A COVENANT OF ALL SOULS

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 17, 2004


I realized that there was probably something seriously wrong with the priorities in my life when it dawned on me this past week that, although I was conversant with the latest head-to-head flash polling numbers from the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin, I had somehow failed to notice that "the Glove," #20 Gary Payton, Oregon State University class of 1990, two-time Olympic Gold medalist, nine-time All Star, and for over a decade the leader and go-to guy for my hometown basketball team the Seattle Supersonics, is now playing point-guard for the Celtics here in Boston. Admittedly, he's 36 years old now and probably nearing the end of his career, so no doubt he's lost a step or two...but he's still one of my favorite players ever, and it's going to be great watching him play on the parquet. There are rumors that he didn't really want to leave the West Coast -- that he failed to show up on time for his team physical, and also that he was arrested for DUI in Los Angeles the night after the trade was announced. But he's here now, and playing pretty good pre-season ball, and I'm just hoping that he'll continue to bring his style of aggressive, tenacious, up-tempo, in-your-face basketball to the Fleet Center night after night, and maybe even that a little of it might rub off on some of these other guys as well. You don't really need to do it all yourself in order to be an effective team leader. You just need to show your teammates how it's done, and convince them that they too are capable of doing it themselves.

But before I get too far away from the poll numbers, I just want to know: how many of you heard yesterday morning on NPR about John Zogby's unusual polling question? Three days before the 2000 Presidential election, Zogby's pollsters asked the question: "If you were a resident of Oz, would you pick the Scarecrow or the Tin Man for mayor?" Given the choice between a candidate with no brains but a heart, and a candidate with no heart but brains, the sample in 2000 split exactly down the middle: 46.2% to 46.2%. (And we all know how THAT election turned out!). This year, however, the Tin Man is leading the Scarecrow by ten points, and among those identified as "persuadable swing voters" the margin is even higher: 48.7% for the Tin Man, and only 13.3% for the Scarecrow....while outraged conservative Bloggers want to know why the Cowardly Lion isn't also listed on the ballot.

Here are some other interesting things that Zogby discovered about these all-important undecided voters. 27.4% of them have seen "The Passion of the Christ," but only 13.1% have seen "Fahrenheit 9/11." (for Kerry supporters those numbers are 15.5% and 65.5% respectively; for Bush supporters 43.4% and 2.7%). 56.2% of these 2.6 million undecideds feel that the country is going in the wrong direction; 55.2% want a President who keeps his religious values out of public business; and 48.4% consider themselves pro-environment. But 57.3% of them say they would rather have a beer with President Bush than with Senator Kerry, while only 9.3% would rather have a beer with Kerry than with Bush...apparently notwithstanding the fact that the President no longer drinks.

Meanwhile, I'm a little disappointed that my own "Joe Six-Pack" poll last week didn't get a little bit bigger response. Zogby's scientific poll determined that persuadable undecided voters are both slightly opposed to more rigid gun control (49.8% to 32.4%) and slightly in favor of either same-sex marriages or civil unions (54.8% to 38%), but I personally felt like my own humorous little survey fell a little flat...and there's really nothing worse than a flat beer gag, unless of course it's a flat beer that makes you gag, which I think might pretty well describe this Molson's Canadian. There are plenty of good beers that come from Canada (including Molson's Golden Ale), but this bi-lingual lager isn't really one of them, although it does possess the interesting feature of coming with pre-printed snappy rejoinders to lame pick-up lines. (This one says "Yes. But not with you"). And I don't mean to sound elitist about this, although I do come from the Pacific Northwest, where we feel like we invented both microbreweries and the espresso cart, and so can often seem a little snobbish about our beverages. And believe it or not, there is actually a point to all this, which I'll get to in just a second.

