On September 14,1974 a couple of 22 year olds walked into a Justice of the Peace in upstate New York and got married. It was very low key; just us and our parents and my somewhat confused grandmother and my brother. We didn’t want an elaborate ceremony or a big reception. In fact, we held the reception in a nearby park where we could play softball. We joked that the only reason we got married was that it was the only way to get enough people together to field 2 complete teams. The results of that game are still in dispute; a small matter of failing to clarify the ground rules in advance. Was the tree at the edge of the outfield in home run territory, or was that hit a ground rule double? Lesson Number 1: Always agree on the ground rules before the game starts.

Thirty four years ago we didn’t know much about what it meant to make a sacred vow. We were in love, head over heels. We made some promises to each other, but we had no idea what the real measure of those promises would be. Today, on our wedding anniversary, I can assure you that we have a much clearer idea of what it means to say ‘for better or for worse.’ Terrible things happen in the course of every life time. They happen to everybody. The living through those things is what makes us real. Remember the passage in The Velveteen Rabbit when the Skin Horse explains to the rabbit about being real? “When you are real you don’t mind being hurt. That’s why it doesn’t happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Once you are real, you can’t become unreal again.” We have, over the last 3 decades, become real. We don’t break easily; neither of us require careful keeping. There are places where the loving has worn away the gloss, but we don’t mind.

          Because we have also learned that in relationships created by the keeping of sacred vows, wonderful things happen. Things that surprise and delight, things that invite us into awe.  Barry and I have been together now for well more than half our lives – several generations of cats have come and gone, baseball dynasties have risen and fallen. When we got married telephones were large things attached to the wall, computers took up a whole room, and America was reeling from the after affects of an ill advised military incursion on the other side of the world. We started out ‘childless by choice.’ That didn’t last long. Our son Danny is now an adult, earning a living and living in a serious and committed relationship.

We have cleaned up wet basements after numerous hurricanes, taken uncountable vacations, watched a bald eagle soar over Squam lake. The changes that have happened around us have strengthened our relationship. In spite of all the change we still have much in common – little things mostly that make it easy to be together. We laugh together, we listen to old Beatles songs, we go out on the balcony  and look at the moon at night. We are somewhat awed by the passage of time. I am not old enough to have been married for 34 years! What is most awesome, though, is the ways in which we have managed to remain true to those promises we made in ignorant bliss back in 1974.

As we have walked together  through the terrible and the wonderful, we have learned a great deal about valuing human freedom and making intentional choices. There is no such thing as a relationship made in heaven. It doesn’t fit with Unitarian Universalist theology. Free will, whether you believe it to be a natural state or a gift from God, is something that needs to be carefully exercised in order to be meaningful. Good relationships are made in the free exercise of the human mind and heart.  For relationships to work long term, you have to want to make them work. And you have to work to make them work.

Along the way Barry and I discovered that we sometimes respond very differently to things – both the terrible and the wonderful.  Learning to respect those differences instead of resent them has at times been a challenge. Too often we assume that in order to be compatible we need to associate with what we call likeminded’ individuals. Sometimes what is best for us is to associate with people who see the world dramatically differently than we do. But then you have to be willing to learn from each other. Barry and I have done this over the years by talking to each other and listening to each other. Listening not for the notes of agreement, but for the discordant notes that could either threaten our well-being or merge together into a more complex harmony. We have also talked to and listened to other people - friends and family, ministers and marriage counselors – whatever it has taken to make it work. 

We have kept our relationship fresh by being intentional about spending time together – we pencil each other into our calendars, have lunches together. On my day off (Monday every week) we try to do something special and relaxing together. We have always made our marriage a priority even in the face of the demands of jobs and kid and other important matters. 

There is a lovely reading about marriage by Anne Morrow Lindbergh that is often used at weddings. “A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules.  The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free like a country dance of Mozart’s.  To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding.  There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing.  Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back – it does not matter which.  Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.”

We didn’t have the reading at our wedding, because we didn’t know enough to chose it. But we have lived it in the years since. We have learned to hold on to each other, but not too tightly. We have learned to move to the same rhythm even when we are going in different directions. We have learned to create a pattern for our lives that accepts fate, welcomes grace, and allows us each to the freedom to grow and change and still have a safe home base. All of this has happened because of the sacred vow, the covenant, we established on this day 34 years ago.

I wasn’t a theologian back then, so I didn’t realize how important covenant would become to my professional life. Unitarian Universalism is a covenantal faith. We are not bound by a creed, a shared statement of belief. We are proud of that. But we are bound, my friends. We are bound by a covenant, a sacred vow, a promise that we make and remake to each other every time we come together. We are bound by that covenant even when we are not paying attention to it; in fact we are most bound by that covenant when we are flaunting it, breaking it, violating it. Covenants call us to our better selves. They are ethical boundaries, reminding us that though we are imperfect, though we sometimes fail to honor the promises we have made, those promises are worthy of our best effort, and they are worthy of our return when we stray from them. Covenants are most powerful when we have broken them, recognized our brokenness, and reaffirmed them. Our covenants call us to our best selves.

But more important than that, covenants call us out of ourselves and into relationship. They remind everyone of us that it really, really isn’t all about me. I’ll be honest with you. Neither Barry nor I remembers the actual words of our marriage vows. But the strength of that covenantal promise bound us together, two young people who had no real idea of what they were getting themselves into, and held us together even after we found out in the most challenging ways what it meant to say, “we intend this, for better or for worse.” Our covenants call us into relationship because every covenant is a sacred promise that, at its core, is made in love.

