Archive for the 'Jewish texts & traditions' Category

“Option D”

Published on November 1, 2009 in Humanism, Jewish texts & traditions, UU issues and UU theology. Closed

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California, at the 9:30 and 11:00 worship services. As usual, the sermon and story below are reading texts. The actual sermon as preached, and story as told, contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon and story copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Story — “The Golden Calf”

This is an old, old story about the ancient prophet Moses. Moses was the man who led the Israelites out of slavery, and helped them escape into the desert. They wandered in the desert, looking for a land to call their own. At last they camped at the base of Mount Sinai.

Moses climbed up Mount Sinai, up to the very top. At the top of the mountain, the god known as Yahweh spoke to him. Yahweh said, “All of you Israelites are going to be my special, chosen people. I will take care of you, and you must promise to obey me over all the other gods and goddesses.”

Moses went back down Mount Sinai to tell the Israelites. It’s always good to have a god looking out for you, so the Israelites agreed to obey Yahweh. Moses went back up Mount Sinai. “They all promised to obey you,” Moses said to Yahweh.

“Well, just to make sure,” said Yahweh, “I’m going to appear at the top of this mountain as a dense dark cloud, filled with thunder and lightning. You come back up the mountain, and all the Israelites will know that I talk to you directly.”

Moses went back down Mount Sinai. Yahweh appeared at the top of the mountain as a dense cloud. Moses went back up the mountain to talk with Yahweh. The Israelites watched.

Moses entered the dense cloud at the top of the mountain. Yahweh told Moses about all the rules and laws the Israelites would have to obey. Yahweh started with ten basic laws, the Ten Commandments: no stealing, no murdering people, no lying; and a law saying the Israelites weren’t allowed to worship any other god or goddess besides Yahweh.

Moses brought the Ten Commandments down to the Israelites. But there were still more laws. Moses had to climb up and down that mountain quite a few times to bring back all the laws.

Once Moses stayed on top of the mountain for a really long time. The Israelites thought Moses and Yahweh had abandoned them. The Israelites decided to make a new god. They took gold and made it into the shape of a calf — a golden calf. They invented a new religion to worship the golden calf, and had a big party to celebrate. Just as the party was really getting going, Moses came back down the mountain.

“What’s going on here?” Moses said. “Don’t you remember that you promised not to worship any other gods?”

The Israelites looked a little shamefaced, but no one apologized.

“Who’s on my side?” said Moses angrily. “If you still like Yahweh best, come with me!” A few people joined him. Moses made sure they all had swords, and then told them to go and kill anyone who was still worshipping that golden calf.

And they did.

This is a strange story. Moses had already told everyone that killing was against Yahweh’s laws, so when he killed people didn’t he break Yahweh’s law? On the other hand, wasn’t it stupid for the Israelites to make a golden calf, and then worship the thing they had just made?

I think this story is supposed to make us stop and think about religion. I think this story is telling us: don’t do something because someone tells you to, or because everyone else is doing it. Seek out the truth, hang out with other people who think for themselves, and remember how easy it is to make mistakes.

[Exodus 31.18-32.25, with reference to the events of Exodus 19-31. I used the New International Version when writing this story.]

 

Sermon — “Option D”

Get out your number 2 pencils. Do not let your mark stray outside the oval, and check off at least one, but no more than one choice. Are you ready? Here’s the question:

Do you believe in God? Choose one of the following: (A) Yes. (B) No. (C) Don’t care or don’t know.

Many, maybe most, people in our contemporary Western society believe those are the only three possible answers to that question. Do you believe in God? Yes. No. Don’t know or don’t care.

Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson, and humanist fundamentalists like Richard Dawkins, would deny that that third option exists — they believe you have to answer yes or no — they live in theological world that operates solely under Boolean logic.

Unitarian Universalists, on the other hand, want option D: All of the above. Since Western society does not give us option D, we take our number 2 pencils and fill in all three ovals, which does tend to mess up the scoring of this particular multiple choice test. This morning, I would like to tell you a little bit about how we came to be this way — why it is that we refuse to restrict ourselves to simplistic answers to the question, Do you believe in God?