A Samuel Adams, of course, is always an excellent choice; but if you really want to enjoy a truly excellent local beer, for my money there's none better than this Harpoon IPA, which tastes almost as good as the IPAs we brew out in Oregon, and which I'm now pleased to say I can legitimately claim as a professional expense. (Why should millionaires get all the tax breaks?). But the two beers I really want to talk about are these. As a lot of you already know, my first full-time settled ministry was at the Unitarian Church in Midland Texas (coincidentally, at precisely the same time that George W. Bush was deciding to put down the bottle and pick up the Bible, and also when the events depicted in the recently released movie "Friday Night Lights" actually took place). And then, some years later as a doctoral student, I spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Aalborg University in Denmark. So I've actually had ample opportunities to enjoy both of these beers in their natural environments, and therefore feel well qualified to compare them. This Carlsberg, you'll notice, comes in a green bottle, and if you read the small print here on the label you'll see that it is brewed "by appointment to the Royal Danish Court." This Lone Star, on the other hand, proudly bills itself as "Texas born and brewed," "Pure Texan Beer," and "the National Beer of Texas." In Denmark you can buy a Carlsberg (in a green plastic bottle) from a sidewalk vending machine, while in Texas you have to get in your car and drive to the drive-up window at the local liquor store, where the smallest quantity you can buy is an entire six-pack...for approximately the same price you might pay for a single beer in Copenhagen. A bottle of Carlsberg also comes with a one-and-a-half kroner deposit (which when I was living over there was approximately 18 cents...I think it's even a little more now), and there are actually professional bottle scavengers in Denmark who apparently make their living collecting and returning other people's empties. This bottle of Lone Star, on the other hand, has a little slogan printed on it which says "Don't Mess With Texas," and periodically the county sends out convicted DUIs in orange jumpsuits to pick up the empties from the side of the highway. Also, even though this beer is labeled as a "long neck," you'll notice that both these bottles are basically the same size. And my theory is that this is the result of globalization, which demands a certain level of standardization when it comes to packaging. An authentic long neck is actually about an inch and a half longer that this, and used to be available only at licensed establishments within the Lone Star State itself. But the point I want to make is that if you were to pour each of these beers, ice cold, into a tall, frosted glass on a sweltering summer afternoon, I suspect that most folks would probably have a pretty difficult time telling them apart by taste alone. Two very different cultures enjoying a nearly identical beverage in almost exactly the same way. There is something universal about the experience; the social nuances may differ, but the beer remains the same.

There's a contemporary school of historical scholarship which argues that this delicious fermented beverage may very well be the reason that the human beings living on the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers approximately ten thousand years ago gave up their hunter-gatherer ways, and decided to build and live in cities instead. Large scale grain agriculture made civilization both possible and necessary...more diversified and specialized forms of labor, a more sophisticated seasonal calendar, greater degrees of social organization and centralized planning, the development of systematic techniques for soil cultivation, irrigation, harvesting and crop storage, the creation of an effective military force to defend the fruits of one's harvest from those who would take it for themselves. Religion, government, taxes and the rule of law: all this flowed from the accidental discovery that sprouted barley contains natural enzymes which convert starch to sugar, which when in turn is exposed to more water and airborne yeast is converted to alcohol. Or so the theory goes. From Gilgamesh to George W. Bush -- nearly five thousand years of Western Civilization, all basically because human beings occasionally like to tie one on, and they wanted to make certain of a reliable supply of brewsky.

