Of Creed and Covenant*

In 1931, a young theology professor returned to Germany from the United States. He had been doing post-doctoral work at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and ministering to impoverished black youth in Harlem where he regularly worshiped at a African Methodist Episcopal Church. This young man was a brilliant scholar; he could read and write in six languages and was conversationally fluent in two and he was a polished pianist and a poet. He came from a remarkable family. He was one of seven children. His father was a physician and a professor of neurology at the University of Berlin and chief of the Neurology and Psychiatry at Berlin’s most prestigious hospital. The household was incandescent. Regular guests at dinner included leading writers, historians, academics, artists, scientists and professionals. His desire to become a theologian, which he announced at age 14, made no sense to his humanist family – but he excelled in his studies and his doctoral dissertation became a subject for serious comment and discussion among the theologians of his day. He went on to write several scholarly works on Christology, the sociology of the church, and the nature of man. These works placed him as one of the few theologians who as able to bridge the gaps between radical German theological developments and the development of theological liberalism in the in English speaking world. He was widely recognized as a rising star.

While his career was on the rise, it was in the context of what Winston Churchill later referred to as the Gathering Storm. In January 1933, Hitler was elected as Chancellor and in March he was given dictatorial powers. In the face of the increasing Nazification of Germany, the church, as a whole, stood silent. As the church become yet another arm of the state the voices of those who opposed the dominant political and cultural trends were silenced one by one. Only a few brave pastors and theologians resisted. Our young theologian was one of these. He resisted – quietly, but without compromise, he spoke for an independent church – a confessing church that espoused Christian, not cultural, values. An Anglican Bishop commented “He was crystal clear in his convictions; and as young as he was and humble-minded as he was, he saw the truth and spoke it with complete absence of fear.”

In 1935, he planned to go to India to study with Gandhi. He was deeply committed to pacifism and the principles of non-violent resistance. But as he was making the decision, history overtook him - he was asked and accepted the role of leading an underground seminary at Finkenwald to train pastors for a resisting church. Not one of the university theology faculties was willing to side with this arm of church or prepare ministers that would stand in opposition to the state. In no time the Nazis withdrew all of his Berlin professorships. The young pastor calmly replied “I have long ceased to believe in universities.”

It was while instructing students for ministry at Finkenwald that this young theologian and pastor started to seriously explore the notion of community. These young people were banded together in an intentional community – they lived together, ate together, laughed together, learned together, and prayed together and did so because they know their commitment to the church and to their own beliefs would be costly. He started writing a little book entitled Life Together which explored these notions of community. In that book, he argued that community rests on two pillars – commitment to a creed and commitment to those who share that creed and its implications for living. He argued that it was only in community that true religious strength exists. In it he argued that every community is deeply flawed because it is comprised of human beings who, themselves are far from perfect. But he saw that it was in the radical commitment to the whole community that truth is discovered and true religious experience is found. He argued that it was only in community that the church would find the strength to stand in opposition to injustice and cultural arrogance. His teachings were unabashedly Christian, but the truths they contained were profound in ways that transcended their theological trappings. He argued that the only way for truth to endure was for the community of the faithful to be faithful to one another and to their most cherished beliefs.

The seminary was closed by order of Heinrich Himler in August 1937. It was at this time that he wrote an extended discussion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – which I will mention again in a moment. From 1937 until 1939 he traveled secretly from one village to another supporting and encouraging his students who were working illegally in small east German parishes.

In September, 1940, the Gestapo issued an order forbidding him from speaking in public and in the following May he was forbidden from printing or publishing his written works. In 1939, he had begun meeting with elements in German intelligence and other high ranking military officers (including Admiral Canaris and General Oster) and some well-placed civilians who were part of a very serious circle of resistance. Over the course of the next few years, this group slowly and, in many cases reluctantly, came to the conclusion that the only moral course open to them was to conspire to assassinate Hitler. Coming to this commitment to regicide caused the young theologian (who had been deeply committed to a path of non-violent resistance) profound disquiet and pains of conscience. Once convinced, however, he worked tirelessly as a courier and otherwise, to further the plot.

In, 1943, he was arrested for his work in helping a group of Jews escape to Switzerland and was imprisoned, together with his sister and his brother-in-law in the Gestapo’s prison in Berlin. He suffered some torture. In July 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was ordered to attend a General Staff meeting at the Wolf’s Lair – Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. When he came into the conference room his briefcase was full of high explosives and he placed it under the conference table. After leaving the room ostensibly to take a phone call – the case was moved behind the heavy support of a large conference table thereby barely shielding Hitler from the ensuing blast and allowing him to survive. The ruthless investigation which followed turned up incriminating documents implicating the young theologian.

After summary trial, on April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonheoffer was hanged from a gallows with piano wire at the Flosenburg concentration camp. He was 39 years old. The camp was liberated 3 days later.

Why am I telling this story about Deitrich Bonheoffer when our subject this morning is community? I bring him up because it is always easy to look at the upside of community, but not so easy to look at the downside. Dietrich Bonhoeffer looked long and hard at the cost of real, intentional community – he realized that community is not simply about warm and gauzy feelings of closeness. To Bonhoeffer community was about commitment – commitment to a creed (or a set of basic beliefs) - and commitment to others who share that creed and its consequent mission in the world.

Creed

Now the word creed is strange to us as Unitarian Universalists. We are fond of joking about our inchoate faith and that you can believe pretty much anything and be a Unitarian Universalist. I would like to raise the rather heretical possibity that, in fact, do have a creed – a set of beliefs we hold very dear. Like all good creeds, it is a simple one. Our creed is embodied in what we say in this community every Sunday when we gather together and light our chalice as one body. We commit to loving our neighbor as ourselves. We commit to searching for truth with an open mind. We commit to making the world a better place to live.

