A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
November 6, 2005
Historical Reading: Covenant of the Salem Church, 1629
Modern Reading: Current Mission Statement of First Parish Unitarian Universalist of Chelmsford
The mission of the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church of Chelmsford is to be a welcoming, inclusive, and nurturing environment for worship and spiritual growth. The Church community promotes and encourages:
Respect for each individual in his/her search for truth and development of spiritual values;
Learning through an open-minded exchange of ideas;
And compassion for and commitment to each other and the world.
Copyright 2005, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
On this Sunday, our All Souls service, we remember those we love who have died in the last year. Memory and love are deeply entwined in the first generations of loss. We know the stories of these lives personally and intimately. They are real to us, part of our living. Over the generations, the individual stories become threads in the larger ones. We gathered here and now are not the whole congregation. We are bound through the generations to the souls of those who came before, and those who will speak of us generations from now. For 350 years, members of this particular congregation have gathered together: to work, to teach, to preach, to learn, to sing, and to worship in covenant together. Think for a moment: 350 years, 37 ministers, four meeting houses, and God knows how many potlucks, committee meetings, RE classes, choir rehearsals, sermons, and congregational meetings have been happening here, in our little corner of the world. In those three centuries and a half, there have been times of war and peace, prosperity and want, unrest and stability. Chelmsford has been Indian villages, an outpost in the wilderness of a New World, a rural farming community, home to industry, and now a suburban community, growing in size and diversity. Next week, we celebrate the 350th anniversary of the first official church service of this congregation. This All Souls Sunday feels like an appropriate time to begin looking at the story of our congregation, and all the souls who have been part of it. How did a Puritan congregation, founded in 1655, come to be the Unitarian Universalist faith community we know today? How is our story reflected in the larger story of Unitarian Universalism? How different are we than the first worshippers who gathered here? What threads have carried through?
One thing I realized this week as I set to writing this is that I cannot sufficiently tell how we got here from there in one sitting, at least not by our practices. Back in 1655, everyone would have expected to have to sit through a couples hours of preaching. Rather than recreate this, I am going to take the next couple of Sundays to tell the story of our gathering over the last three centuries and a half.
We need to begin by acknowledging that this church and its founders were not the first gathered here. In 1655, other people already lived here, as they had for generations, the Wamesit Indians. They lived in community, they worked and worshipped here. It is told, and it may well be, that the relations between the settlers of Chelmsford and native Indian tribes were friendlier than elsewhere in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, at least until the time of King Phillips’ War in 1675. But the telling of this is from the Puritan and European perspective. That few, if any Wamesit descendents, live today and certainly not in the way and the community of their ancestors, tells us that a people were lost, voices were lost, a story was lost, except in fragments. So, as we remember the souls of this congregation, we can remember and honor also the souls of those whose story was pushed to the margins and finally out of our vision by prejudice, fear, ignorance, greed, and all those things that allow us to believe another human being is less human than ourselves.
The settlers who founded this church were Puritans. It is easy to romanticize the Puritans as fearless pioneers of religious freedom or to demonize them as intolerant bigots. The truth is yes, they were, and as is usually the case, more interesting and complicated than either stereotype. The Puritans were a Reform sect whose stated goal was to purify the church by removing any vestiges of Catholicism and returning to the practices of the ’true’ church, the early Christian church as described in the Bible. For the Puritans, the relationship with God, discerned through study of the Bible and direct revelation, was the center of their faith. They were Calvinists, believing that humanity was so depraved that there was nothing we could do to work for our own salvation. God, in God’s grace, predetermined a few, the elect, to be saved.
The Puritans saw themselves as of this elect, a new chosen people whom God called into covenant to live together in a community whose secular and religious spheres reflected the will of God. In the 1630’s, during what was called the Great Migration, "…some 20,000 English Puritans (fleeing religious intolerance) settled in New England and established independent parish (neighborhood) churches" (Wesley, Hughes, and Carpenter, p. 1). Chelmsford and First Parish’s early history follows the similar path of these other parishes. As the demand for land grew, settlers moved further west into the wilderness of the colony. In 1653, a small group of settlers petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts to grant them land rights to establish a plantation "…to the quanity of six myles Square of Vpland and medow: which parcell of land: we doe intreate may be gin at merimacke Riuer at a necke of land nere to Concord riuer: and soe run Up by Concord: riuer South and west into the Contrie to make Vp that sircomferenc or quanity of land as is about expressed…" (p. 2 in Waters, History of Chelmsford Massachusetts). Once the petition was granted, the settlers got to the work of establishing the town. They chose leaders from their eligible members (male landowners and farmers) to serve as the magistrate and selectmen. In May of 1655, the town of Chelmsford was incorporated.
The next important task was to establish a church. Church and state (or in this case, town) were not one and the same for the Puritans. The elected leadership of the town had oversight over secular matters such as land, taxation, regulation and access to resources, and the enforcement of common standards of behavior. Members of the religious leadership, the minister and the elders, could not serve as selectmen, magistrates, or other town leaders. That said, church and state were very much connected, mutually supporting and reflecting the particular Calvinist Christian beliefs and values of the Puritan settlers. Establishing a church mattered because it justified the social order and set out the theological foundation for why these settlers were here in the wilderness in first place: to create God’s "City upon the Hill", a Christian utopian community of "visible saints". Town taxes supported the church and the minister. While one did not have to be a member of the church to be a "freeman" or eligible voter in the town, those seeking elected leadership positions certainly did. The meeting house served as a gathering place for both town meetings and for worship. And the systems of governance: election of leaders, membership into the community, decision-making processes, conflict resolution, etc., were similarly practiced.