Love is, of course, the basis of a successful long term partnership of any kind. It is also the basis of successful faith community. Love is the compelling core of our free faith; it unites us even in the absence of a set of shared beliefs. Both  historically and presently, we know ourselves by our doctrine of radical love. If a covenant is based on love, then the relationships that emerge out of that covenant will reflect that love. The community that is built on that basis will embody that love. I would be so bold as to say that a covenanted community is the incarnation of love. The covenant of the free church is one that calls us to our better selves, calls us out of ourselves and into relationship, and calls us into community. For as long as free thinkers, heretics, those who yearn for a liberating religion that affirms human dignity and recognizes the interdependence of all creation – for as long as people like that, people like us - have practiced their radically free religion, their covenant has been a completely voluntary affirmation of their – our willingness to walk together in the ways of love.

There was another time when I took a sacred vow. That was on the day of my ordination. At that time I said to you, even though I didn’t yet know you, “I am aware of the privileges and obligations that this ordination confers on me. I enter into this ministry with a deep sense of commitment, with gratitude to you who have ordained me, and with a sense of joy and excitement. In humility I promise to try always to live my life in unity with the principles by which this act of ordination takes place.” Just as I didn’t know much about marriage when I took my marriage vow, I didn’t know a whole lot about ministry when I took my ordination vows a little over 17years ago. But there were things I did know about our free faith then that I still know now.

 I knew that Unitarian Universalism is a religion that is worthy of the best we all have to give. I knew that the great strength of Unitarian Universalism is our radical inclusionary principle; we are committed to creating communities where people with different theologies and philosophies can come together to explore their basic assumptions about the nature of life and love. More importantly, we come together to find answers to the question of how we can live out our faith in tangible ways. After 17 years I still take delight in being a professional facilitator of that process – insuring that our congregation does the great magic trick of holding in creative tension all of those ideas and hopes and dreams and experiences in such a way that all who are willing can experience spiritual growth and transformation, and can better prepare themselves to offer their gifts of spirit to a hurting world.

What I know now, after all these years of ministry, is that the covenant that calls us into community is an ideal that is all too often broken. I am no longer surprised that Unitarian Universalists are so quick to endanger the health of their beloved communities by allowing gossip and rumor and resentment and narcissism to have free rein. I am not surprised by how often we have to hold each other accountable, to acknowledge our failings, to ask for and offer forgiveness, to begin again in love. A former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association once said that his biggest surprise after becoming president was not how often UU congregation shoot themselves in the foot, but how quickly we seem to reload. But we keep coming back, we keep trying to live up to the ideals of our covenant, we keep trying to be the people who reflect the ideals that we enshrine in our sacred promises.

We live by covenants call us to our better selves, that call us into relationship, that call us into community. There is one more dimension to our covenants. They call us into awareness of whatever is of ultimate worth to us. That is why I asked Jo to read the Miriam Williamson poem written for Nelson Mandela’s inauguration. Her words are often mistakenly attributed to Mandela himself. At a time when his nation needed a bold vision of what a free South Africa could be, what better way to address individual South Africans than to remind them that each and every one of them “was born to make manifest the divine within?” You don’t have to believe in any kind of traditional God to know the truth that there is something noble that resides in our souls and is constantly seeking expression. Finding the divine, within yourself and within your covenanted community, is the essence of Unitarian Universalism. Jo also read from UU minister Brent Smith who talked about the gift of our faith being, “the freedom to explore and understand one’s own unique and direct relationship with God (or the Ultimate)”. This, he said, “is the purpose and aim of spiritual community, of giving one’s consent to walk with others.” We enter into covenant in order to have the freedom to explore our relationship with the ultimate. We enter into covenant in order to have others to walk with us in our exploration.

So what is the covenant of South Church? Much of our covenant is implicit rather than explicit. We have some understandings of the ways we hope to walk together, but we haven’t articulated them in a clear and accessible way. I am hoping that over the next year we can work on making our covenant more explicit. I would like to see us strengthen the language of the promise we make to each other every week in worship. But not right now.

First, let’s do the vision piece – the Searching For the Future sessions are next Saturday and the following Thursday. We need many of you there to help articulate the big picture of what South Church can be. If you haven’t already registered for the 3 hour session of your choice, please do so by talking to any board member during Social Hour today, or calling or emailing the office this week. This is the last piece of the strategic planning puzzle – a puzzle that many of you have been working on for years. It is now close to finished. But we need you to show up one more time and share your views and listen to the views of others so we can put the final pieces in the right places. Your presence will be a present to the future of our church. It is not easy to do complex long term planning in a covenanted community. It takes patience and time and most of all your participation in many iterations of the process. So let’s all be there.

Then, let’s do the fiscal piece. The stewardship campaign begins in October and will require a full measure of our time and energy. Then the holidays. So, how about we revisit this in January, when we have agreed on our direction, and have figured out how we will begin to finance the future. We will have done our visioning, our pledging, our celebrating, and maybe gotten some well deserved rest.

Until then we will walk together through this very full and challenging fall season, we will remind each other that we are bound together in love and freedom, and we will know that we have, each one of us, freely chosen to be a part of this covenantal community.