Do you know what you need to be considered legally married according to New York State? (Besides being two people of different genders, an injustice which I hope someday will no longer exist?) But I digress. In New York State a marriage requires a marriage license signed by an approved state officiant, two witnesses, vows or promises made to each other, and the officiant to declare you married. That’s it. In essence, New York State only asks that its representative plus two others be present to witness the promises you make and ratify them. Interesting, huh?

What exactly are these promises that people offer to one another? What purpose do they serve? How many relationships base themselves upon those promises made? In my experience with weddings and ceremonies of union, I would say that the vows couples make more often than not express what they understand to lie at the heart of their coming together in marriage and what they hope their marriage will be through time. I will love you and I will stand by you form the gist of most vows. “Do you take, to be your wife/husband, to love and to cherish, to honor and to comfort, in sickness or in health, in sorrow or in joy, in hardship or in ease, to have and to hold, from this day forth?” Such vows form a covenant between the people making them. What’s a covenant? How does it differ from a contract?

*A contract indicates “an exchange of promises between two or more parties to do, or refrain from doing, an act which is enforceable in a court of law.” The word comes from the Latin contractus, "to draw together," metaphorically, "to make a bargain." *A promise describes a “manifestation of intention to act or refrain from acting in a specified way. . . . in understanding that a commitment has been made.” It comes from promissum "a promise," from the verb promittere to "send forth, foretell, . . . " * A vow (Latin votum, vow, promise, wish) means a promise, an intention. *A covenant is an oath or a bond between people, or parties, in which both promise to do, or refrain from doing, something. Unlike a contract, most covenants are not legally binding. From the Latin convenire, to come together, to meet, to agree. (Definitions from Wikipedia and word etymology from the Online Etymology Dictionary)

A covenantal relationship, therefore, is one in which the parties make promises of intention to one another, promises which reflect a mutual understanding of the relationship and mutual hopes for its future. Only the fabric of the relationship itself and everyone’s commitment to it can keep alive the covenant. I like that. Can you think of other personal or societal relationships that base themselves upon explicit covenantal promises which each party makes to the other? There aren’t too many, although most relationships carry implicit promises and implicit expectations. We do not regularly make covenants with our children or our friends. We do not make covenants with neighbors or co-workers or our government, though we might make contracts with them.

We do not often make explicit, mutual promises, or intentions, for our relationships, promises which only we, and no outside entity, can hold us to. Maybe it would be helpful if we did. Not because they would make our relationships, societal and personal more secure. People often want vows to bring them safety and happily ever afters, forgetting that a promise is an intention. No one can completely control the future and no promise is an ironclad guarantee. Rather a promise, a covenant, lifts up the responsible, personal commitment of each party to the relationship. A covenant says “I’m in! Here’s what I can make the intention to do and be.”

Covenants, historically, have religious connotations. In the Hebrew Bible God makes several covenants: with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses and so forth. In each of them, God will do this and humans will do that. For example, in Genesis 17, God’s covenant with Abraham spells out that God will make Abraham the father of a multitude of nations, that Sarah will give birth to Isaac, that God will give them the land of Canaan and in return every male shall be circumcised as a sign of the covenant. If Abraham and his descendants do not keep the co venant, they will be cut off from their people. Where is the mutual agreement, you ask? Where is the mutual understanding of the relationship? Although not mutually arrived at, this covenant does contain an understanding of the relationship and each party’s responsibility for keeping it going. God has chosen Abraham and will make him and his descendants God’s people, if they agree to the sign of the chosen-ness. God dictates this and Abraham’s only response is yes or no. True. But covenants in the Hebrew Bible take as their model Babylonian treaties, which often existed between two unequal parties, with the more powerful party dictating all the terms. Christians took this model as well when they proclaimed a new covenant made between God and humanity through Jesus.

Christian churches kept the covenant model going. Since church covenants existed among human beings, they took as their basis a more mutual and more equal understanding. One of the more famous religious covenants is the Cambridge Platform of 1648, created by Puritans living in New England. The Cambridge Platform has played a large role in the formation of our Unitarian Universalist congregations, but today I want to focus on its character as a covenant. (You can read further about it in a book edited by Peter Hughes and called The Cambridge Platform.) In brief, though, the Cambridge Platform rested authority for a congregation within that congregation itself rather than in an outside ecclesiastical body. The Puritans of New England dissented from the Church of England, where authority rested with bishops, in an “episcopal” structure, and also from Puritans in England, where authority rested with a council of elders, in a “presbyterian” structure.

The Puritans fashioned a covenant because they thought it gave unity and form to their body and made them a community. In a similar line of thought, marriage vows give a certain unity to the people making them and transform them into a third body. A covenant defines a relationship, expresses how the parties understand that relationship, and specifies their voluntary intention to undertake their obligations to it and participate in the benefits they will derive from it. The Puritans’ covenant was a voluntary agreement and consent among their members to give themselves up to God and observe the ordinances of Jesus together in the same society. They recognized that their covenant put them in mind of their mutual duty and stirred them to it.

Because of the Cambridge Platform and its influence upon Unitarian Universalist congregational polity, we are a covenanted community. In the bylaws of this congregation a covenant among members reads:

We, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskills, have a mission to:

Provide a supportive place for spiritual, philosophical and intellectual development;
Celebrate and affirm, through the democratic process, our commitments to social activism, cooperation, c aring and love;
Seek ways, for both individuals and the congregation as a whole, of providing service to the community;
Invite and welcome persons in our geographic area to become part of our religious community.

