Lambeth Day 12 - 7/28/2008

This evening brought an extraordinary and powerful lecture by Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Among so many exceptional sermons and presentations, his has to date topped the list. His subject was covenant, and while the written text will not reflect the energy and passion of his delivery, the words themselves will surely inform and move you as profoundly as they did those in attendance. You will find the text of the lecture at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1912. I urge you to read it.

Rabbi Sacks’s words about covenant and betrothal touch a particularly personal note with me as Sue and I will mark 20 years of marriage this Wednesday. She will by then be back in Ohio, while I remain at the conference through its conclusion in a week. Of course, it is not where we are on that or any specific day that matters, but where we have been over these twenty years and where we are willing to go from here.

Covenants and betrothals are dependent upon the generous willingness of involved parties to move toward one another, and in so doing, to bring together their authentic selves. Therefore, covenants also require a generous acceptance of who the other is, and a willingness to accommodate whatever it is that can be genuinely offered. While what is exchanged in a contract is power or wealth, what is exchanged in a covenant, by giving and forgiving, are trust, forbearance, and companionship. It seems to me that the generosity required by covenants is measured by what each is able to give, not by what the other needs. The model generosity of the widow in Jesus’ story was measured not by what was determined as another’s need but by the mite, what she alone discerned she was able to give.

If we are to explore a covenant in the Anglican Communion, beyond the tacit covenant of missional companionship and common prayer that we now incarnate, it will need to be a generous commitment of who we fully are, and a full acceptance or taking in of who the other is. It will need to reflect the mathematics of love, wherein the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and what we give away results in gain for both the giver and the recipient. If, on the other hand, what we create is juridical, having legal consequences for not meeting whatever the other needs, it will ultimately only be a contract for the purposes of exercising power. I fear that such an arrangement would not much look like any of the things to which Jesus likened the kingdom of heaven.