Rev. Josh Pawelek
Spiritually speaking, where—or in what, or in whom—do you place your trust? Do you place your trust in God? Goddess? Spirit? Do you place your trust in the universe? In Nature? Do you place your trust in yourself? Do you place your trust in family, friends, neighbors? Do you place your trust in the people sitting around you—the members and friends of this congregation? I ask because where we place our trust matters. It shapes who we are and whose we are. And it shapes how we are in the world. Spiritually speaking, where do you place your trust?
Our ministry theme for February is trust. I wrote in my newsletter column that trust occupies a different location within Unitarian Universalism than it does in most other faith traditions. Unitarian Universalism is primarily a this-worldly, relational and covenantal faith. We explicitly gather around a set of seven principles—guidelines for how we are going to be together, how we are going to treat each other, how we are going to relate to the wider community and the world. We are non-doctrinal, meaning we do not gather around a specific theology or doctrine. What does this mean for trust? It means we place our primary trust in each other. In this sense, our trust is horizontal. It extends from person to person within the congregation and out into the wider community.
In more doctrinal faiths, people gather around a theological assertion, a commonly-held belief. As such they tend to place their primary trust in God. In this sense, their trust is vertical, extending “up” to God, or to wherever God lives. This does not mean that they don’t trust each other or that they don’t have agreements about how they are going to treat each other—they do. But they place their primary trust in God.
I call this sermon “The Wages of Trust is Life.” This title plays with a verse in the Christian New Testament book of Romans in which the Apostle Paul asserts, “for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.”[1] That is, if you live a sinful life the result will be death. If you put your faith in Jesus Christ the result will be eternal life. This is a doctrinal statement. Paul was among the first followers of Jesus to articulate in writing this doctrine about Jesus; a doctrine which lives at the heart of Christianity today. It has been a compelling doctrine for billions of people over the nearly 2,000 years since Paul wrote to the Roman Christian community. It is a compelling doctrine for a majority of the more than two billion Christians on the planet today. That’s a lot of vertical trust!
But our collective trust is horizontal. As a Unitarian Universalist congregation, we place our trust in each other. We don’t promise eternal life. Sorry. But we do promise a life worth living. And that matters. A life of community, companionship, partners for the journey, caring, compassion, support, mutual encouragement, mutual challenge, listening, love. These are the fruits of our trust in each other; and this is why I say, humbly, the wages of trust is life.
We aren’t the only ones whose trust is horizontal. From Christianity’s earliest days, Christians have debated the question: to what extent is religion about adherence to a doctrine? To what extent is religion about how we treat one another? A group of us are reading Jesus and After: The First Eighty Years by University of Massachusetts professor, E. Bruce Brooks. Brooks engages in a linguistic analysis of the Bible and other texts to show that prior to Paul’s efforts to establish Christianity as a doctrinal religion, there were Christians, centered primarily in Jerusalem but also living in communities throughout the ancient Near East, who knew nothing of Paul’s doctrines, and who focused primarily on being good to each other and their neighbors.
Brooks points out that in the earliest versions of the Gospel of Mark, which is the earliest of the four New Testament Gospels, a man comes to Jesus and asks, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus doesn’t give Paul’s answer. He doesn’t respond with doctrine. He doesn’t say ‘you have to believe.’ He advises the man to keep the commandments. He names five of the ten commandments from the Hebrew Bible—the five which have to do specifically with how we treat others: do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, honor your parents. He also adds a sixth commandment which is not in the original ten: do not defraud. What is significant for Brooks is that Jesus doesn’t name any of the commandments that have to do with humanity’s relationship to or belief in God. He doesn’t mention ‘have no other gods before me,’ ‘make no graven images,’ or ‘speak not God’s name in vain.’ In this very early version of Christianity, in the decade following Jesus’ death, the emphasis is not on belief or doctrine, but on ethical human behavior, on living a good life.[2]
This tension between right belief and right living, or what some call ‘works,’ continued throughout the first century. Brooks refers to a famous passage from an early version of the Epistle of James. James was attempting to counter the emphasis on doctrine coming from Paul and his followers: “What good is it,” James wrote, “if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a [sibling] is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them: ‘Go in peace. Keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”[3] For shorthand, you might be familiar with the phrase, ‘deeds not creeds.’ I feel a certain spiritual kindship with these early, Pre-Pauline Christians—at least Brooks’ understanding of them. There’s an air of horizontalness about them. It is no coincidence that this passage from James appears in our Unitarian Universalist hymnal.
One can reasonably ask—and our critics do ask—if you don’t have a commonly-held belief, what holds you together? The answer is covenant. Our covenants hold us together.
Covenant is an Ancient Near Eastern concept. The Hebrew word berit or beriyth translates variously as covenant, treaty, compact, alliance or agreement. It appears 3oo times in the Bible. Its earliest, pre-Bibilical usage was political. It referred to a treaty whereby one king pledged allegiance to another, more powerful king. Most scholars agree this political model provided the template for Israel’s spiritual covenant with God, which is the heart of Judaism. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures God regularly revises the covenant, making promises of land, prosperity, freedom, protection, victory in war, national greatness and on and on. The people agree to remain loyal to God and uphold God’s law. Then they typically miss the mark in some way. They fall out of covenant. God commissions prophets to call the Israelites back into covenant. They come back, the covenant gets revised, and so on. The covenants within Christianity are revisions and adaptations of God’s covenant with Israel The covenants within Islam refer back to the Christian and Jewish covenants.