———

Let me go tell you a little bit of the historical story behind our Unitarian Universalist attitudes towards God.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Unitarian ministers like Francis Ellingwood Abbott and Octavius Brooks Frothingham caused a ruckus within Unitarianism by preaching “Free Religion” — what we today would call religious humanism [Dorrien 2001], although they still used words like “Christ” and “God.” By the end of the 19th century, free religionists were everywhere: Eliza Tupper Wilkes, the Unitarian preacher who first spread Unitarianism here in Palo Alto in the 1890s, was one of those who allied themselves with the Free Religion position in the Western Unitarian Conference. [Tucker 1990]

By the 1930s, John Dietrich and other Unitarian and Universalist ministers were preaching what they had come to call humanism — religion with humanity at its center, not God. The humanists found themselves engaged in active debate with the theists, people like William Wallace Fenn, Unitarians and Universalists who felt no need to dismiss the concept of God. In the first half of the 20th century, the debate between the theists and the humanists was vigorous, sometimes stupidly acrimonious, but often quite fruitful.

But not all Unitarians and Universalists could be characterized as either humanist or theist. There was E. Stanton Hodgin, who had been minister at the radical Los Angeles Unitarian church, and then minister at the fairly stodgy New Bedford, Massachusetts, Unitarian church. When Stanton Hodgin was asked to sign the Humanist Manifesto in 1933, he refused — he didn’t want religion reduced to anything that remotely resembled a creed. And when Hodgin wrote his autobiography in 1948, he gave it the title Confessions of an Agnostic Clergyman — he refused to let himself be put into a theological box.

I give you some of this history so that you realize that the conversations between the humanists and the theists have been going on in Unitarianism and Universalism for one and a half centuries. Plenty of smart people have participated on both sides of these conversations. If one side could prove the existence or non-existence of God, they would have done so by now.

Let me move ahead in time to 1973, when William R. Jones published his controversial book titled Is God a White Racist? In that book he made a crucial advance in the debate between humanists and theists, which he further clarified in his 1975 article “Humanism and Theism: The Chasm Narrows.” [Note 1] Jones said that the battles for liberation — liberation of African Americans, liberation of women, liberation of third world peoples — would force theists to a position that he called “humanocentric theism.” Getting rid of the theological jargon, what Jones meant was simple: There are two basic types of theism. First, there’s the theism that says that everything is God’s will, and humanity has little or no freedom of decision. Second, there’s the theism that says God exists yet we human beings have freedom to make decisions — and that being the case, this second type of theism, humano-centric theism, functionally looks very much like humanism. Jones is African American, and he was active in the Civil Rights struggle; speaking as a humanist, he almost seems to be saying: Instead of arguing about whether God exists, let’s just acknowledge that humanists and theists are different, move beyond that, and work together to end racism.

Let me jump ahead to 2002. In that year, Carole Fontaine, a Unitarian Universalist who is professor of Biblical studies at Andover Newton Theological School, posed an interesting question: What will it take to form a global conscience for planet Earth? Part of her answer was that theists and humanists need to work together. And she contended that we Unitarian Universalists are uniquely placed to build bridges between traditional theists and secular humanists so that, for example, we can do human rights work together. Thus, Fontaine believes we Unitarian Universalists need to “reconstitute Jesus as a human rights guy…. I like Jesus. He’s my guy. The fact that he’s executed on trumped-up political charges — I mean, he’s the Stephen Biko of the first century. We can work with this!” [Note 2. Fontaine 2003.] So Carole Fontaine goes a step further than William R. Jones — not only should humanists and theists be working together on social justice — but those theists and humanists in Unitarian Universalist congregations, already so experienced in humanist-theist dialogue, have a special role in the wider world, because we are the ones who can get the traditional theists and the secular humanists to work together.

Now you begin to see why we Unitarian Universalists want to choose option D. There are those who believe in God; there are those who don’t believe in God; there are those who don’t know or don’t care; and then there’s us. We do all of the above, and that is our unique strength, that is the unique contribution we have to make to the world.

