"Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive" (Lk.20.38).

I. It was a strange question they put to Jesus – about a man’s responsibility to care for the family of a brother who dies. It was tied up with ancient Jewish customs intended, no doubt, to ensure the survival of the community. But the answer Jesus gives looks beyond this age to that future time when there will be no marriage and no death, the time of the general resurrection, when all of us will be "like angels and ... children of God."

We are not there yet!

It is that last line that speaks to us tonight: "Now (God)," says Jesus, "is God not of the dead, but of the living." The eyes of God, and the eyes of faith, do not focus on a dead past – we are not here to worship our 300 years – but rather we are called to attend to the concerns of the living. And then Jesus adds that kicker – " for to (God) ALL of them are alive." Perhaps that is what "eternity" means – those 300 years are but an instant in God’s eyes, and all of them, all the generations, are present, influencing the present.

If you close your eyes and look around, perhaps you can see some of them.

There in the back is Sir Richard Saltonstall. One of the earliest to arrive in Boston, he sailed up the Charles until he came to the bend in the river just beyond where Harvard now sits, just before where Mt. Auburn Hospital now is, and there he came ashore and led his group inland a ways and settled Watertown in 1630. He’s not really one of our’s, of course, but we were part of Watertown then – the Watertown Farmers, later the West Precinct of Watertown. It was Sir Richard who wrote the Boston clergy protesting their tyranny and intolerance: "Do not assume to yourselves infallibility of judgment," he warned. Perhaps because of him, this place experienced none of the persecutions and banishments and cruelty of some other places.

And over there in the back are Nathaniel Coolidge and his son Jonathan Coolidge, who deeded the land on which we now sit for the first meetinghouse. Plans were made in 1695 but it took five years for the building committee to get it finished.

They had trouble convincing a minister to come also. Several declined and the one they got – Joseph Mors – they didn’t like (I don’t see him here tonight!). They may have liked his wife better: Amity Harris Mors taught school here, and later became known for her care of the Indians; "a woman whose name deserves veneration and praise," wrote a biographer.

Finally – ah, there he is – Williams Williams came to Weston in 1708. He was minister here for 41 years, during which time the church made the advance "from childhood to maturity." In fact, there were only two more ministers during the rest of the century: after Williams was Samuel Woodward (over there, in the back) for 31 years; he was the great patriot who offered prayer at the gathering of a hundred Weston Liberty Men and then fell into the ranks and marched off to Concord to start the Revolutionary War. It was Woodward who, on this very spot of ground 222 years ago, read the Declaration of Independence to the Town. And Samuel Kendal followed, serving another 31 years (Kendal is sitting back there under the plaque on the wall with his profile). Stories abound about Kendal – when his house and his study burned one night in 1791, he said that for once at least his sermons were able to give some light!

Joseph Field (I think he’s singing with the choir) was the first Unitarian minister. He was here for 50 years. His wife, Charlotte Latham Field, would be with the choir too: she was the daughter of an English father and French mother, educated in France, a "highly educated lady, who had musical tastes," says the biographer. Their house down here on the Boston Post Road across from the cemetery was "a center of refinement and culture," and of six children.

Ah, so great a cloud of witnesses – and I haven’t mentioned Edmund Hamilton Sears who wrote "It came upon the midnight clear." His son, Horace Sears, made so much money that his house on the hilltop behind me actually makes most of today’s new houses in Weston look pretty small. And do you know that his tombstone, next to his parents in Linwood, is not grandiose at all, but exactly the same modest size as his parents’ stones?

There’s Francis and Anna Hastings (over by the organ): their company built organs for Symphony Hall and John Rockefeller’s Riverside Church in New York as well as this one.

Look around – there’s Abigail Kendal and Mary Otis Rogers and Roland Rand and Miss Nellie Jones, keeping tabs on the Sunday School children. And Robert Winsor organizing a parish choir, Major Sauerwine fixing just about everything in the building, and Fred Coburn keeping track of the funds.

So great a cloud of witnesses – and "time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets" (Heb.11.32).

II. What were they all about? What were they, what are we, doing here? Is there a way of tying it all together?
I think there is. It is the Covenant, those words we use to describe our relationship with God and with one another in the church-condition. It is a covenant first made 300 years ago in this place and given its current form in 1884 and reaffirmed in 1984: "In the love of truth and in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we unite for the worship of God and the service of humankind."

