The Covenant Church
Isaiah 65:17-22
For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating, for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days or an old person who does not live out a lifetime, for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat, for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
Luke 21:1-4
He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them, for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.
The Covenant Church
This is the third sermon in this November series that explores the roots of our church. We have talked about some of the unique freedoms expressed in Congregationalism, their origin, their importance, and how these freedoms make our church different from other expressions of Christianity. This morning I want to focus on a very important foundation of the Congregational movement which we have not talked about yet, and that is, the covenant church.
We have a church covenant, and it’s in the back cover of our hymnal. Let’s read this together.
We covenant with the Lord and with one another, to walk together as followers of Jesus Christ. We propose to devote ourselves to the study, practice and spread of Christianity. We will endeavor to be loyal to this fellowship, to help one another in the Christian life according to our ability and opportunity, and to support the work and attend the meetings of the church, and in every way to strive to make it a power in the service of God and humankind.
So, we are a covenant church. And every congregational church has its own covenant. This church wrote that covenant. That’s our covenant. To be a covenant church means that we are not a creedal church or a doctrinal church. And to explain what this means, I want to tell you the story of William Bradford.
I’m sure you have heard of Willam Bradford. He was the governor of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, and in his life story, we have a wonderful example of perseverance, leadership, dedication, and vision. Now, that’s high praise, I know. But it seems to me, at least, that Bradford’s journey was a pilgrimage that captures the essence of the American adventure, a lifelong pilgrimage to a new land in search of freedom. And since he was a founding father of the American Congregational movement, he was our ancestor. So if we understand him, this will help us to understand who we are as a church, and even, I will venture to say, who we are as a country. In his famous journal called Of Plymouth Plantation,Bradford wrote, “All great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.” His own life certainly bore witness to these words.
William Bradford was born in Austerfield, Yorkshire, a small village in northern England, in 1590, into a family of farmers. By age 7, he was an orphan living with his uncle. During this time, perhaps because of the shock of losing his family, William was often ill. Instead of working on the farm, he took to reading. He educated himself by reading the Geneva Bible, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Then, at age 12, young William heard a sermon by Richard Clyfton critical of the Church of England, and that same year, he met William Brewster. Young Bradford began attending secret church services at the home of Willam Brewster where he heard more sermons by Clyfton and by another pastor, Rev. John Robinson. These ministers were Puritan Separatists. And the secret house church where they met was in Scrooby, about four miles from where William Bradford lived. His uncle did not approve of William attending these secret meetings, probably because they were illegal, but William was convinced there was truth to be found there.
Then, in 1603, King James took the throne with a vow to put an end to the church reform movements going on in England. By this time, the church congregation at the Brewster’s home in Scrooby was about 50 people. They were discovered by local authorities, harassed, and some were imprisoned. So this congregation realized that attempting to reform the Church of England was a hopeless cause, so they decided to break away completely.
By 1607, the Scrooby congregation had made plans to escape to Holland, an act of treason. In their first attempt to sail to Holland, they were caught, and most of them were thrown into prison. Released several months later, they attempted again to sail to Holland, and this time the local militia showed up while they were loading the ship. With only half the male passengers aboard ship, when the ship’s captain saw the soldiers, he set sail, leaving the wives and children on the dock. It took months for the families to be reunited in Amsterdam.
The Spark that Lit the Protestant Reformation
Let’s pause here and consider: What was the driving force that compelled these people to risk their lives? Well, they did not like the idea of a National Church. They wanted their own church. And they wanted to base their church on Scripture. And here, we touch on the essential disagreement that sparked the Protestant Reformation. One way to frame the central disagreement is with the question, “How is God’s grace given to us?” Or from another angle, “How can we know God’s will?” From the medieval Roman Catholic view, humans receive God’s grace and know God’s will through the church, through the tradition, as expressed in the sacraments, the creeds, and the doctrines of the church. But the Protestant Reformers wanted to have a more direct route to God. They wanted to get rid of the “middleman”, so to speak. They did not want to go through the church. They did not want an intercessor.