Of course, even if this theory contains a grain of truth, it would still be a mistake to conclude, in the words of botanist Paul Manglesdorf, that "the foundations of western civilization were laid by an ill-fed people living in a perpetual state of partial intoxication." There are certainly many other plausible interpretations of the historical record. A Marxist historian, for example, might argue that the increasingly complex forms of human social organization made possible by the Neolithic agricultural revolution facilitated the concentration of ever-increasing amounts of wealth and power in the hands of an elite, privileged class of warriors and priests, who then exploited the surplus resources of the entire society in order to consolidate their authority over the class of people who actually performed the hard, physical labor, while at the same time extending their hegemony over neighboring societies. But we all know that Marxist historians are basically just a bunch of crackpots. A more interesting line of inquiry involves the complex ways in which civil and religious authority were intertwined in Ancient Mesopotamia. The Kings of Bronze Age cities like Uruk, Sumer, Nineveh and Babylon were understood to be semi-divine entities, whose political legitimacy was derived from their faithful relationship to the local deities, who granted them the authority to impose equitable laws upon the population, and to demand and enforce obedience to those laws. The King was responsible both for maintaining order within the Society, and for protecting the members of that society from external threats; and to the extent that he was capable of performing those responsibilities, the people of the society owed him both loyalty and respect. The king's word was law, but the legitimacy of that law was not the product of the King's will alone, but flowed from the Gods, and was grounded in a covenant of mutual security and social order. And this Covenant replaced an earlier form of vendetta justice in which families basically exacted their own revenge against their perceived enemies for offenses real or imagined. Hammurabi's famous dictum "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" may sound a lot like the codification of the principle of vendetta, but in reality it mandates proportionality -- JUST an eye for an eye, ONLY a tooth for a tooth. (Although I should point out, just as an aside, that the Code of Hammurabi also calls for death by drowning for beer parlor proprietors who over-charge their customers, or who "fail to notify authorities of the presence of [known] criminals in their establishments.")

The ancient Hebrews appropriated this same idea of covenant to their own social organization. Except that their God was understood to be more than just a small, local deity whose jurisdiction merely extended over a single city. The God of Israel was the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, whose jurisdiction knew no limits, and whose power and authority dwarfed that of Gods fashioned by human hands. And the Covenant which this God entered into with Moses at Sinai held those “chosen” people to a higher ethical standard than their neighbors -- concerns about security and social order were subject to the additional commandment that justice be extended not merely to the members of the tribe itself, but also to outsiders...to strangers and foreigners; and to those who were powerless to protect themselves, like widows and orphans. This God of the Israelites was not merely the protector of the powerful, the pious, and the well-connected. This God cared about the weak, the poor, the marginalized and the forgotten...and insisted that they too be treated with fairness and compassion.

This tradition of ethical monotheism -- a tradition shared by the three great “western” religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, essentially affirms both that God is sovereign and that all souls belong to God -- that all people are God's children and therefore members of one family. This Covenant of All Souls declares that there are NOT two standards of justice: one for "us" and another for "them" -- rather, we are all accountable to the same ethical principles of mercy and even-handedness. And what makes this covenant possible is our own capacity for empathy: the recognition of a common humanity which transcends our various social and cultural differences, and unites us as a single people who are much more alike than we might at first think.

Here in the United States, the architects of our Constitution - our own so-called "founding fathers" -- created a secular form of Government with a strong separation of Church and State because the sophisticated political philosophies of the Enlightenment which they embraced allowed them to understand that even though we may be "One Nation under God," it is "out of many" that we become one -- E Pluribus Unum as well as "In God We Trust." And over the course of the last two centuries so-called "activist judges" (along with legislators, religious leaders, social activists and various other progressive reformers) have continued to encourage our society to expand its vision and become even more inclusive than even our most enlightened founders might have imagined. Because when we are all encouraged to bring our diverse gifts to the table, no one really knows for sure what kind of feast we will create. But we can at least feel confident that it will probably be delicious, because despite our different tastes and backgrounds, we all have much more in common than we know.

Good leadership is a process of bringing out the best in others. Ineffective leadership fails to do this, while bad leadership often succeeds only in bringing out the worst. And it isn't easy, because even when good leaders do their best, they can always control the behavior of those who follow. But if our church, for example, desires to exert spiritual and ethical leadership in a pluralistic society, the first thing we need to do is demonstrate among ourselves how it is done. Tolerance, compassion, civility, fairness, and dialog...these are the qualities which make us moral leaders in the world. These are to foundations of a Covenant through which "all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine."