I saw a curious thing the other day. A fence had been damaged. Really it was one fencepost. The post was uprooted from the ground, and yet it hadn’t fallen over. The other fenceposts around it were still deeply planted, so the damaged fencepost was still suspended upright by their strength.

It reminded me of the goal of covenant. You know a covenant is a set of mutual promises. Those promises are kind of a fence around a community. Not a scary fence with barbed wire and an electric current running through it. It’s a pleasant-looking fence that says, These are the boundaries of our relationships with one another. Here’s what you can expect from me. This is who we are as a community. A perimeter of love and trust.

Our fence needs fenceposts. Those vertical pillars that root deep into the ground and hold up the horizontal border. Fenceposts are what keep the boundaries well-defined. Without fenceposts, nothing holds up our covenant… our fence. Boundaries wouldn’t be as clear. The community wouldn’t feel as much like a safe place.

Maybe certain people come to mind when you think of fenceposts. But the thing about a mutual covenant is that we are all in that role. You are a fencepost of this congregation. You are a reason we’re able to build meaningful, authentic community together. You are what makes a covenant more than just pretty words we say. Without all of us doing our part, boundaries collapse, we lose definition, we fall short of the thriving community we want to be.

We’ve seen what happens when fenceposts fall down on the job. We’ve even seen the consequences of that lack of responsibility on a national scale. We can guess at the reasons. We can tell stories in our minds about why people might get uprooted, lose their grounding, and let go of their stretch of fence.

The real work that follows when a fencepost collapses though—when a person fails to hold up the boundaries of a community with integrity—is to rebuild the fence. Sometimes we probably want to collapse too. We think, “That person didn’t uphold the covenant, why should we?” Like children arguing over who hit who first to legitimize our reactive behavior.

Mending a fence—we might even say healing the fence—is a little more challenging. Maybe it’s easier if we accept that we are committed to our promises even when other people don’t follow through. Instead of further destroying the boundaries that define what we want this community to be, we can lift people up and call them back to the mutual promises they made. We can renew our commitment to one another. And maybe those other fenceposts can reestablish their footing, get grounded, and uphold the boundaries of our community again. We call that accountability.

This Sunday afternoon, we’ll express a covenant between Minister and Congregation at my installation ceremony. It will reflect how we rely on one another to be fenceposts in shared ministry. Maybe the covenant expressed this afternoon will even be a model for the work we do in the year ahead to create a congregational covenant, defining the boundaries and promises that allow us, and everyone else, the freedom to live with deep integrity to life-affirming values.