the only road was desolate and dangerous.

A group which wanted to visit the place of treasures hired a guide to help them navigate that difficult road. Unfortunately, even with the guide’s help, it was a hard journey, and the group eventually asked to give up, to return to their starting point.

The guide thought it would be a shame for the group to get halfway, only to turn back, so he magically created a beautiful city, which the group could see was only a day or two farther. The guide promised they could rest there. The Sutra recounts, “Then the hearts of the exhausted group were filled with great joy and they exclaimed … “Now we can surely escape from this dreadful road and find some peace and comfort.”

The group went to the Fantastic City, and they rested there. When the guide saw that they were no longer afraid or weary, he made the city disappear, and he told the group that their original goal, the place of treasures, was a little farther.

Like all good parables, this can be understood a number of ways. One moral is that a good teacher will use skillful means to help their students accomplish their goals.

Another interpretation notes the philosophical disagreement between the Mahayana Buddhists who wrote the Lotus Sutra, and the older, Theravadan Buddhists. The Theravada Buddhists believed that each individual must work toward his or her own salvation; the Mahayana Buddhists believed that nobody could be saved until *all* were liberated.

According to this understanding, the Theravada Buddhists were like the travelers who needed the intermediate goal of the Fantastic City to keep them progressing toward the more worthy goal of the place of treasures. The Theravadans might well achieve their own enlightenment, only to then realize that their real goal was to help *all* beings achieve enlightenment.

One last interpretation is that the universe gives us what we need, even if it may not give us what we want. We might want to live in peace and comfort in the beautiful Fantastic City, but our Dharma guides insist that, as soon as we are able, we must push on to our ultimate goal of peace for *everyone.*   

Our contemporary dharma guides are still giving similar advice. Many 21^st-century authors and church consultants warn against the temptation to remain inside of our comfortable congregations. Experts such as Bill Easum and Michael Durall urge church communities to expand their vision and tackle significant tasks outside the church walls.

In one of the more-than-500 books on amazon.com with “missional” in the title, Bill Easum explains, “A missional church is organized around mission [around doing good work in the local community.] A missional church doesn’t have a Missions Committee; it *is* a mission. Mission isn’t one program among many; it is *the* program.”

Easum and other consultants do not recommend doing extra work just for the sake of doing extra. They are not blindly following the United States’ mantra, “bigger, better, faster, more!” Nor do churches adopt their suggestions because the congregations are masochistic, or because they need to prove how successful and competitive they are.

They do it because they are convinced that missional churches *are* better: better for the world, better for the congregation as an entity, and better for the members who make up the congregation.

Let’s take these claims, one at a time. Depending upon the language—the metaphors and symbols of a given tradition—you might hear that missional churches save more souls, or do more work to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, or they liberate the oppressed more efficiently.

In a cover story of the current edition of our UUWorld magazine, Ron Robinson’s “Third Place” missional church does a great deal of good for our human cousins residing in and around Turley, Oklahoma. Pastor Robinson’s four-year-old UU congregation may attract only ten people on any given Sunday, but four times that many showed up to help landscape a local elementary school, including planting a vegetable garden.

According to the article, the “Third Place” community center—so named because it is not home and it is not work—provides the only local library, several computers for public use, a free health clinic, food pantry, drop-in living room and a place to get used clothing and household items.

I don’t know about saving souls, but it certainly seems that Robinson’s congregation is succeeding at its mission of serving the people around it.

Consultant Michael Durall states that congregations which do not expect much from their members do not receive much from them, while congregations which require high levels of commitment reap that commitment. He tells success story after success story of congregations who took a leap of faith, who required more of their members—and now have more members, more money and more programming, both inside the congregation and outreach to the local community.

Durall consistently challenges congregations to give away all of the money they collect, every Sunday. He recommends that a church tithe ten percent of its total budget toward outreach and social justice projects. This may sound impractical, but again, he has many stories of congregations who have become tremendously generous—with their money and their time.

At least in some places, high expectations do result in stronger, more active, more generous, congregations.

Those high expectations can also yield more meaning, and more satisfaction, in the lives of the church members. For one thing, high expectations can help to create the sense of community that most of us crave. Nothing builds community like working together on meaningful projects that are just-difficult-enough, without being too hard. Shared labor, and shared sacrifice, contribute to strong bonds. 

Furthermore, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, people who focus on living with a sense of purpose “are more likely to remain cognitively intact, have better mental health and even live longer” than people who focus on their own pleasure. The article’s author, Shirley S. Wang, writes that “raising children, volunteering, or going to medical school may be less pleasurable day to day. But these pursuits give a sense of fulfillment, of being the best one can be.”  End quote. Such a sense of well-being has both short-term and long-term health benefits.

