The Bonds of Affection
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, December 27, 2009


Message: The Bonds of Affection

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2009.

The stories about the birth of Jesus
are written well after he died.
When he was about his ministry,
no one was thinking to write stuff down,
because he was right there, to ask.
Although his answers were often enigmatic and told in parables.

No, it was after Jesus died
that his followers and admirers gathered in community
to worship and to figure out
what does this all mean.
They told stories,
and, in some cases, they expected the end of the world.
Individual communities
had particular ideas about who Jesus was,
and who God was,
and what the Spirit was,
and what it meant to be human,
and what it meant to be Christian,
but there was no universal creed of Christianity.
There wasn’t really even such a thing, yet,
as Christianity per se.

There were just bands of people who gathered together,
to love one another.

Some of these early communities would get into disagreements
within each other,
and they began to turn to Paul for advice.
And Paul, for all he is maligned among us,
is pretty clear:
what matters is love.
In the letter to the Romans, he says,
“Owe no one anything,
except to love another;
for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law . . .
Let us therefore,” he continues,
“no longer pass judgment on one another.”

The Christians in Corinth had many debates,
about doctrine, and whether they were allowed to marry,
and the role of the women and men, and more:
and Paul gave his answers to their questions,
but he ends his letter to them by reminding them
that what matters most is love:

“If I have not love, I am a noisy gong . . .
Love is patient, love is kind . . .”
you know the rest.

It was, in other words,
the bonds of affection between Christians that mattered more
than creeds, rituals, or ecclesiological structures.
The bonds of affection –
the commitment that we shall love each other,
and walk together in the ways of love.

Well, that was all fine and good,
but then came Empire, and Order,
the Crusades and a religion of power and domination –
a religion that would, surely, as Dostoevsky imagined,
have put Jesus to death as a radical, troublemaking prophet of love.

But there came a day when a new land
was claimed by Englishmen,
(who gave no notice that the land was already occupied,
but that is a sermon for another day)
and some of the Christians who gathered there
decided to start again.

They would build their churches like the early Christian churches:
self-governing, independent,
and, most importantly,
places guided by a covenant of love.
In 1648, the leaders of these churches wrote together
a statement of how it was that they were gathered.
How is it that they are church?
It is from this document, the Cambridge Platform,
that the formal rituals of our faith:
the ordination of a minister,
the laying on of hands at such a ceremony,
the installation of a minister,
the annual congregational meeting to elect officers –
that a church might govern itself,
these rituals are all guided by this old document.
And in it, they ask, what makes us a church?

What makes us a church?
It is not, they wrote, faith in the heart, for that is “invisible.”
Think about that for a moment –
this is important.
A lot of folks think that all you need is faith,
but our religious anscenstors argued that was necessary but not sufficient.
You needed something you could see,
to make the visible church in the world.
So it is not faith in the heart. It is not private and particular.

Nor is it the profession of a creed
for anyone can recite a creed.
A lot of folks seem to expect this –
they always ask,
well, what does your church believe,
as if a statement of belief made a church.
But our foremothers and forefathers said,
no, anyone can recite a creed.

Nor is it not “cohabitation” – not cohabitation.
which doesn’t mean what you think it does –
it is not simply that they are in the same room for worship.
Being together in the same space
that’s not enough.

It is not Baptism,
because Baptism is for people who are already part of the church,
and therefore presupposes the existence of a church.

What makes a church is a covenant, they say.
A consent, a voluntary agreement.

Alice Blair Wesley, a Unitarian Universalist minister
who has studied our puritan ancestors closely,
put it this way:
“Refusing to embrace any creed, their members entered simply and beautifully phrased covenants to “walk together” in the divine spirit of love, as best they could see to do.”

To walk together in love: thus did they covenant.
They laughed, they cried, lived and died,
and found a need to be together.
To hold onto each other in the bonds of affection.
This is our spiritual legacy:
The free church, which enters into covenant,
which binds together families and generations,
a covenant which is the charter and responsibility and joy of worship . . .

Both of these groups – the early Christians, the puritans –
lived in times of religious energy and diversity.
Times when there were many religious options,
when new religious, cultural, and scientific ideas
were sweeping away the old structures.

We live in such times.
We live in times when folks are finding
that the old ways of doing things
well, it just doesn’t work for them anymore.
The fastest growing religion in this country is none of the above.
They are tired of creeds and doctrines,
of stultifying forms and “church politics.”
This tiredness is reflected in the popular megachurch
as much as the young women who searches for spiritual meaning
walking the trails at Rock Cut on a Sunday morning.
People are looking for something else.
If they are looking at all.

We live in a world
of great religious diversity,
of spiritual mixing,
of free-form creativity,
of anxiety in the face of adventure.

“TURNING and turning in the widening gyre”
these are the words of Yeats
”The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

The modern world, like Constantine’s Empire,
values convictions.
Clarity.
But in this world, with so many competing claims to truth,
conviction feels like holding a finger in the dyke,
feels like willful spiritual blindness.

What can save us?
What can be the center that will hold, when convictions won’t do?
The same spirit that gave us birth, over and over again:
the bonds of affection.

We live in a world of dizzying diversity.
But the bonds of affection
can heal our wounds
and get us under the churn, the waves, the storm,
and down in the deep and peaceful waters
of our common humanity.