———

We Unitarian Universalists refuse to be boxed in by either-or theological choices. James Luther Adams, perhaps the most prominent Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century, started out as a traditional Christian. He became a Unitarian and a religious humanist at about the same time. Later on in life, he thought of himself as a theist, a liberal Christian; although he was a very liberal Christian, active in feminist critiques of God-images. When I look back at my own religious journey, I have been successively a non-traditional theist, a non-traditional humanist, and now I call myself a religious naturalist; as a religious naturalist, I can use God-talk or not as I wish, and still be theologically consistent. Someone once asked a Universalist minister what it was, exactly, that Universalists stand for. “We don’t stand,” he said, “we move.” [Fisher 1921]

And this brings us back to that story I told at the beginning of the worship service, that old, old story about Moses and the golden calf. You remember the story: Moses and the Israelites make promises to the god Yahweh; in return for Yahweh’s protection, Moses and the Israelites promise (among many other things) to refrain from killing each other, and to refrain from worshipping other gods or goddesses. Yet when Moses is gone for a while, the Israelites start worshipping a golden calf, and then Moses kills a whole bunch of the Israelites for doing so.

Before I go any further, I have to make something clear to those of you here this morning who might be new to Unitarian Universalism. We Unitarian Universalists do not take the Bible literally, any more than we take Shakespeare literally. Did Moses really go up onto Mount Sinai and speak to a god whom he called Yahweh? Yes and no. Did Macbeth really see Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth”? Yes and no. In each case, there is a literal answer, an answer which is fairly trivial and ultimately rather boring; and there is also a non-literal answer, an answer which relates to moral and spiritual truths, and it is in answering this latter question that we can be transformed at our deepest levels of being.

We Unitarian Universalists have traditionally understood the story of Moses and the golden calf to be a story calling upon us to reject idolatry. Let me explain one way we Unitarian Universalists might define idolatry:

When the Israelites made the golden calf, they were guilty of idolatry: instead of coming to terms with the complexities of moral and ethical thinking encapsulated in the laws of Yahweh, the Israelites tried to take a set of religious concepts that were really quite complicated and subtle, and they tried to reduce those concepts to something that was showy but empty and useless. When Moses ignored the law of Yahweh that prohibited killing, so that he could angrily kill anyone who worshipped the golden calf, he was guilty of idolatry. He took a set of religious concepts that were complicated and subtle, and he cut out all the parts he didn’t like. So Moses ignored the law against killing so that he could enforce the law against worshipping another god; and in one of the Bible’s moments of supreme irony he exchanges one form of idolatry for another form of idolatry. Both types of idolatry are the same in that they place undue significance on something of little or no significance.

(I cannot resist digressing here for just a moment to point out that the usual American method of reading the Bible is the first form of idolatry. Most Americans, when they read the Bible, take this complicated, layered, fascinating collection of literature written over a period of thousands of years, and reduce it to simplistic moralism. Most Americans read the Bible the way they’d read the latest thriller by Dan Brown, when we should be reading the Bible the way we read Shakespeare, reading it as literature that offers something to everyone from the groundlings to the most sophisticated intellectuals.)

Historically, we Unitarian Universalists have resisted idolatry with all the power of our beings. The Unitarians of my grandparents’ generation realized that the crosses that had appeared in some Unitarian churches were idols — symbols that had taken on undue significance. My aunt and uncle belonged to the Unitarian church in Lexington, Massachusetts, and in the late 1940s that church developed a really beautiful Christmas eve service, where the whole church started out in darkness, and gradually a few candles were lit, then a few more, and at the end of the service everyone was holding a lit candle and the combined light of all those individual candles lit up the whole church. As this candlelight service evolved, someone threw in a dramatic moment when an internally-lit cross rose up in front of the pulpit — a nice piece of theater, a sort of dramatic reminder that Christmas is central to the Christian tradition. And so for some years, that internally-lit cross would rise up on Christmas Eve — until the year when they decided that the symbolism was heavy-handed, that it was a form of idolatry. So that big old cross got stuffed in a garbage can, and placed in front of the church, where (it is said) it provoked a great deal of comment about those Godless Unitarians among certain more literally-minded residents of the town.

I remember the first time the minister introduced the flaming chalice into a worship service in the Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in. I was sitting next to my mother, a lifelong Unitarian, and as he lit the match she muttered under her breath, “Graven images” — which is an old-fashioned way of accusing that minister of idolatry. I don’t think the flaming chalice is inherently idolatrous, but if we place undue significance on what is essentially an insignificant object, then it becomes idolatrous. The flaming chalice began as a symbol used by the Unitarian Service Committee during the Second World War, and really it is a symbol of our commitment to social justice work. This congregation’s habit of extinguishing the chalice strikes me as tending towards the idolatrous, as placing undue significance on a very simple symbol.

