The Villager Voice
During the second half of my sabbatical I took a few not-too-far from home trips I’ll be sharing with you in a couple weeks. One was to Provincetown, which has become a favorite destination of ours. We visited the Pilgrim Monument one morning, and after the dutiful climb to the top, I visited the bookstore in the visitor’s center, and came away with Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, the story of the Pilgrims’ voyage and first fifty-five or so years in New England. Philbrick first came to my attention years ago with his books In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, the true story of a doomed whaler which inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and his follow-up book (naturally), Why Read Moby Dick?
Early on in Mayflower, the writer describes the Pilgrim understanding of covenant – the Mayflower Compact was the inspiration and forerunner for the US Constitution. Here is his description, which continues to resonate in the Congregational church today:
The Puritans believed that a congregation began with a covenant (a term they took from the Bible) between a group of believers and God. As a self-created and independent entity, the congregation… used the concept of a covenant to describe the individual’s relationship with God. Ever since the Fall, when Adam had broken his covenant of works with God, humanity had been deserving of perpetual damnation. God had since made a covenant with Christ; upon the fulfillment of the covenant, God had offered a covenant of grace to just a small minority of people, known as the Saints.
Although our theology has grown and matured since Pilgrim days, as Congregationalists we continue to believe and live within the covenant between ourselves and God, which motivates and sustains our covenant among one another. We spoke of covenant in June when we received four new members into our church family, and we will revisit it again in a few weeks when we consider our church’s covenant among other congregations. But it was helpful to me to be reminded of our church’s place in the earliest days of our nation’s history, and of the ways we continue to live out that history in our own day.
Here are the links to Sunday’s bulletin and service: