First Parish Unitarian UniversalistLove, Truth, Service
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
January 25, 2004
This sermon is the second in a series about the Covenant of this congregation, which we recite each Sunday morning. For the first, called “Doctrine, Sacrament, Prayer” on December 14th, I sketched the context for this series at some length, which I won’t do again today, except to say that it is part of a resolve expressed by the First Parish leadership last June to clarify the congregation’s “shared identity” as part of preparing ourselves for membership growth. If you missed that first sermon or want to be reminded of it, you will find copies in the Parish Hall in the display of literature that faces you as you enter.
The Covenant is a good place to begin the quest for a shared identity precisely because we recite it every week. Many of you and many of the children know it by heart. As the phrase suggests, when we know something by heart we are more likely to take it to heart.
It becomes part of us, doesn’t it? It “becomes us,” too. It “becomes us” not in external appearance, as a color or outfit may be becoming, but it “becomes us” on the inside, in our inner nature. It helps us love ourselves; it makes us better people. If there is anything that provides this Unitarian Universalist congregation with a shared identity, it is our Covenant.
We like to say ours is a “covenantal” religion, as opposed to a creedal religion. This means we don’t have a test of belief that one must pass in order to join. Instead, we have a set of agreements into which we knowingly enter and periodically revisit. Covenants.
Unitarian Universalists make covenants at every level of our life together. The children in their RE classes make covenants about classroom behavior. Each of our small groups that meet regularly for sharing and meaningful conversation, which are called (not accidentally) Covenant Groups, created a covenant in which they committed to a certain quality of listening, holding confidences, and so on. When we prepared for my installation as your minister in May of 1999, we wrote a covenant between minister and congregation, articulating how we would act one with another. UU congregations are even in a covenantal relationship with one another, the text of which you may read on the back of your order of worship this morning.
Our faith is more to each of us as individuals than the words in these covenants, of course. We’re going to be exploring that something “more” in our upcoming Adult Religious Education class, “Articulating Your UU Faith,” which will begin a week from Thursday for six alternate Thursday evenings. The President, Laurie, and I and two members of the Parish Committee, Jan and Don, will be co-leading the class. We will be using a curriculum that has been acclaimed by other Unitarian Universalist congregations as both reflective and interactive, and is appropriate for both long-timers and newcomers to First Parish. So, I hope lots of you will join us in this venture to understand our “shared identity.” You can sign up today during Coffee Hour, at the table to the right as you enter the Parish Hall, or call or email the office.
The most familiar Covenant of all to us is the one that begins, “Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest for truth is its sacrament and service is its prayer.” Doctrine, sacrament, prayer… as I said in the first sermon, our Covenant begins with these three very traditional religious words but uses them in very unorthodox ways.
The first phrase is easy, because it is so simple: Love is our doctrine, our dogma. It’s what we teach, and try to live by. Love is our only dogma, it implies.
“The quest for truth is its sacrament,” we say. If sacrament is a rite believed to be a means of grace and if grace is divine love and protection (however we define divine), then our Covenant expresses a theologically radical notion. It says that our individual and collective searches for truth and meaning in life are the means by which we receive grace and know the divine, the means by which we grow our souls or become more whole, more holy. It’s not by baptism, or communion, priest or rabbi or imam, altar or bema or prayer rug, that we become whole.
The third phrase, “and service is our prayer,” makes it clear that ours is a religion of the here and now, and that we pray by serving, by doing the work of love and justice in the world. This doesn’t mean that we can’t also pray prayers, but it says that, to us, prayer without action, faith without works, is not anywhere near enough. Service is our prayer.
But, you know, this Covenant, to which I refer every Sunday, as “the covenant of this congregation,” isn’t just our covenant. In fact, it’s not original to First Parish at all. It is an adaptation of a covenant credited to the Rev. Charles Gordon Ames, who wrote it for a congregation in Philadelphia in the 1880s. Known therefore as the Ames Covenant, it is thought to be the most widely used covenant among UU congregations, and has been modified variously by them.
Ours is one of the wordiest of the variations I’ve heard or seen. I’ll read you what is known as the Ames Covenant (though I have not seen a historic source cited, so I can’t say for sure this is the 1880’s original), and you can listen for what is different from ours:
Love is the doctrine of this church
the quest of truth is its sacrament,
and service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace,
to seek knowledge in freedom,
to serve humanity in fellowship,
to the end that all souls shall grow
into harmony with the Divine –
thus do we covenant with each other and with God.
Did anyone catch any differences? (Read it again).
