From Covenant To Courage: Parker Palmer, James Luther Adams, and the Availability of Beloved Community by Eric Hepburn

Our covenants are promises that are the foundation of our congregational polity - they make us, practitioners without creed or canon, a bound community. But why? What do these promises make possible? Combining the work of Parker Palmer and James Luther Adams, we'll put forward a claim about our community's purpose and process.

https://youtu.be/vmxunkgje6E

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Full Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for readability: transcription errors corrected, filler words reduced, punctuation repaired. Bracketed items are editorial.

[00:00:00] Eric Hepburn (host intro): Welcome to the thirty-second episode of the second season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode. Today's episode is called "Covenant to Courage." We'll struggle today with how covenant — a set of promises that binds a community — can be a source for the courage we need. And how, through combining the work of Parker Palmer and James Luther Adams, we might ask the deep question of how we bring about what Adams called the Kingdom of God, and what Dr. King called beloved community. Let's begin with our Great World House segment, and then the Voice of Wisdom, delivered by Heather Makare.

The Great World House — Eric Hepburn

Now we pause to honor the Great World House, of which we are a part — lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.

This is Memorial Day weekend — a day when we honor those who have died in service to what they love.

This week in San Diego, three men at the Islamic Center — Amin Abdullah, Nadir Awad, and Mansour Kaziha — put themselves between armed attackers and their community. They didn't have weapons. They had each other, and they had the conviction that their community was worth protecting. That's what covenant looks like when it's tested.

Most of us will never face that test in that form. But every community that matters asks something of us. Today, we honor the courage of those three, and of the many others for whom Memorial Day was founded. And we hold the question they answered, for all of us: what is our community worth to us?

A Voice of Wisdom — read by Heather Makare

Let us enter a still place within, opening our hearts and minds to receive this Voice of Wisdom. We welcome a Voice of Wisdom carried through James Luther Adams. After the words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence, preparing ourselves for the Word unfolding among us.

"I call that church free which enters into the covenant with the ultimate source of existence. It binds together families and generations, protecting against the idolatry of any human claim to absolute truth or authority.

"The faith of a church, or of a nation, is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions — social, economic, and political — of the common life."

The Sermon: Covenant to Courage — Eric Hepburn

From breath to word, from silence to speech — we enter the Unfolding in Word.

Today's unfolding is called "Covenant to Courage," and we're going to spend a little time this morning unpacking how that might work.

Covenant is essential and central to our congregational life. It is the set of promises we make to one another. Those promises create the conditions for our mutual life — and, if we do it well, our mutual flourishing.

We have two covenants that we circulate in our congregation. One is very short — you just heard it in our joining ceremony: Seek to connect. Take time to reflect. Be direct. Speak with respect. The other covenant this church holds sacred, we read together near the end of every single service: Love is the spirit of this community. Truth is our sacred quest. Justice is our prayer. We dwell together in peace. We seek wisdom in freedom. We serve life in fellowship. We grow in harmony with the sacred. Thus do we covenant with one another.

I want you to notice — there's a lot in there. This is not a paltry list of minor commitments. This is a list of aspirations that each one of us — me especially — fails to live up to with some regularity. It's an aspiration high enough that there's often some margin between what we do on our better days and what's left to be done to become the most fulfilled versions of ourselves.

Seek to connect. Three words: to be interested in one another. To cultivate relationships with one another. To give the gift of attention to each other.

Be direct. Here's a tough one: talk to each other, not about each other. Anybody here struggled with that one in the last five minutes? Hour? Day? Week? Look — we're going to talk about each other. So here's what I want to propose as a litmus test, to ask whether you're on the path to being direct: is the conversation you're having about someone helping you figure out how to have the hard conversation you need to have with that person? Or are you just spreading the hot tea — dropping the hot goss?

If the conversation about someone is a tool of community — one you're using to figure out how to have the hard conversation with the person who's the subject of it — don't beat yourself up. It's okay to have friends on the journey. But if you have no intention of ever having the conversation with the person who's the target of your thing, ask yourself whether your words are even necessary, or helpful, or kind. I have read books on the pro-social value of gossip. I'm not convinced. I know it's easy to say "be direct." I also know, from my own life experience, how hard it is to practice. But I'll say this: it's in the covenant because it is worth practicing. It is worth getting good at. It is worth taking up issues directly with the people involved, instead of talking about how dumb they are because they don't already agree with you.

Truth is our sacred quest. Honesty, integrity, and acknowledgment of the limitations of our own knowing. If truth is our sacred quest — and part of the truth is the limited size of our own melons — then humility is part of that quest. None of us knows it all. Most of us know a thimbleful. We make an ocean by sharing our thimbles with each other — not by defending the sacredness of our own thimble. So "truth is our sacred quest" is not an individual quest. Because you ain't going to make your thimble bigger. Your thimble isn't getting bigger. If you want to be part of the ocean, you might have to surrender your thimbleful into the sea of the community. That might be what a sacred quest for truth would feel like and look like. All of that, wrapped up in such a short phrase.

We grow in harmony with the sacred. Well — we keep trying. Some days, that's the best we can say: we keep trying to grow in harmony with the sacred. Certainly, when we find quiet spaces in our lives, we can open up and hear the still small voice beckoning us into that deeper relationship. And I also know how easy it is to stay busy — with all of this — in a way that doesn't allow you to slow down and hear that voice. Estrangement is possible. We can become estranged from ourselves, and estranged from the divine within us — estranged from the yearning and the calling of life, beckoning us to get in sync with its rhythms.