The establishment, or the gathering, of the "churches of the Standing Order" in New England began with a group of men in the community, deemed pious enough to found a church, being chosen as pillars. They would meet over a period of time to, among other things, discuss the covenant for the new congregation. On a chosen day, representatives from the neighboring towns and churches gathered to interview the potential pillars at length for the morning. If they were found to be sufficient, a formal service was held in the afternoon with the whole community and guests, with the church covenant read aloud. Neighboring churches would offer the right hand of fellowship to the new congregation and oftentimes, one of the pillars would be ordained by the congregation as the minister.
In the case of Chelmsford, the settlers brought a church to the town. A delegation of settlers went to Wenham to invite this struggling plantation to join them in Chelmsford, including their minister, the Rev. John Fiske. After a period of negotiation and consultation with a special council which included the governor and well-known clergy, the Wenham congregation voted to move and join with Chelmsford. As Rev. Fiske records: "Accordingly about the 13th of 9 mo. 55, there were met at Chelmsfd. the pasto with the engaged Brethren of Wenham church vi. Ezdras Read, Edw. Kemp, Austin Killam, Sa: Fostor, Geo; Byam and Rich. Goldsmith. Seuen in all. To whom such of the Brethren of Wooburne & Concord ch: who had before ppounded themselves to joyne with the ch: late at Wenham, now in Removeing to Chelmsford. & presented themselves with their Lrs. Of Dismission: upon satisfaction & Testimony Giuen were by an vnanimous vote Received into fellowship" (p. 11, Waters).
To be received in fellowship and membership of a Puritan congregation was not so easy back in 1655. Those who wished to join the church had to first approach the minister. Then they had to share with the entire congregation a full confession of their sins. Next, they had to relate their conversion experience or their experience of grace or regeneration, how God had revealed to them that they were saved, members of the elect, one of the visible saints. The Puritans assumed a shared theology: they all believed in God the Father, they believed that Jesus Christ was their Savior, they believed in the Holy Spirit, in Heaven and in hell, in original sin, and the Bible as God’s true word. To become a member was to enter into covenant with these other visible saints. And their covenant required more, not less, than belief. It required a binding together of their lives, to open themselves up to one another in a whole manner of ways in order to ensure that their life together was "pure", truly that of the saints and of God. Chelmsford must have been full of saints, because no one who applied for membership was rejected.
We do not have a copy of the original covenant used by First Parish. However, it was probably similar to the one I read from the Salem church, as Rev. Fiske had served there before he came to Wenham and then Chelmsford. But the roots of this congregation becoming Unitarian begin in the ideas of this covenant, specifically in the opening paragraph: "We covenant with our Lord and one with another; and we do bind ourselves in the presence of God to walk together in all his ways according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth, and do explicitly profess to walk as followeth, through the power and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ." As Wesley et al. note in an article about the Puritan roots of the Unitarian controversy, "The revolutionary thrust of the Puritan covenant and polity is given voice especially in two words, ’unto us.’ This is because the issue of the Puritan mind and heart was contained in a set of closely related questions: Where is authentically the commanding religious authority to be found? How is it known? And what are the conditions of its appearing ’unto us’? The Puritans’ answer to those questions found expression in the covenant of the local church. They granted ultimate religious authority solely to that convincing power of truth evident in the understandings reached and tested over time by a body of loving individuals mutually pledged faithfully to seek and to heed truth together, in ongoing community, so long as their earthly life should last" (p. 1). Religious authority, the power to say what is and is not religious, spiritual and moral truth, was not placed in creeds, in the practice of sacraments, or in the religious hierarchy of bishops or presbyteries. It was placed in the congregation. And this, this, is the heart of our inheritance. If we are to understand what it means to be Unitarian Universalist, we have to understand our congregational polity, its roots, its strengths and its weaknesses as the means for gathering and sustaining a religious community. The Rev. Dr. Gretchen Woods, who taught the Unitarian Universalist polity course at my seminary began every session by saying "Polity is theology and theology is polity." How we organize and gather to worship expresses what matters most to us, what we hold as sacred. What does our congregational polity express that we hold sacred? Next Sunday, I will look at the paradoxical nature of the Puritan covenant and how differing discernments about to what is sacred in it led to the Unitarian controversy and a split in the churches of the Standing Order, and in this congregation.
Resources:
Previous Parsons. Compiled by Jane Drury of First Parish of Chelmsford.
The Notebook of Reverend John Fiske, 1644-1675. Robert G. Pope, ed. Salem, MA: Essex Institute, 1974.
History of Chelmsford Massachusetts. Wilson Waters. Lowell, MA: Courier-Citizen Company, 1917.
Profits in the Wilderness. John Frederick Martin. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
"The Unitarian Controversy and Its Puritan Roots". Alice Blair Wesley, Peter Hughes and Frank Carpenter. Unitarian Universalist Historical Society. http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/unitariancontroversy.html.
"The Halfway Covenant". http://www.pilgrim-platform.org/halfway.htm.
325 Years: The Story of First Parish Church Chelmsford 1655-190. George Adams Parkhurst. North Chelmsford, MA: Picken Printing, Inc., 1980.
A New England Town: The First Hundred Years. Kenneth A. Lockridge.