The bonds of affection can get us to the place
where everything is holy now.

How does this work?

I recently had the privilege of preaching the ordination sermon
of a colleague, a hospital chaplain,
back in Colorado.
He serves this diverse world,
this world of people who are choosing none of the above
as their spiritual affiliation,
this world of confusion and uncertainty.
He walks into a room,
and is present.
But sometimes, person he goes to visit is not alert.
What then, is the chaplain’s job?

Like him, many of us, I’m sure,
have visited someone in the hospital
or the nursing home,
or their own bed,
when they are very ill,
and unable to speak,
maybe unable to wake.

But sometimes, it is the pastor’s job
to sit in that room.
To sit in silence.
I know this is true of hospital chaplains,
it is true of me,
and I bet it is true of most of you,
these are holy moments –
a testament, as much as the questioning look on a child’s face,
as much as a sacrament as the rising sun –
even when not a word is shared.

We sit in silence,
and something is happening.
What is it?

Or, let us say that the person does not share our faith,
maybe doesn’t share our cultural heritage,
maybe doesn’t speak our language.
But somehow, something is happening between us.
Somehow, we connect.
What is this?
It is the bonds of affection.

Let me make this point another way:
When we feel despair,
the private pain of what has failed,
we can go deeper into that despair,
which we often do.
That destructive cycle.

But Thandeka suggests another way:
“I turn to the world, the streets of
the city, the worn tapestries of
brokerage firms,
drug dealers, private estates
personal things in the bag
lady's cart
rage and pain in the faces that
turn from me
afraid of their own inner worlds.”

The worn tapestries of brokerage firms –
sometimes history is cyclical, isn’t it?

It seems counter-intuitive, I know,
that when we feel the weight of everything,
we turn not away from everything,
but back towards it.
But notice how specific Thandeka is:
real people, living their real lives.
And we love this reality, as it is:

“This common world I love anew,
as the life blood of generations
who refused to surrender their humanity
in an inhumane world,
courses through my veins.
From within this world
my despair is transformed to hope
and I begin anew
the legacy of caring.”

Thandeka is telling us something important about being human:
about how we turn to the world –
not away from it, in retreat or exile,
but toward the real world,
the streets of the city,
to the faces of others,
and we see their rage and their pain,
and we feel, at the same time,
the life blood of generations
coursing through our veins,
those who did not surrender,
and we begin anew the legacy of caring.

In other words, what draws us together,
what gives us hope,
is affect. The bonds of affection.

Thandeka was my theology professor in seminary,
that was at the same time as she was
an affiliated minister with this church –
in fact, my one experience in this church
before interviewing to be your minister,
was attending her ordination here.

She was always, in class, talking about affect.
There would be long discourses –
in theology class –
about how babies watch their parents’ faces
and mimic them,
and communicate without words.

Thandeka argues that affect is the true core of liberal religion:
that the experience of the holy is not an intellectual exercise,
but something we experience in our bodies,
and witness to others by our expressions and our own bodies.

She believes in embodied spirituality –
that the spirit is something we feel.
Coursing through our veins.

Affect is how we are all brothers and sisters in humanity –
beyond the divisions of religion, language, skin, politics, class:
everyone cries, everyone laughs, everyone is born, everyone dies.
Affect:
“If you prick us, do we not bleed?,” says Shakespeare’s Shylock,
and this commonality is our hope and our strength
in this world of confusion and division.

Draw the line with me –
between the theology of affect, Thandeka’s common world
and the hospital chaplain,
on one hand,
and the bonds of affection, the early Christians and the puritans,
on the other.

When the chaplain walks into the room,
he cares not what name you use for God,
if you use a name at all.
he cares not how you voice your prayers,
or what your income was last year.
He cares not what your parents did for a living.
What he cares about is this:
how do you feel today?
what’s on your soul today?

It is the chaplain’s job,
at their best,
to attend to affect
as a way to strengthen the bonds of affection:
to help the patient, the family,
the doctors and nurses and aides and volunteers
have strong bonds of affection
between each other,
with what is holy in their life,
with their own soul and body and heart.

In this multi-religious, multi-cultural world
this is not just the task of chaplains:
this is our work,
as inheritors of those who gathered in their homes
in Asia Minor and in New England,
who put aside creeds for the sake of love,
who pledged to walk together,
who made free churches:
churches grounded in the covenant they made with each other,
in the presence and for the sake of
the ultimate source of existence.

We are their descendants,
and the bonds of affection
are our inheritance.

It is my hope and my prayer
that we might celebrate this inheritance,
and claim it,
by nurturing our bonds of affection.

Here, within this church,
with each other,
with the newcomer,
the bonds of affection
between yourself and those you love,
near and far,
with people of all ages,
nurture these bonds
and celebrate our common humanity,
not just celebrate it,
but make it real.

See the hope and the fear,
the joy and the sorrow,
in the eyes and faces of one another –
stranger, friend, yourself standing before the mirror –
see this affect,
and respond with affection.

Such is the calling of liberal theology.
Such is the hope, ever eternal,
of people of faith who live for the sake of love.

Such is the task given unto you.

Walk together, in covenant,
in the bonds of love,
from this day forward,
and, my friends, all that is good and just,
all that is holy and wondrous,
will be before you, within you, and among you.

Amen. Shalom. Blessed Be.