Covenant to courage. "To" is a very short word, but it's doing a lot of work in this phrase. It evokes a process — a connection, a linkage — that links covenant to courage. That linkage is expressed well in the work of one of our Quaker brethren, Parker Palmer. He says this:

"The soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek."

Parker Palmer teaches us that our souls are shy. Our deepest sources of wisdom are shy. And our ability to keep our covenants is what creates spaces safe enough — and brave enough — for our shy souls, our shy wisdoms, to come out and express the still small voice that resides within each of us. Covenant, to courage.

So: we started with our own covenants. We talked about what connects them to courage, with the work of our Quaker friend Parker Palmer. And now we're going to center the work of one of our UU ancestors, James Luther Adams, whom we heard from in our Voice of Wisdom.

James Luther Adams preached often of the Kingdom of God. But he was not talking about the afterlife. He was talking about the culmination of what Dr. King would later call beloved community. He was talking about the world we could create and experience if we kept every line of our covenants, in their full depth. Adams believed deeply that the Kingdom is the horizon toward which prophetic action moves — and that the Kingdom of God is available. The Kingdom of God is available: available in this world, available to us. Available — if you prefer a different framing — as a natural consequence of what the Buddhists call right action.

James Luther Adams had another phrase that evokes this courage. He called for the prophethood of all believers. Not just a priesthood, folks — a prophethood: that the still small voice of wisdom within you has something challenging and disruptive to say about the way the world is, and how to turn it right-side up.

Now, I want to wrestle with this term "believers" — because, in good UU fashion, I wanted initially to declaim that we are non-creedal, that we are not unified by belief. And that is true in a great many ways. But it may not be true in all ways. I think the belief to which Adams refers is the belief in the availability of the Kingdom. If you can't find the Kingdom in a child's laugh, I'm going to need you to check yourself — you may be a little too far up in your head. You see, it's around us all the time, folks. The little joys. The little moments. Even the little sorrows — am I right? That moment when your heart breaks tells you what mattered to you. Don't shun it. Don't try to shove it away.

I'll break the script for a minute. I've been to two memorials recently. And they'd done the modern thing: it's not a memorial, it's a celebration of life. And life is worth celebrating. And the loss of things we loved is also worth grieving. And our failure to learn to grieve, as a culture, is part of the reason we are so sick out there. "I don't know how to lose. I don't know how to be wrong. And I don't know how to be sad, or to grieve. And therefore everything is an ego play, to hold up a false sense of my invulnerable self." Amen? Amen. That's not real courage, folks. It's not the kind of courage that Keith put up on the marquee for us. It's not the kind I was thinking about when I wrote this page. Being defensive about how right you are, or how righteous you are, isn't courage. It's cowardice.

Adams believed in the availability of the Kingdom. He believed that right relationship — among us and between us; between us and the world; between us and nature; between us and social structures; between us and the divine — is both possible and available. How courageous is that? How courageous is it to believe that the better world we all yearn for is possible? What an invitation to heartbreak — to admit that you love that possibility; that the deepest fear in your life is that it's a hope that can't be fulfilled.

Maybe you have felt alone in that. You are not alone. Just look to your right. Look to your left. Turn over your shoulder. You're not alone — neither in the yearning, nor in the deep desire that the yearning might not go unrequited. And it's not an unrequited yearning. Because I will tell you, from my own personal experience: not only is it shared among many, many of your fellows — it is shared by the divine itself. The divine itself yearns for us to be in right relation. To stop hurting each other for bad, egoic reasons — for bad, supremacist kinds of reasons.

[I'm sorry for breathing on the mic like that. It's really awful — I have not found the right place to get this thing to sit, and I breathe out through my nose, and then suddenly you all have to hear it.]

All right. To believe that we can find the narrow path, and listen to the still small voice, and find our way, together, to the Kingdom. I don't like "Kingdom" very much, as a word — I'm really not into the whole idea that hereditary dynasty is a great plan. I guess I'm pro-democracy in that way. I think we should find the best people, with the most wisdom, and ask them to lead and guide.

Yeah — see, that's the thing, though. You say it out loud, and it's like: what a lovely pipe dream. Right? Am I wrong? I'm not wrong. You look at the world today — you go home and watch CNN, or whatever your flavor of news programming is — and you're thinking: I haven't seen a wise elder on the screen in months, despite my steady diet of panic news. Is it an absolute absence of wise elders in the world? Where are they? And why don't they get our attention? And who are we picking instead — and why?

Covenant to courage. That is what we practice here at San Gabriel. We covenant to create safe and brave spaces for ourselves and each other. We invite our still small voice — our inner wisdom — to come out from its hiding place while we are together. And we courageously heed that voice, allowing wisdom to guide our co-creation of the better world we all yearn for.

May it be so. And amen.

[00:21:39] Eric Hepburn (host outro): Until next time — thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give. If the podcast makes you feel like a remote member of our congregation, please consider making a pledge for the 2026–27 year by sending a pledge email to treasurer@sangabrieluu.org, including your good-faith promise of financial support. The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted on Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Andrea McDaniel. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn. See you next time.