Another obvious example of something here in our church which can be interpreted as idolatrous is the branch which hangs in this room. I don’t mind having a branch hanging on our wall; it’s a nice piece of decor. But when I am uncomfortable when I hear people attributing symbolic significance to that branch; that, it seems to me, is placing undue significance on what is, after all, just a branch. And I’m sure some of you disagree with me, and you will politely let me know about your disagreement after the worship service. We need polite disagreement if we are to keep ourselves from falling into idolatry. Because people like me — mystics who want to get rid of all symbols — we can create another kind of idolatry, an idolatry of simplicity where we try to place undue significance on plainness and complete lack of ornamentation.

Anything can become an idol, a graven image, a golden calf. Even if we got rid of all the symbols, our whole building could become a graven image, if we place undue significance on it. We don’t even need a building in order to be a congregation; all we need is each other, and the search for truth, and a commitment to make the world a better place.

The golden calf was an crude attempt to fix the truth in a calf made of gold. Let us be sure that we do not try to fix the truth in some material object — the truth will not be held in a golden calf, nor in a flaming chalice, nor in the branch, nor in this building. The truth may be held for a time in a community of people, as long as that community of people remains flexible and willing to evolve. We may be comforted, for a time, by our building, or by the flaming chalice, but do not confuse such comfort with truth. Truth and comfort are united only in a community of people. If this building crumbles into dust, we will still be able to take comfort in each other, we will still be able to take comfort in this religious community, we will still know the truth that we can change the world for the better. We gain strength from each other, from our shared religious community; and we take that strength out beyond our community to heal a world that desperately needs healing.

———

Do you believe in God? Choose one of the following: (A) Yes. (B) No. (C) Don’t care or don’t know. (D) All of the above. As Unitarian Universalists, our choice is clear: we choose option D. We choose to remember that we have debated this question for a century and a half, with very intelligent people arguing for very different answers, and we no longer expect a definitive answer. We choose an answer that puts us in a unique position to help heal the world. We choose to resist an idolatry that would limit us to simplistic answers to religious questions.

 

Selected References

Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001.
Fisher, Lewis Beals. Which Way? A Study of Universalists and Universalism. Boston: Universalist Publishing House, 1921. [p. 9]
Fontaine, Carole. “Strange Bedfellows? human Rights, Scripture(s), and the Seven Principles.” Journal of Liberal Religion, Winter, 2003; www.meadville.edu/journal/2003_fontaine_4_1.pdf accessed October 2009.
Hodgin, E. Stanton. Confessions of an Agnostic Clergyman Boston: Beacon Press, 1948.
Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist?. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973, 1997.
———. “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows.” The Christian Century, May 21, 1975, pp. 520-525.
Tucker, Cynthia Grant. Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880-1930. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1991.

The Covenant of Moses

Published on January 11, 2009 in Jewish texts & traditions and UU issues. Closed

More than half this sermon was preached extemporaneously. A written version will be available in the near future.

The Covenant of Abraham

Published on January 4, 2009 in Jewish texts & traditions and UU issues. Closed

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Reading

The reading is from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Genesis, chapter 12. In this reading, instead of using the traditional term “the Lord,” I will use the more correct name “Adonai” for the God of Abraham:

“Now Adonai said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

“So Abram went, as Adonai had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then Adonai appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built there an altar to Adonai, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to Adonai and invoked the name of Adonai.”

[NRSV Genesis 12.1-8]

Sermon — The Covenant of Abraham

If you come regularly to First Unitarian, or if you get the church newsletter, you will know that our church is in the process of creating a mission statement, a set of goals, and a covenant. This process began a couple of years ago with something called the “Seeker’s Task Force” — Ned Lund came up with that name based on the words I usually read just before the worship begins: “…we come together … to seek after truth and goodness…” The Seeker’s Task Force was a group of people who were charged with discerning what direction this congregation might pursue in the future. They talked with members and friends of the congregation to find out what about this church was most important to people. Then the Ministry Committee took the next step, developing a mission statement, a set of goals, and a covenant; all these are based on the final report of the Seeker’s Task Force, aw well as additional conversations with church members and friends.