What does it mean? It is not a creed, spelling out what we must believe, rather it talks about what we do here, what makes us a church. And a great covenant, like a great work of art, can inspire many interpretations. Let me share one perspective.

In the love of truth – truth, veritas, the truth shall make you free said Jesus. This is the guarantee of liberty here. I’ve adopted recently a line to welcome visitors on Sundays: "Whoever you are, wherever you find yourself on your journey of faith, you are welcome here." We are free to go where reason and evidence lead us in our quest for truth – no creed, or even scripture, can make us believe what does not commend itself to mind and heart. We are free and independent thinkers. We decide for ourselves.

And if that sounds like a recipe for making stubborn individualist Yankees – it is! And we are proud of it. But we know that we need not always think alike to love alike. So we are also a community . . .

In the spirit of Jesus Christ. There are several meanings here. Perhaps one meaning is simply that our church is grounded in a specific tradition, the Christian tradition. Just as one cannot be "political-in-general" without voting for a particular candidate, so one cannot be "religious" in-general (at least not for long or in depth) without choosing a particular tradition with its common language, and symbols, and hymns and stories and revelations that give substance to a religion.

For those raised in that tradition, though, "the spirit of Jesus Christ" means something more: it is the vision of one we came to know in Sunday School and are still discovering today – one who welcomed sinners, dines with publicans (that means tax-collectors, not REpublicans!); one who was open in his relationships and loving in his outreach to the needy and to the whole world; who was bold in advocating what is right, and compassionate on those who failed; who knew God, and wanted us to be transformed by that same knowledge. When we saw him, we knew we were seeing truth with a capital T, truth not in propositions and statements, but in a life.

That is the heart and soul of the covenant to me – for it asks us to go and do likewise.

But I think it’s also important to not simply reduce down "the spirit of Jesus Christ" to just "being compassionate." This kind of reductionism – of theology down to ethics – too easily loses something much too important. I think that (and I speak out of my own heart here, not necessarily for you) that there is a way that Jesus reveals something to us we don’t easily see elsewhere in the world – about the nature of God and about the obligations of a responsible human life. For me, being Christian is not just picking one among many ethical options, but it is responding to a call, an invitation to relationship, to a command – to serve the needy, or to forgive the sinner, for example, not just because it is nice or good but because the One who teaches us God’s love is calling and inviting and commanding. Sometimes we don’t feel like doing the right thing, but "the spirit of Jesus Christ" calls and, if we respond, empowers us.

And what do we do in a church? We unite for the worship of God and the service of humankind. And sometimes we do that even when we aren’t in the mood or don’t feel like it!

Do you know the source of that part of the covenant? It’s the Great Commandment – to love God and your neighbor as yourself. The two have to go together – faith AND works: faith in God without doing good is empty piety; good works without a supporting faith behind it is an invitation to exhaustion. If we think WE alone are saving the world, we’re going to eventually crash and burn.

Carl Scovel gave one of the best descriptions I know about what faith in "God" means. He calls it "the great surmise" – and what is says is simply this: "At the heart of all creation lies a good intent, a purposeful goodness, from which we come, by which we live our fullest, to which we shall at last return. And this is the supreme reality of our lives."

The service of humankind then grows out of, and is empowered by, the worship of God. I am still new enough here that I can celebrate, without being immodest, the extraordinary outreach of First Parish. It’s not just the Outreach budget of some $40,000 a year going to wonderful programs, but its also the food our 8th graders collect for the Asian food pantry this month, the benevolences of the Benevolent Alliance, next week’s Secret Santa for the OnTRAC after-school tutoring program in Roxbury, the presence of the Roxbury-Weston preschool in our buildings, and simply the way concern for others permeates everything we do here at First Parish. Do you know, for example, that a portion of our endowment is segregated for investment in the Community Loan Fund which helps programs like low-income inner-city housing?

III. So, my friends, we unite for the worship of God and the service of humankind not just in some haphazard way, not just as the mood strikes the parsons or the parishioners, but "in the love of truth, and in the spirit of Jesus Christ."

If we are faithful to our covenant, I suggest that we are being faithful to Sir Richard and Amity Mors, to Miss Nellie Jones and Major Sauerwine, to ourselves, to our children and children’s children.

Then we are faithful to the God in whom all of us, past and present and future, are all alive, all together, all in covenant.