Covenants & Contracts

Towards a Tangible Trust

When I was little, I loved musicals. My mom took me to see a high school production of Brigadoon when I was seven, and I was smitten. The local public library had about a dozen records of soundtracks that it loaned out, and I learned them all by heart. It has been one of the great disappointments of my grown-up life that people do not randomly burst into song nearly as often as I was led to hope. (On the other hand, quicksand has turned out to be a much less common hazard than I feared, so on balance, things have turned out OK, I think.)

One of my favorite musicals was Camelot. My mom always talks about how embarrassing it was to have an eight-year-old running around singing “The Lusty Month of May.” But I wasn’t very interested in the Arthur–Lancelot–Guinevere triangle; what I loved was the fellowship of the Knights of the Round Table, their open talk of honor and loyalty and noble love. I was an odd, nerdy, and kind of lonely little kid, and I longed for that idealistic friendship.

When I was ten, our stake put on a musical about the early Latter-day Saints’ attempt at living the Law of Consecration in Orderville. I still remember the chorus of my favorite song: “Love thy neighbor—not an easy thing to do / especially when your neighbor’s not as lovable as you!”

What these musicals have in common is that the Round Table and the United Order were both communities established by covenant. And to borrow from yet another tale of knights and true love, covenant is one of those words we keep saying, but “I do not think it means what you think it means!” We often think and talk about covenants as contracts—lists of mutual obligations—but understanding the differences between covenants and contracts can transform the way we live and love as members of the family of God.

Bonds of Loyalty

The earliest covenants we know about were diplomatic treaties establishing relationships between kings—usually between a greater king, called a suzerain, and a lesser king, or vassal. These covenants followed a specific form: they opened with a preamble, declaring the suzerain’s name and the elements of his greatness. Next, they described the historical relationship between the suzerain and the vassal king, emphasizing the things the greater king has done to benefit the lesser one, and then they lay out the terms of the covenant, or what each party would do for the other. One way these covenants differ from what we think of as contracts is that the parties are sometimes enjoined to “love” each other—for instance, an Assyrian treaty from the seventh century BC says to the vassals, “You will love as yourselves Assurbanipal.” There are several examples of such treaties, or elements of them, in the Old Testament.  

Nowadays, lawyers talk about covenants and contracts more or less interchangeably. But the older understanding of covenants tells us something important that can be easy to miss if we think of covenants as contracts. Covenants don’t just prescribe actions, they describe a change in status—when a vassal swore allegiance to a suzerain, or a knight pledged fealty to his liege, they changed not just what they did, but who they were. They were now bound to the sovereign—they belonged to him. And their status relative to their peers changed, too. You’d think twice about attacking the duchy of a knight protected by King Arthur, rather than just some random peasant with a sword. 

One Latter-day example of this type of covenant is in Section 84 of the Doctrine and Covenants, often called “The Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood.”

“For whoso is faithful unto the obtaining these two priesthoods of which I have spoken, and the magnifying their calling, are sanctified by the Spirit unto the renewing of their bodies. They become the sons of Moses and of Aaron and the seed of Abraham, and the church and kingdom, and the elect of God. . . Therefore all that my Father hath shall be given unto him. And this is according to the oath and covenant which belongeth to the priesthood” (D&C 84:33–39).

Notice that this is not simply a list of duties or mutual obligations. This is the language of kinship, of loyalty and protection and inheritance.

The covenants we all know best, of course, are those that we take on at baptism, and when we partake of the sacrament each week.

When, as part of those covenants, we take Christ’s name upon us, we are joining a family, and accepting obligations not only to the sovereign, but to all of his other subjects as well. These covenants to each other are clearly laid out by Alma at the Waters of Mormon in the familiar passage in Mosiah, in which Alma bids his followers to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, to bear one another’s burdens and mourn together and give comfort to one another.

We often try to read these verses as a contract, as though we could check off “mourn with those that mourn” on Monday, “comfort those that stand in need of comfort” on Tuesday, and put “stand as witness of God” at the top of our lists every day, and somehow fulfill our obligations. But of course we can’t—those obligations are open-ended and infinite; the nature of the world is such that there will always be mourning and comforting to do, and our witness of God’s love will always be incomplete.

And look at the final clause, where the sovereign enumerates his promise to us, to “pour out his Spirit more abundantly.” I’m not a lawyer, but I am married to one, so I can assure you that this is a completely unenforceable contract; the terms are ill-defined, the obligation is completely elastic, the timeframe is unspecified. God would flunk contract law. 

These covenants are like contracts in some ways—they elaborate duties of each party, but they are fundamentally different because they operate in a framework of relationship and abundance, rather than exchange and scarcity.

Here’s how Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, put it:

In a contract, two or more people come together, each pursuing their self-interest, to make a mutually advantageous exchange. In a covenant, two or more people, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of loyalty and trust to do together what neither can achieve alone. It isn’t an exchange; it’s a moral commitment. It is more like a marriage than a commercial transaction. Contracts are about interests; covenants are about identity. Contracts benefit; covenants transform.

Loving by Covenant

Everything about living in an economy built on contracts conditions us to believe that the good things in the world are scarce—both material and spiritual things. We believe, no matter how many times the scriptures tell us otherwise, that there might not be enough love or status for everyone—that if someone else gets more love, we will get less. 