We covenant with each other to:

Accept the responsibility to maintain a congregation in which to develop the best possible relationships, to love ourselves and others and to encourage our children to realize their potential;
Provide a respectful place for people of diverse backgrounds, views, and religious beliefs and foster a sense of well being for everyone in our religious community;
Respect, recognize and appreciate each and every individual's spiritual search and unique nature, and provide for alternatives to traditional forms of religious practice;

Affirm our special responsibility, and that of our members to promote the full participation of persons in all of its activities and in the full range of human endeavor without regard to race, color, sex, disability, sexual orientation, age or national origin and without requiring adherence to any particular interpretation of religion or to any particular religious belief or creed.

We are a community built on interdependence.

Furthermore, you and I have a covenanted relationship. When you installed me as your minister, we made a covenant to walk in partnership as we cared for this congregation. We recognized our relationship as one built upon mutual trust, mutual commitment and mutual responsibility. We renewed that covenant upon the ten year anniversary of the installation. Furthermore, Mike Ignatowski and I have made a covenant, as president and minister, regarding how we will we share our respective roles and how we will be with each other. We are a covenantal community. That’s cool, no?

Why? Because our UUCC covenants give us a framework in which to develop our best hospitable, fearless, wise and compassionate selves in relationship with one another and to realize our greatest potential, both for ourselves, for the community outside our walls. and for the environment and other living beings. James Luther Adams, a UU theologian wrote, “One maintains responsibility for the collective, not, finally, because it is the law, but because of love.” Or I might say because of a need for and an impulse toward connection with others. He goes on: “The responsibility is motivated by affection. Thus the breaking of the covenant is not merely a violation in the sense of criminality but in the sense of breaking faithfulness, of violating the affection that was the ground and nerve of the covenant in the first place. It is through God's love, God's grace, that we receive the covenant.” ("The Prophetic Covenant and Social Concern" in An Examined Faith, edited by George K. Beach) Or if those words do not work for you, one might say,20love, the core of the universe, pervades us. Or one might say, the inter-connected nature of life moves us toward realizing the connections because we are a manifestation of that life.

How do our covenants accomplish that? By first naming our community as a relational one built upon interdependence and mutuality and then acknowledging a set of ethical values and behaviors, specified, for instance, in the mission piece I read from the bylaws, that will encourage us to move toward the goal. Our covenants express our relationship and offer our intention to work and play together to make this relational community the most vibrant, energetic and healthy it can be. We’re counter-cultural both in the values we seek to live and in that we attempt, in a highly individualistic society, to embody individualism within community. “. . . the concept of covenant elevates ordinary qualities inherent to the concept itself: equality, consent, social bonds, promise, mutuality, conversation, agreement, . . . These qualities simultaneously contain ordinary relevance and ultimate meanings. Covenantal relationships prize persuasive discourse over coercive submission, the separation and balance of power, dissent and critique, and distinct individuality as necessary to, and the aim of, a relationship. The bonds created cherish spoken discourse as a spiritual practice and "walking together" as a spiritual discipline.” To paraphrase the thought of Brent Smith, whom I just quoted, unions such as our congregation have “love as (their) foundation and justice as (their) measurement.” (Brent Smith, “A New Birth of Freedom,” Journal of Liberal Religion Vol.8 No.1 (Winter 2008); http://meadville.edu/LLJLRv8n1Smith.htm)

If I understand Barack Obama correctly, he calls us to a covenantal way of thinking about our society and our government and one another. (Interestingly enough, Abraham Lincoln, whose birth we celebrated this week, also called the country to covenant based upon his understanding of us as a covenanted nation.) We exist in a network of connections in which the actions of each part of the network affect the other parts, (witness our economy). It behooves us then, to reach some explicit understandings of our obligations to one another within the frame of this network and to take personal responsibility for our contributions to the just sustainability of the entire network. Obama would be a connector. Covenants connect people.

A covenant derives its power from the ultimacy of the values of those who agree to the covenant. “We enter a well-crafted covenant in the hope of becoming -- not just the kind of community we think it would be nice to be but -- the kind of community we can’t help believing reality actually requires us to be for the fulfillment of our own human nature.” (Alice Blair Wesley, as quoted by Chip Roush in “Covenantal Breakfast” presented to the Ohio River Group in=2 0October 2008) When we base our covenants upon the ultimacy of connection, of love, of God, or however you name that which represents ongoing life, then the values our covenants would seek to embody are those of justice, gratitude and generosity, compassion and understanding, respect for the life and well-being of all -- physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual. That’s what, at our best, we try to do here at UUCC. That’s what I hope our nation would try to do for all its people.

Covenants have their place in more human relationships than marriage and congregations. Making promises of intention for the peaceful and prosperous sustenance of all the participants in a covenant is sorely needed in human interaction. I feel grateful to be part of this covenantal community and, like our president, I am wanting to carry forward the idea of covenantal thinking as a way of helping our nation to weather the crisis we’re in and emerge from it strengthened and transformed.

I want to close with a meditation, a prayer, a wish, for the economic stimulus that has now passed Congress and which, hopefully, will soon begin to make a difference in our lives. May we add a covenantal flavor to our society and economy, one that fastens love of neighbor as oneself into an economic frame. May we open and broaden the chambers of qualification that limit peoples’ access to such things as health care, education, p ositions of power, service in government, and keep so many waiting outside the gates. May we move away from the accumulation of wealth, of power, of knowledge by the few and open opportunities for the many. May we temper the spirit of individualistic entitlement with a spirit of communal solidarity and generosity. May we recognize this as fairness. May we have the imagination to re-envision the world and the courage to do it. May we covenant to build a land where justice rolls down like water and peace like a ever-flowing stream. May it be so.

Song #121 We’ll Build a Land