The words can be cheap to say. But I think we all have all found where it is costly in practice. Indeed, we were confronted with the implications of our creed last Sunday when we voted to welcome Tent City 4 as our guests, despite the potential costs. That vote reflected a commitment of faith in our creed (and I say this for both those who voted in favor and those who voted against). Some of us have been pushed out of our families because of what we believe. Some of us have lost friends or been shunned by coworkers. Most of us feel our voice is crying in wilderness in a culture in the predominating values are contrary to our own. Our creed of tolerance is met with intolerance. Our acceptance of all people is seen as subversive. Our call to equality and peace and justice are seen as hopelessly naïve.

We turn to each other for support in our journey. We provide sanity checks to one another and we remind each other that we are not alone. We turn to each other for inspiration, information, laughter and….ultimately, for community. The term community itself derives from the same root as the word common. It is what we share together – what we have in common - that makes us a community. It is what we have in common that binds us together. And it is this common set of beliefs that is the basis of our community.

We don’t have exclusive beliefs. In fact, we throw our arms open and invite anyone in. And that makes our beliefs are radical. They are counter-cultural and they are more than a little dangerous because they confront deeply held values in the dominant culture. Calls to truly love your neighbor as yourself are fine in theory – but for those who will love you if you are not too gay or too heretical or too homeless or too Islamic or too this or too that, the kind of unconditional love we call can deeply trouble them. For those who think they have stranglehold on the truth, our call to continue to search for truth with an open mind is offensive. It challenges an accepted understanding of the world that brings great peace of mind to many. And for those who like and benefit from the status quo, working to make the world a better place to live is deeply confrontational.

And so we are often out of step with the culture around us. It seems to me that we are in many ways a community of prophets in an age where prophets are not held in high regard. We don’t espouse a doctrine, but I do believe we have a creed that rests in a common mindset - a set of beliefs that sets us apart as UUs. Those beliefs give us our identity and call out to people who are likeminded – we provide a sanctuary for those who need what we need – a community of likeminded people. So we grow in numbers and strength and so we stand firm as a liberal religious presence in Woodinvile.

Covenant.

If Bonhoeffer’s first principle of community was adherence to creed – his second was a commitment to the community. Any serious religious community requires the existence of a covenant: a commitment, and perhaps even a radical commitment, to one another.

A community built on covenant calls for a deeper understanding of individualism than the one held by popular culture. It stands at odds with the notion of religion as an item for consumption – spirituality as something you get as easily as you visit the Gap, as buying into a cheap, uncostly cultural conformity. Our culture, and our civil religion, promote a type of individuality that is conformist, self-centered and ultimately self-serving. Religion in our culture is mostly about feeling good, not doing good. Spirituality is often reduced to a personal “righteousness” on a very superficial and undemanding level rather than a passionate commitment to true justice and a deeper and harder work of cultivating righteousness of the spirit and righteousness of community.

In contrast, our Unitarian Universalst understanding of individuality sees us as part of an interconnected web of all beings and that true individuality exists in our connections with those around us, with the earth, with nature, and even with peoples we don’t know. In our creed, there can be no I without a You. It is in the relationship between the sacred “I” and the sacred “Thou” that we find out who we really are. It is this recognition of the web of being – and its expression in our commitment to love our neighbor as ourselves and to make the world a better place to live – that we come into our own as individuals. We are not islands. We recognize that we cannot truly be an individual alone. Our individuality paradoxically requires that we be in community.

Just as it can be costly to have a creed, it can be costly to be in this type of countercultural community. This type of community is like marriage…it can be the most rewarding thing in our lives or it can be the most exasperating. It requires that we accept one another and hang with one another through it all. It requires that we give in and give up a portion of our lives for the greater good of the whole community. It demands our time, our resources, as we look forward to our stewardship season, our funds, and could, potentially, if things got bad enough, require our very lives in exchange for the ability to claim our beliefs – our creed. That is not likely, but it probably didn’t seem likely in 1930 in Germany either.

Bonheoffer’s book about the Sermon on the Mount, entitled The Cost of Discipleship, begins with these words,

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of the church. We are fighting today for costly grace….Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack’s wares. Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God thought as the Christian “conception” of God. The mere intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself, sufficient to secure redemption. The church which holds the correct view of grace, it is supposed, has that grace. In such a church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no real contrition is required, still less any real desire for transformation. Cheap grace amounts to a denial of the living Word of God….

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field, for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell as his goods. Costly grace is the good news which must be sought continuously. It is a gift which must be asked for over and over again. It is a threshold we must always seek to cross. It is costly because it costs a man his life. It is grace because it gives a man his only true life.

These words, to us as Unitarian-Universalists, may be, at best be odd, and worst a little offensive as laden as they are with the Christian elements of Bonhoeffer’s theology – words like redemption, contrition, and grace are not words we typically use – yet if we take the time to unpack them they contain a profound truth. What Bonheoffer is saying is that spiritual maturity (however you define it) cannot be had on the cheap. While it is infinitely rewarding, it isn’t an easy journey. While it creates true and profound joy, it is not a comfortable journey. Having a spiritual life (having a truly human life) requires being committed to a creed and to covenant with a spiritual community. I believe that we are far down the road of forging that type of profound community here at this church. Our community is here, in this place, and it is now, in this time. And it is in our community – in all its humanness, weakness and goofiness – that we find that we are able to love our neighbors as ourselves, seek the truth with an open mind and make the world a better place to live.

Peace, Shalom, Namaste, Blessed be.

*Sermon delivered at Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church on 2.20.2005

© 2005. Matthew W. Wesley. All rights reserved.