On February 22, we’ll take the next step in this process. After the worship service on February 22, there will be a special congregational meeting to vote on a mission statement, set of goals, and a covenant; and while everyone is welcome to observe this meeting, it is those of you who have made the commitment to becoming full voting members of the congregation who will actually vote. This Sunday and next, there will be two further meetings after church as a final opportunity for you to talk with members of the Ministry Committee about the draft mission statement, goals, and covenant; in other words, if you have any question or concerns, you have two more Sundays to express them; and after next Sunday, the Ministry Committee will write out the final wording to be voted on at the meeting on February 22.

We all know what goals are, and we all pretty much know what a mission statement is too. But it may not be quite so clear what a covenant is, at least what a religious covenant might be. In order to clarify this concept well before the congregational meeting, I would like to speak to you this morning about covenants in our religious tradition.

1. I will start out by saying that a covenant is the center of our religious tradition. Unitarian Universalists are less concerned about what individuals believe:– we can believe in God or not; we do not require anyone to subscribe to a specific creed or dogma. Instead of being organized around specific beliefs, we are organized around our covenant, that is, we are organized around a set of promises that we make to one another. There is no requirement for us to have a written covenant. Yet in our tradition there is always a covenant at the center of our congregations, whether it happens to be an explicit written covenant, or an implicit unwritten covenant.

When I arrived here three and a half years ago, we had no written covenant for this congregation. I did discover that we had had one during the ministry of John Weiss, that is, until the 1850s. Yet while there was no written covenant, it was clear to me that this congregation had, and has, a strong implicit covenant. I wanted to find out what that covenant was, so I did a little research. Most importantly, I listened hard when members and friends of this church talked about what this church meant to them. I also read through the church bylaws, and many other documents. Based on what I had heard from you, and what I had found that had been written down, I wrote up a rough version of the unwritten, implicit covenant of this church. And I started reading my rough version of this covenant before each worship service each week just at 11 a.m. Over the past three years, you listened to what I read out loud, and you corrected my rough version of this church’s covenant. Three years later, based on what I heard from you, this is what I now read:

Here at First Unitarian, we value our differences of age, gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, and theology. We are bound together, not by some creed or dogma, but by our covenant: We come together in love to seek after truth and goodness, to find spiritual transformation in our lives; and in the spirit of love we care for one another and promote practical goodness in the world.

This is how I tried to articulate the promises that we in this congregation make to one another. Mind you, my version is pretty rough and far from perfect! Based on the Seeker’s Task Force report and further conversations with you, the Ministry Committee has developed a more refined version, which reads like this:

We come together as a religious community upholding freedom of conscience, right relationship, and the inherent worth of all people. We value our diversity, and pledge to care for one another in the spirit of love and to promote justice and kindness in the world.

You can see that this new written version is smoother and more concise. Even so, what’s written down isn’t what’s most important about a covenant. Any written covenant merely puts into writing a set of promises that already exists at the core of who we are as a congregation. A covenant describes our way of being together as a religious community. And in our tradition, the way we make ourselves into a religious community is through our covenant, that is, through a set of promises that we make. It is easier for everyone if we put our covenant into writing — it especially makes it easier for newcomers to figure out who we are — but really what’s important about any covenant is the way we live it out in real life.

I think I can make this clearer to you if I tell you where our idea of covenant comes from.

2. Now the idea of covenant is at the center of three major world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three of these religions trace themselves back to the figure of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible. Abraham, says the Hebrew Bible, made a covenant with the god named YHWH, or Adonai. So let me tell you the story of Abraham and his covenant with Adonai.

The story as it is told in the book of Genesis begins in most ancient times. There’s that flood, where Noah built the ark; somewhere in there there’s the Tower of Babel; anyway, one of Noah’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandsons was a man named Abram. (If I counted right, that’s ten generations from Noah to Abram; it would be as if Noah was the first European settler here in New Bedford, and Abram was one of his descendants living today.)

As the story opens, Abram is living in a place called Haran with his wife Sarai, and his father Terah. Terah dies, and Abram decides to move into the land of Canaan — he and his family are semi-nomadic, they lived in tents and moved around a lot. But how does Abram decide that it’s time to move into Canaan? Adonai — this is the same god named Adonai who told Noah to build the ark because there was a flood coming — Adonai appears to Abram, and tells him: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” In other words, Adonai promises certain things to Abram — blessings, greatness, and so on — if Abram will promise in return to do what Adonai says, beginning with going into the land of Canaan. This is the beginning of Adonai’s covenant, or set of promises, with Abram.