I suspect I am not alone in being a people pleaser, sometimes in unhealthy ways, because I am trying to earn approval and affection. In every ward I’ve ever been in, women have confided in me that they “don’t really fit in.” Often, the women who said this were women who I would have said were absolutely at the center of the ward’s social life. I think a sense of belonging may be elusive for all of us, or at least most of us at one time or another. Human friendships most often are built on similarity—we just naturally tend to like people who are like us. 

Yet when God tells Peter at the beginning of building Christ’s church that “the net gathereth of every kind,” he’s warning us that there are going to be some weird fish! There are so many ways to be a weird fish: maybe you are older or younger than most of the people in your ward, maybe you are disabled, part of a racial or ethnic minority in your ward, poorer or richer than most people there, or your political views are different, or, like me, you have been divorced and are rubbish at pickleball. Human limits of attention, patience, affection and—especially—time can make friendship feel scarce. It is a hard truth that we have made covenants that require us to love more than we are able to, and to be committed even when we don’t feel loved or comfortable. Our wards, our priesthood quorums and Relief Societies, are made up entirely of people trying and failing and trying again to love by covenant.

The saving truth is that, by virtue of having made covenants with God, we each carry the deepest kind of belonging within ourselves. Knowing that, we are freed from competing for scarce social capital; we can take delight in the variety of relationships that are offered to us by virtue of our covenant of belonging.

Here is how one woman described a relationship that she struggled initially to enjoy, but came to appreciate deeply:

Our home teachers are in their seventies and eighties. They come over in their orthopedic shoes, holding their Ensign, and give us a lesson. Sometimes their slowness is unnerving, but more and more, I have learned to crave this unusual gift of stillness in our home. Our special-needs daughter comfortably plants herself between them, takes one of their hands, and plays with their fingers as she likes to do. Just last month one of the teachers held up the cover of the May Ensign showing a refugee woman and wept as he recounted his experiences as a missionary in South Africa in the 1950s. Sometimes we think, they are so far removed from our situation, how can they possibly understand it? And yet, I think it is their distance from it that blesses me. It is the way they observe our family chaos with mild amusement. It is the way they don’t mind when my daughter rests her head on their arm. It is the box of fruit they brought when they learned that my husband lost his job. It tasted so good.

For many years, my family also had such a minister. He tried to visit every month, despite our frequent too-busyness; he remembered every child’s birthday, and mine; he showed up to baseball and basketball games and high school improv nights to cheer for my kids. Once I posted something on Facebook about how much I love lilacs, and he and his wife were at my door within the hour, arms full of gorgeous blooms—I think they must have cut down an entire lilac bush in their yard. When he asked if there was anything he could do for us, I knew the question was sincere and heartfelt and would have been followed by the relocation of at least a New England–sized mountain if I asked. He seemed disappointed when I couldn't think of anything to ask for.

Once, I had a meeting scheduled with his wife, and called to cancel because I had a cold and felt mildly crummy. He called a few minutes later. “I heard you were sick,” he said, sounding oddly elated about it. “It’s no big deal,” I told him, truthfully, “just a little cold.” “I’ll bring you guys pizza for dinner!” he said, sounding as though he absolutely could not think of anything more fun. I felt like I was doing him a favor when I said, “Thanks, that would be great.”

A little while later, he was on the porch with pizzas and a bag with vanilla ice cream and root beer in it. “I hope your kids like root beer floats,” he said. They do, of course, but that was not why I suddenly got all teary. It was his uncertainty that made me realize the holiness of the moment. Our home teacher, despite his valiant efforts, didn’t know my kids all that well. It was a pretty safe bet that they would like root beer and ice cream, but we hadn’t spent enough time together for him to know that for sure. His kindness to us was not grounded in the usual currency of human friendships—mutual self-revelation, reciprocal gift-giving, shared experience. I think he liked us just fine, and we liked him, but that is not the reason he cared for us. He tended to us not because we were interesting or amusing or admirable, not because we merited his attention, but because he loves Jesus and knows that “[Jesus] first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

He did simple, kind things for us because he loves Jesus. And not in spite of his dutiful goodness, but exactly because he was following a commandment, he brought root beer and ice cream that were not only sweet with human kindness, but sacramental—redolent of wine and blood and the bread of life.

When we love and serve because we have promised to, even when we have to rely on our sense of duty rather than warm feelings; when we endure awkward conversations and keep showing up for each other; when we go to church week after week despite feeling friendless; when we slow down to notice who needs a friend, we are stepping out of the economy of contracts and into a covenant economy where there is enough and to spare of all that we need, especially of love. In that world, we do not have to earn the love of others, or somehow manufacture warm and fuzzy feelings by an act of will. Instead, we love “because he first loved us,” because Jesus showed us how to love, commanded us to love one another, and helps us to keep his commandment.

Elder Gong said it this way: “When we covenant all we are, we can become more than we are. Covenant belonging gives us place, narrative, capacity to become. It produces faith unto life and salvation. Divine covenants become a source of love for and from God and thereby for and with each other.” 

We can trust the Lord, who has made this covenant with us:

With everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee. (Isaiah 54:8-10).

This essay originally appeared in the volume A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century, edited by Philip L. Barlow and published by Faith Matters Publishing.

Kristine Haglund is a freelance editor living in St. Louis, Missouri. A former editor of Dialogue, she is the author of Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal.

Art by Andrew Payne.