Speaking only for myself, I sometimes do not do the things which I know are good for me. Left to my own devices, I might volunteer less often. However, if my congregation has high expectations for my participation, and if several of my church friends are going, too, then I am much more likely to spend a Saturday landscaping a school, or a Tuesday morning cooking and serving a free meal. And then I do feel better about myself, for participating in such things—and I might even live longer, too.

The good news is that we do not have to choose between doing good in the world, or spending time strengthening our congregation, or doing something to benefit ourselves. If we challenge ourselves and our church community to do significantly *more* good work, then it is a win-win-win, for all!

Unfortunately, a large number of contemporary congregations—of many traditions, but especially Unitarian Universalist—require too little of their members. There are no minimum pledges listed, and no consequences for missing seventeen Sunday mornings in a row. Neither the congregational bylaws nor its lived customs indicate that it takes real work to be a member of that church community.

Now, I can hear hyperventilating around the room. I am not talking about inflexible, hard and fast requirements. Obviously, accommodations are made for differing levels of  physical or mental ability; and there are confidential and compassionate avenues for handling financial hardship. There are creative ways that every person can contribute *something* to the common good.

The idea is not to have absolute minimums on the amounts of time and money each donates; rather, it is to allow every person to start where she is, and challenge himself to grow into doing a little more. Members of healthy, high-commitment congregations challenge themselves and each other to set lofty goals, and to pursue those goals with integrity. And however things work out, the congregation promotes forgiveness and resilience and celebration as they mark the progress they made, and they begin setting new goals, together.

Now, I think I *do* understand why our congregations might not have such high requirements. Apart from the legendary UU anti-authoritarianism—our knee-jerk response against requirements of any kind—many of our congregations were created by people who were harmed by the inflexible doctrines and dogmas of other faith traditions. Affirming the right and responsibility of each person to follow hir own path, they deliberately did *not* make many requirements.

Furthermore, there is a pastoral issue. Most of us are busy already; we are stressed by the commitments we have already made. At least some of us are truly concerned that we could not do even one more thing.

Knowing that we ourselves are over-busy, we do not set high expectations for church membership, because we do not want to further stress—or drive away!—our fellow church participants.

I get why our customs evolved, but I fear that, just like the Half-Way Covenant of centuries past, our modern Half-Hearted Covenant may also backfire. The Puritans wanted to welcome their descendants into the Kingdom of God; but some of their great-great-grandchildren gave up on God entirely.  Our congregations wanted to welcome people into church on their own terms…but an awful lot of our human cousins are giving up on church entirely.

And that is a crying shame, when we know that congregations with high expectations offer some of the most effective means around for making our world a better place; and they transform the lives of the church members who live out those high expectations.

Unlike the Fantastic City, in the Buddhist parable, our congregations do not disappear when the guide reveals the larger goal. This can be both a benefit and a curse. The benefit is that the congregation remains, as a beacon to more travelers, always inviting new seekers to stop awhile, to rest and recuperate and gather their strength for the next leg of their journey. The downside is, that the congregation remains, which makes it too easy to choose to stay in that place of comfort and security, rather than brave the hard road again.

As in our second reading, we forgive ourselves so easily, that we sometimes do not force ourselves to take up the next challenge of our lives. However, paraphrasing our first reading, “Security is mostly a superstition; the Fantastic City is an illusion. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Let us press on to the real benefits for us, for our  congregation, and for the world around us, which are found farther down the road.

How many of you have ever been invited to go out with friends, but you had a long day, you’re pretty stressed, so you try to invent a believe-able, serious-enough, but not too terrible, excuse…but you eventually *did* go out, and you had a great time? How many have faced a Saturday morning chore-list, including that one big task you’d been putting off, then, while you debated and wrestled with your conscience, a friend or spouse or partner “encouraged” you to make it happen…and you felt really satisfied and happy about it, later?

I am really not talking about taking on new, back-breaking tasks. We can find meaningful projects, and tackle them together, in steps that *stretch* us but do not break us.

This Fantastic City we’re in feels really comfortable; I love it here, too. And I know that there are much better things waiting for us if we press on, just a little further. We can have healthier, happier, *longer* lives, by working to extend those same benefits to others.

What this is about is taking our beliefs and opinions seriously. We *are* all connected, in this world; love is the strongest force; we are responsible for each other.

If—may all the goddesses forbid—some kind of natural disaster were to strike here, we would of course rush to help our families, and aid our friends. I would like to think that we would reach out to the stranger struggling in the rubble next to us.

I invite you all to close your eyes again; take a moment to imagine yourself in a local store…standing in line, you are about to pay…see all those standing near you…the cashiers, the fellow shoppers, the children…now imagine having the power to help those people. Imagine accepting responsibility for the lives and wellbeing of the people around you.

We may not be able to rescue everyone, but together we can help to make real improvements in the lives of many of our northern lower Michigan neighbors. And by working with them, we may strengthen our own congregation and increase our own well-being.

Meaningful work that stretches us just a bit can create longer, healthier, happier lives.

So may we be.