Abram tells everyone to pack up, and they all move into Canaan. When they get there, Adonai appears to Abram and says again, I’m giving this land to you and your descendants. So Abram builds a temple to Adonai, which probably was a platform made out of stones, an altar to offer up burnt offerings.

Then there was a famine in the land, and so Abram had to go to Egypt, and he underwent all kinds of adventures there, but Adonai looked out for him the whole time. And Adonai kept promising Abram that the land of Canaan was going to belong to him and to his descendants. Problem was, Abram had no descendants; he and Sarai were in their nineties, and they didn’t have any children. But Adonai tells Abram not to worry, and promises yet again that all this land will belong to him and to his descendants. And Adonai makes more promises — he adds to the covenant with Abram — as follows: Abram has to change his name to Abraham, and his wife’s name to Sarah; Abraham has to make sure every man in his tribe is circumcised; Abraham has to promise that he and all his kinfolk and all his descendants will keep Adonai as their god, and obey Adonai. In return, Adonai promises that Abraham and Sarah will have a son; they will have lots of descendants, who will make great nations; some of his descendants will be kings; he and his descendants will own the land of Canaan in perpetuity.

To which Abraham responds: “Whaddya mean, Sarah and I are gonna have a son? I’m ninety-nine years old, for Pete’s sake, and Sarah is ninety. How are we gonna have a child?” But Adonai says, Trust me. So Abraham trusts him, goes back, and makes all his male kinfolk and all his male slaves get circumcised. Then Adonai, being all-powerful, makes sure that Sarah gets pregnant. Abraham and Sarah are overjoyed when they have a baby boy, whom they name Isaac.

Then Adonai tests Abraham. Adonai appears to Abraham, and tells him: OK, you have to sacrifice Isaac to me. Sacrifice, as in kill your son, and offer him up as a burnt offering on that altar you made for me. Sacrifice, as in murder your son because Adonai tells you to do so.

(At this point in the story, I can’t resist interjecting a little parenthetical comment: I am glad that the children are up in the Sunday school, and not with us right now to hear this story. I really don’t want to tell one of our children about God telling someone to kill his child; it sends the wrong message to our children. We really want to be careful about the Bible stories we tell to our kids. Now back to the story:)

So Abraham says, Yes, Adonai, whatever you say, and he takes Isaac out to the stone altar, lays Isaac down under a big pile of firewood, and gets ready to kill him and burn his body. At the very last minute, Adonai stops Abraham from killing Isaac, and makes a sheep appear magically, so Abraham kills the sheep and turns it into a burnt offering instead of his son.

If you’re like me, your first reaction will be: What a gruesome story! — how could Adonai test a father in this way? And how could a father actually consent to sacrifice one of his children? And based on that reaction, we might conclude: The whole reason Abraham is willing to kill his own son is because of his covenant with Adonai; because of the promises he has made to his god Adonai. This does not make covenants seem particularly attractive.

But before we jump to conclusions, let’s stop for a moment and do a more considered analysis of the story. If we put aside traditional Christian and Jewish notions of God for just a moment, we realize the story is not quite as simple as we might have though. First of all, it is clear from the Hebrew Bible that Adonai had competition, that there were other gods and goddesses out there. Abraham didn’t have to choose Adonai; he could have chosen another god, or no god at all. Abraham chose Adonai freely, and furthermore it seems to me that Abraham went into the covenant with his eyes wide open; he knew that the benefits Adonai offered would come at a high price.

And if we pause to give this story even more careful consideration, we would have to ask ourselves why we are taking this story so literally. Is this story any worse than the fairy tales we read to children? Think about the story of Hansel and Gretel, where the witch eats children, which is just as gruesome; think about all those fairy tales where parents kill their children. Yet we don’t take the story of Hansel and Gretel literally; we treat it as a myth, a story which contains psychological truth, but which is not literally true. We can treat story of Abraham and Isaac in the same way.