Did anyone note that ours adds “with respect and understanding” to qualify how it
is that we shall “dwell together in peace”? We say, “to serve our fellows and humankind” whereas that version says, “to serve humanity in fellowship.” We add “together” to make it “all souls shall grow together into harmony” clarifying that the community aspect of our growth is important to us. And, of course, I’m sure many of you noted that we add “by whatsoever name we worship” at the end, thus allowing for the Goddess, Allah, Yahweh, etc. or possibly even no name at all.
There is another less noticeable difference between the two. I wonder if anyone noticed? I’d read the Ames Covenant many times before I realized that one preposition is different in the opening lines, in the very phrase that I wanted to explore in this sermon.
As you will recall, we recite, “Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest for truth is its sacrament…” but the Ames Covenant says, “the quest of truth is its sacrament.” The quest of truth. That’s the wording in our hymnal and in previous ones, too; I looked as far back as the 1937 Universalist hymnal. What do you make of that? Is it the quest of truth or the quest for truth that is our sacrament? Does it matter?
But, I found many variations of the Ames Covenant that read as ours does with “for” in that line, and with other contemporary adaptations.
Here’s one from a sample UU website: [This] Congregation affirms love as its chief doctrine, the quest for truth as a sacrament, and service as a prayer. Members covenant together to seek knowledge in freedom, and to serve others in community to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with creation.
And another from the cover of a congregation’s order of worship: Love is the Doctrine of this Church. The quest for Truth is its Sacrament. And Service is its Prayer. To dwell together in Peace; To seek knowledge in Freedom; And to live in Harmony with all the Living Creatures and Plants of the Earth; This do we Affirm.
So, is it the quest of truth or the quest for truth that is our sacrament? Does it matter?
Well, I don’t know… do you? If we say “of” it suggests that the quest is made of, characterized by, truth as in “the table of wood” or “spirit of love.” A truthful quest. If we say “for” it suggests that truth is something that at least may be sought and, perhaps even, found. Perhaps it is just the ring of familiarity caused by repetition week after week, but “the quest for truth” makes more intuitive sense to me than “the quest of truth.” A truthful quest for truth?
I’m much more interested in what we mean by “truth.” It doesn’t start with a capital T, though who knows, perhaps back in the 1880’s it did. In which case it would refer to doctrinal Truth. But, with a lower case “t,” what does it mean? What is “truth” to you?
I always like to look in the dictionary, and there we learn that the words true and tree are joined at the root, etymologically speaking. In Old English, the words looked and sounded much more alike than they do now: "tree" was tr ow and "true" was tr owe. The first of these comes from the Germanic noun *trewam; the second, from the adjective *treuwaz. Both these Germanic words ultimately go back to an Indo-European root *deru- or *dreu-, appearing in derivatives referring to wood and, by extension, firmness. Therefore, truth may be thought of as something firm; so too can certain bonds between people, like trust, another derivative of the same root.
“Like a tree planted by the water, we shall not be moved. We shall not, we shall not be moved…”
It comes from the Hebrew Scriptures, Jeremiah 17: verse 8. “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”
Truth, then, is firm, like a tree? But we all have likely experienced an evolution in our own beliefs and our own understandings of what is true. Humankind certainly has. Just think of the belief that the earth is flat: experience proved otherwise, and therefore what was known to be true changed. Truth does not stand still and solid, does it?
It’s as Huxley wrote in regard to the Origin of Species, “It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.” This we know for ourselves, that what is important in our Covenant is that we are blessed by the search for truth, because it, and our ability to know it, are ever evolving. The search engages us fully in life.
If we ever seek the truth, we will entertain the possibility of new truths that feel, at first, as heresies. If we continue to seek the truth, ever open to new truths, we will never be saddled with superstitions, which by their very nature are static and unchanging.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.” For him, apathy of the mind would be abhorrent. For him, it is not a choice between truth and doubt, but between being fully engaged in life or not.
Emerson also knew something important about that how we communicate our truths. He wrote, “Truth has already ceased to be itself if polemically said.” If a person declares his or her truth in a hostile way, it no longer can be heard as the truth.
So, what is constant, then, is not the content of the truth but the way it feels: solid, like a tree, requiring no hostility to be conveyed. Like a tree, you can climb up and it will support you, in its branches you can find shelter, and underneath it you may find nourishment in the form of nuts and fruits. But when it feels confining, or we feel apathetic, our sacramental search for truth would have us question the old truths, thus finding new ones.
In our sacramental search for truth, let us be guided by doctrine and prayer, by our doctrine—which is love—and by our prayer, which is service. Thus, it becomes clear that what is true, what is right and good, is true because it is guided by love and serves the needs of others. Today, and every day, as we search for truth—as we endeavor to know what is right and good to do—let us ever be guided by love and by service to the common good of all. Amen.