Covenants were very important to our spiritual forebears in colonial New England, the Puritans. Although their faith was certainly doctrinal in emphasis, they also placed great trust in each other. The late Unitarian historian, Conrad Wright, wrote that “when the New England Puritans gathered their churches, they wrote out covenants, by which the members agreed to walk together in mutual fellowship, in commitment to one another as well as to Christ Jesus.” [4] This metaphor of walking together was very important to the Puritans. It’s a reference to the Hebrew prophet Amos who asked “Do two walk together who have not made an agreement?”[5] Walking together is another way of saying ‘we trust one another.’
Wright said “the earliest New England covenants … were simple statements. [For example,] the Salem covenant of 1629 is as follows: ‘We covenant with the Lord and one with an other; and doe bynd our selves in the presence of God, to walke together in all his waies….’ While there are words here with theological significance, such as ‘Lord,’ and ‘God’ … it should be remarked that this was not a creedal statement. The operative words here are: ‘we … doe bynd our selves … to walke together.’ They are not ‘we believe.’”[6]
Over time, theological disagreements emerged within the New England churches. The Orthodox clung to the old doctrines. Liberals rejected them. The Orthodox demanded doctrinal purity. Slowly the liberals moved on, establishing the first Unitarian congregations in the United States. Wright says that “very early in our history as a separate religious body we insisted that creedal statements are not the proper basis for religious fellowship; more than that, that theological diversity is not only to be tolerated, but to be embraced as a good thing…. [Today] we assert the right and duty of each one of us to adhere to his or her understanding of religious truth, and we accept the obligation to respect one another, even if we do not always agree.”[7]
Our early American Unitarian forebears rejected the old doctrines, but they kept their covenantal practices. They remained a covenantal faith. When this congregation was founded in 1969, Unitarian Universalism’s covenant featured six principles, including strengthening one another in a free and disciplined search for truth; cherishing and spreading the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity; affirming, defending and promoting the supreme worth and dignity of every human being and the use of democratic processes in human relationships; striving for a world community founded in peace and justice; supporting, extending and strengthening liberal religion; and cooperating with people of good will in every land.[8] In 1985 we changed our principles to their current language: “We covenant to affirm and promote: the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; and respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”
In 1989 this congregation created its own covenant and mission; and in 2012 we crafted our current congregational covenant, which supplements the Unitarian Universalist principles with more specific statements about how we intend to relate to one another here, including treating each other with respect, engaging each other with love and kindness, listening openly, speaking our truths thoughtfully, embracing conflict as an opportunity for growth, nurturing generosity, maintaining a sense of humor, being mindful of power dynamics based on identities such as race, class, sexual orientation and gender, and seeking forgiveness when we miss the mark. We’re now beginning a process of reviewing and updating that covenant. On March 14th the Policy Board will hold open forums to discuss possible updates.
None of these covenants are statements of belief. They do not express doctrines or creeds. They state our highest values. They express how we intend to relate to each other, how we intend to show up in the world, how we intend to live. We enter into this religious community trusting that each of us will do our best to live by these covenants, trusting that each of us is seeking relationships that have dignity, justice, compassion, a sense of interconnection, and love at their core. As Unitarian Universalists, we agree that such relationships here and now, in this life, in this world, matter immensely. That’s what unites us! That’s what gives us life. Indeed, the wages of trust is life.
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The other night my 16-year-old asked what I thought happens after we die. Some faiths answer that question with a doctrine. “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.” My answer was “I don’t know.” That seemed OK to him, but for me, as a dad who wants to give his child all the hope and confidence in the world, it felt significantly less than satisfactory. We then had a philosophical conversation about what it might mean to simply cease existing, or whether there might be such a thing as soul that lives on after we die. That was a ‘head’ conversation. But lurking beneath was a ‘heart’ conversation, a longing, a yearning for something more, perhaps a sadness that our time on earth is short, that we really may not encounter each other again after this life is done, that nothing is truly eternal.
Yet, in such moments I’m also reminded: if this is the only life, then let’s live an amazing life. Let’s live the best life we can possibly live. Let’s life lives of integrity, lives that seek justice for people and the earth; lives that build beloved community; lives that search earnestly for truth and meaning; lives that recognize and value our interdependence with all other life. And this is why a covenantal faith is so important. None of us can live such a life on our own. We need one another. We need each other’s care and support and compassion and love. We may not be able to trust in some ancient notion of eternal life, but we can put our trust in each other to live this good life. Indeed, the wages of trust is life.
Amen and blessed be.
[1] Romans 6:23 (New Revised Standard Version).
[2] Brooks, Bruce E., Jesus and After: The First Eighty Years (Amherst, MA: Warring States Project, UMASS Amherst, 2017) pp. 19-20.
[3] Ibid., pp. 85-86. Also, I am quoting the language of James 2: 14-17 that appears in #668, Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
[4] Wright, Conrad, Walking Together: Polity and Participation in Unitarian Universalist Churches (Boston: Skinner House, 1989) pp. 7.
[5] Amos 3:3.
[6] Wright, Walking Together, p. 7.
[7] Wright, Walking Together, p. 27.
[8] The full text, complete with male-centered language, is at https://www.uuworld.org/articles/the-uuas-original-principles-1961.