And so here, painting with some broad strokes, let’s talk about this thing called “the Protestant Reformation.” As you know, it was a religious and cultural movement that spread across Europe in the 16th century and basically blew up the solid fortress that was the Roman Catholic Church. But rather than a single explosion, it was more like a series of explosions, a series of reformations, with several key figures, people leading the reformations in several different countries. We are talking about England because the Pilgrims came from England. But the first reformer was famously Martin Luther, who, in 1517, nailed his 95 complaints to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Now, this is probably a legend. It’s more likely that Luther simply pasted his document on the church door. That’s what people did if there was some kind of news flash or announcement. In my sermon text, I have included a link to an article in Time magazine on the 500th anniversary of Luther’s famous day, and you may find it interesting. So you can check that out on the church website.
https://time.com/4997128/martin-luther-95-theses-controversy/
One of Luther’s slogans was “sola scriptura” that is, “only scripture.” Luther wanted to go straight to the Bible and bypass all the church tradition and doctrine that had developed in the previous one thousand years. See, the creedal statements of belief, for example the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed, the Doctrine of the Trinity, all these things were written by the church. They were part of church tradition. But the reformers wanted to go back to the Bible directly and base their beliefs and practices in what they found in the Bible. And one of the things they found in reading the Bible was this idea of Covenant, that is, the spiritual agreement between God and the people, and the social agreement among the people themselves. For the reformers, covenant was what holds it all together. Covenant is the glue that holds everything together. It is the tie that binds.
The Reformer John Calvin
Now, there is a long list of reformers, but the two most important, after Martin Luther, were John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, both in Switzerland. And what is important for us to know is that the Pilgrims really liked Calvin. The Pilgrims, that is, the English Puritan Separatists, were Calvinists. They read Calvin, and they subscribed to his ideas. The Pilgrims theology and social ideas were based on what they found in Calvin. So this is key. This is where they got their ideas on covenant. And the strength of their commitment comes from their belief in the importance of covenant. So covenant is foundational for us, too. This is where we get it. This is where it comes from.
Bound Together by Covenant
Now, back to the church in Scrooby. These people were bound together by covenant, beginning with their secret meetings in England; they were bound together by their covenant with God and with each other. And we can see, as we follow their story, how strong this bond was. It was what carried them through. It was what gave William Bradford tenacious strength. So, let’s continue with his story.
The Pilgrims in Holland
In 1608, the Scrooby congregation landed in Amsterdam. They had spent most of their money to get there, and so, they struggled as poor foreigners. They could only find menial work, and nine months later, they decided to move from Amsterdam to a town in South Holland called Leiden. By this time, William Bradford was 18 years old.
Without family and without money, he was taken in by the Brewster family, and in Leiden, the Brewsters found housing in a neighborhood called “Stink Alley.” So that tells you something about their economic status in Holland.
Our Ancestors were Foreigners
And here, I think it would be fitting to remember our scripture reading from Luke this morning. The Pilgrims knew poverty. On the socio-economic ladder, they really fell a long way down. And even today, our world is not so different from theirs. The wealth gap continues to be great. I don’t need to elaborate on this. But let us remember to keep our hearts open, and remember that our ancestors, too, struggled as immigrants in a foreign country.
They plan the voyage to the New World
William Bradford turned 21 in Leiden, and at age 21, he was able to claim his family inheritance. With this money, he bought a house, set up shop as a weaver, (he was weaving heavy cotton cloth for men’s clothing) and became a reputable Dutch citizen. In 1613 he married Dorothy May, and in 1617 their first child was born. At this point, William Bradford was 27 years old and had become a leader in the Puritan community. And it was at this time that the Puritans began to plan their departure from Holland to start a new colony in the Americas. They had been in Holland ten years, and they were worried that their children were becoming Dutch. They wanted to raise them as English.
The Year 1620
In July of 1620, they left Leiden and travelled to Delftshaven where they boarded the ship, Speedwell, headed to England to meet the Mayflower, bound together by their faith, their covenant with God and with each other. It was in 1620 that William Bradford began to write his journal, this book he called Of Plymouth Plantation. It was in this book that Bradford first used the term Pilgrims to describe his people. “They knew they were pilgrims,” he wrote, who lifted “up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country.”
Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation
Bradford’s account of the Pilgrims’ history is a landmark of American literature. It’s found in all the anthologies of American literature. The original manuscript was kept in a Boston church until the Revolutionary War when it mysteriously disappeared. It so happens that that same Boston church was occupied by British soldiers during the war. And so, about a hundred years later, Bradford’s original handwritten manuscript showed up, interestingly, in the library of the Bishop of London. It was eventually returned to Boston in 1897 and placed in the Massachusetts State Library.
And we will pick it up here next week, and I will have some more stories for you about William Bradford and the Pilgrims journey to the New World. Let us remember we are, like the Pilgrims, covenant people. Amen? Amen.