Considered as a myth containing psychological truth, the story of Abraham and Isaac can tell us something important about covenants. You will recall that a covenant is a set of promises where you promise something, and get something in return. Take the implicit unwritten covenant of our congregation as it exists right now: in our implicit covenant with one another, we promise to come together in love; we promise to seek truth and goodness; we promise to transform ourselves spiritually; we promise to care for one another; and we promise to go out and make the world a better place. We promise those things, and in return we get to be part of a community based on love; we get companions to accompany us on the often unpleasant journey towards truth and goodness; we get other people caring for us; and we get help as we try to change the world into a better place.

When I look at our own unwritten covenant, the first thing that I notice is that these promises are hard to keep. Come together in love? — in every church I’ve been a part of, that has been a promise that has been broken as much as it has been observed: people behave as badly in church as they do out of church! Companions on the journey to truth and goodness? — that means people telling me when I’m being stupid and avoiding the truth, and letting me know when I have done something wrong; it hurts when people let me know that I’m stupid or wrong. Care for one another? — it’s hard to actually care for one another, especially here in New England where often people don’t want to be cared for, and where the general culture is to keep people at arm’s length and neither ask for nor receive help. Change the world into a better place? — that’s hard work, we often disagree on how to accomplish that, and besides it takes time away from doing fun things like watching TV.

These promises we make to one another are idealistic, and difficult to keep. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just swallow the creeds they want you to believe in a fundamentalist church — it might be easier than actually having to live out the promises we make to other people, the promises we make to something greater than our selves.

So we come back to the story where Adonai told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is a psychologically impossible act, yet somehow Abraham brought himself to do it — or at least, he started to do it, until Adonai said, Stop! you don’t really have to kill Isaac. Similarly, we make impossible promises to one another as part of our covenant; the promises we make to each other don’t involve any actually killing of our firstborn children. Yet the promises we make to each other are demanding in their own way because we know that some god isn’t going to come along at the last moment and say, “Just fooling! you don’t really have to treat each other with love, or go off together on a search for truth, or care for others (and be cared for!), or make the world a better place.” We know that we will have to follow through on our own promises.

This is why I find the story of Abraham and Isaac so powerful: because it tells me a psychological truth. The story reminds me that it is hard to keep promises; the story reminds me that it is hard to be a part of a caring religious community. We know that even though we make promises to one another, they are promises that are hard to keep; and because we are imperfect human beings, we will occasionally break our promises to one another. And yet, the story tells us another psychological truth: that even though at times it will seem impossible for us to keep our promises to one another, we can find a way to do it; and we can find a way that won’t involve killing anyone.

3. At this point you may well ask: Why not just forget about these old fairy tales? Why not just do away with covenants, and even religion, altogether?

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A person will worship something — have no doubt about that.” When you find out what someone worships, then you will have a measure of that person. In our society, there are lots of things to worship: People worship money and consumer goods (probably most of us do, to a greater or lesser extent); and if someone worships consumer goods, you have the true measure of that person, who worships something impermanent that will wear out as soon as the warranty ends. People worship sports and pop musicians and celebrities; and there you have the true measure of those people, because they worship figures of fantasy who will fade away when they are no longer pretty, or musical, or able to play sports well.

The point of our covenant is that we are worshipping something greater, more permanent, and much more significant. When we establish a covenant, we are saying that we shall worship that which is greater than our selves, which some of us call God and some of us prefer to call the highest and best in humanity. When we establish a covenant, we are saying that our worship is not done on bended knee and with a great show of ritual, but rather it is done is our daily lives, in the way we live out our promises. When we establish a covenant amongst ourselves, we are saying that we want to establish goodness and truth that our children will carry on after us, goodness and truth that will last for generations.

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In this way, our covenant lies at the center of our religious community. We can ignore each other’s religious beliefs. But people certainly notice what I do with my life, how I live out my values. The point of a covenant is to establish a community that helps me live out my values; a community that supports me when I am weak or suffering or when I don’t have the strength to live out my values. A covenant provides a community in which I can (and will) transform myself, so that I can in turn go out and transform the world into a better place.

All this goes back to that old, old story about the covenant that Abraham made with Adonai. At first, it seems like a crazy story. But when you think about it, you realize it’s telling us something important: it’s telling us that if we want to live out our highest values in the world, it will not be easy to do so, and we know we won’t be able to do it alone.