On September 6th, 1620, 102 people left England on the Mayflower. Of them, 37 were part of the Separatists Movement, known in England as Non-Conformists, as Puritans, and later by us as Pilgrims. The others on the ship were enslaved people, or people caught in indentured servitude, or children, or crew – and some are just listed as “wife” which opens a whole new set of questions. For the moment, though, I’m talking about those 37 people who made a choice to leave Mother England for the opportunity to live their faith in a church structured on their newly reimagined theology. They left home with a vision for a place that could be even more welcoming, even more comfortable, even more reflective of who they are. They left because they had a vision of a new home, one that fit and served and supported them even more than the one they had. And they travelled for 66 days across the Atlantic, not so much to find it, but to build it, together.
Central to the dream they pursued was the new concept of a covenanted church, one where people belonged because they wanted to. In England – and all over Europe, to be fair – people weren’t given the opportunity for personal faith. They had national faith. They were told what they believed and practiced. In England, it was a matter of patriotism, and lack of membership in the national Church came with severe penalties. Setting sail across an ocean was their way of disentangling themselves from Anglicanism and the doctrines of the state. They were trading that in for something new.
Not long after the Mayflower landed, John Winthrop was preaching to a new batch of pilgrims heading to this new land. To them he said:
"Now the only way…to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one [person]. We must entertain each other in brotherly [sic] affection; we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities... We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together: always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body."
This is covenanted religion. Every church had their own covenant, their own specific promises and understandings of who they were to each other, but the covenant as binder was universal, as it continues to be centuries later. We are not bound together by doctrine. We are bound together by covenant. We are here because we choose to be here. We are with each other, because we want to be.
This isn’t new to you. I’ve been talking about this for three years. What might be new is that, after three years, we’re going to start getting serious about what it might mean for us to live in a covenanted community. What if, as Winthrop says, we delight in each other, rejoice in each other, morn together, suffer and labor together?
In his poem "I am a Little Church," E.E. Cummings wrote:
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness
He’s describing authentic community. Covenanted Community. Whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness.
Have you ever had that experience? Maybe you were or are in a family system that feels deeply supportive, where each person clearly and certainly has each other’s back. Or maybe there’s an authentic community at work where you know the details of each other’s lives, celebrate and mourn and walk together in love? It can happen in friend groups, although after college they tend to be harder to come by. I’m in one, though – a group of friends who text daily, share meals several times a week, and raise our children together. It feels safe. There are many examples and you might be part of one, although statistically, it’s more likely that you were once part of one but don’t really experience that so much any more. Covid and other cultural shifts have made genuine community harder to find these days.
And yet, here we are. A community of faith whose bedrock belief, whose organizing principle, is covenant.
For the next two years, we are going to focus a lot on covenanting, on becoming that community of people who experience deep relationship. People who have made a decision to be together, to love and work and dream and grieve and celebrate together.
We’ll start with a series of small groups or cottage meetings with me to talk about what covenant is and what we dream for this congregation. In September and early October, we’re going to begin our thinking and I’m hoping every member participates because the only way we shift culture is with intention and engagement.
We are only ourselves. We belong to a denomination and we have partners churches, but Community Church of New York is part of the Free Church movement. That was the language of those Puritans, those Non-Conformists. The whole denomination, all of Unitarian Universalism is a part of the Free Church movement. This refers to our polity that allows each church to define its own parameters, to write its own bylaws, to create its own policies, and worship as they see fit with a minister they choose and call collectively themselves. Sometimes the term Free Church also points to our shared recognition that faith cannot be dictated, that each person must come into their own understanding of the world, filtered through personal experience. If we are going to abide our theology of covenant, we’ll do it because we – just we – decided to. No one dictates this to us.
I love the term “Free Church” and after having been Roman Catholic for a good long time, I appreciate it tremendously. But in this particular national moment, I worry that it’s a little too close to the word or the current practice often termed “liberty” which gets bandied around as a way to justify all sorts of anti-communal behaviors. I’m going to avoid yet another history lesson, so let me simply say that when our nation’s founding documents were written, the liberty to which they were referring wasn’t individual but collective. That is to say, our liberty, not my liberty. Freedom came from the group’s ability to make choices without interference by a distant power. Regardless of the unfortunate parallels in this divided country, the term Free Church continues to define and describe us from the 17th to the 21st century. We just have to mature enough to understand this isn’t about me, but about us.
UU theologian and historian Rev. Alice Blair Wesley tells us “the free church” – meaning us as the inheritors of the faith that travelled on the Mayflower – “is an organization we establish and join so that we may help each other to find, over and over again, in a thousand varying time frames and settings, what are our own worthiest loves, and therefore, what these loves now require of us, if we would be loyal in the most meaningful sense.”
What a question. What are our own worthiest loves and what is required of us to be loyal to them?
And in this Free Church, in this covenanted faith, we are called to ask that question in the context of our intentional, committed, relationship with each other. I am for you and you are for me. We are in this together. We are community. Your sadness or joy is my grief or gladness. Together we will find and practice and embody and protect all the ways of love, all that is worthy of love, all that is required of love.
To that end, we are hoping to inspire deeper connections across the congregation. Some of you have joined a Wellspring group. Some of you are enjoying Circle Suppers – and brunches – in all their locations and formats. Some of you are on the Board, a group that has shifted from just a working group to a gathered group of seekers and dreamers who are leading our transformation. Over this year, some of you will join Br. Zachary in the pastoral care programming he will be designing. And some of you will lead the way, making the transition from our Care Team to a culture of care where everyone is responsible for everyone, where we know that everyone is in need and everyone has something to offer.
Today is homecoming. Six months ago, I made a note on the worship calendar not to call this service homecoming because, let’s face it, this isn’t home. This might be the Mayflower, the ship we’re sailing, so grateful it’s keeping us safe and dry, but it’s not home. It’s a means to an end. So, I didn’t want to pretend that we were coming home from a summer respite. I wanted to name it and say – maybe next year. (And, to be clear, I really think we’ll be in our own space by Christmas, 2023.) I changed my mind, though, and I have been calling this service Homecoming and that’s because I think we are coming home. Not from summer. Not to a physical space. But, home to ourselves. I’m calling us home to our deepest values. I’m calling us home to the hopes we each had when we first joined this church. Those visions of community, of shared lives, of shared faith, of partnership and connection. I’m calling us home to the grounding of our faith, to living into the question of the worthiest of loves, where we delight in each other, mourn together, suffer and labor together, where your sorrow is my grief and my joy is your gladness. Welcome home to the visionary and beautiful future of Community Church.