PEOPLE OF THE COVENANT: BOUND TOGETHER IN LOVE

(Preached on Sunday, March 29, 2009)

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people.   -Jeremiah 31:33

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...”  We all recognize and know these words.  They are branded in our national consciousness — the opening words of the Declaration of Independence.

 

We are not so familiar with the closing words: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”  We often forget, beyond being a Declaration of Independence from England, this document was also a covenant.  Our Founding Fathers had a great appreciation for the role of covenants.  They believed passionately that covenants were the foundation for all facets of their lives — in private and in public, in the home and in the church, in the marketplace and in the political forum.  Therefore, in signing this watershed document, each signer made a covenant with every other signer.

 

Understanding and treasuring covenant is important for us, not just as citizens of the United States, but also as members of the United Church of Christ.  Covenant is God’s good glue that keeps us together.  The history of God’s relationship with human beings is a story of covenant.  It is a story of God’s pledging God’s very self, God’s love, acceptance, and care for people and of God asking only in return the same: the love, acceptance, and caring for God from human beings. 

 

The Bible is very clear that God covenants.  In the Hebrew scripture alone there are 286 mentions of covenant.  Over and over again God makes promises and makes good on those promises.  At the end of the Noah story, after destroying all life on earth with a flood, except for Noah, his family, and what animals he carried in the ark, God promises never to do that again, and gives the rainbow as a sign of the promise.  When God liberates the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt God makes a covenant with them.  And Moses’ sister Miriam dances and Moses delivers the sign of the covenant, the commandments of God written on the stone tablets. 

 

There are two powerful truths about covenant as described in the Bible.  First, the truth that covenant is something that each party enters for the sake of the other. “You shall be my people, and I shall be your God” is how the covenant between God and the Hebrew people is expressed over and over again.  No other purpose intended but the cementing of their special relationship.

 

The second truth is that God never gives up on covenant.  Over and over again in the Hebrew scripture, though the people break their covenant with God, God continues to make covenant with them.  The passage we read from Jeremiah this morning illustrates that truth.  In perhaps one of the bleakest periods of history for the people of Israel God is making sweeping promises to them again; promises of restoration and return and, most importantly, of relationship.  Once again, as in all the earlier covenant stories, God promises to be in relationship with the people, to be a presence abiding with them: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” 

 

This time the prophet and God make crystal clear the nature of covenant.  For the language here is all heart language.  This is why covenant is different from contract.  Covenant always grows out of a relationship and the love that is the foundation of that relationship.  A contract is an agreement of mutual benefit, involving a quid pro quo.  There is a clear indication in the contract of what each party gets out of it.  It does not involve any heart knowledge, any intimate knowing between the two parties.  But a covenant does.  A covenant is motivated from a heart of love.  A covenant is a pledge of devotion, without concern for what one gets in return.  A covenant is always a promise to be there for the other party, no matter what!

 

In the United Church of Christ we understand this core truth about our relationship with God.  We understand ourselves to be people of the covenant.  We understand God promises to be there for us.  And we also understand that places a responsibility on us to be there for God.  Which also means we have a responsibility to be there for one another. 

 

As it was not easy for the ancient Hebrews, this covenant living is not easy for us today.  But it is what we come together each Sunday to remind ourselves we are striving for and to support one another as we seek to live faithfully in the covenant.  A contemporary author has visualized what this covenant living might look like in a modern parable titled “Second Sight.”  Once there was a minister gifted with second sight.  The congregation where she found herself working loved things “the way they had always been.”  On her first day with the congregation, the chair of the Worship Committee said to her, “We like to sing the old hymns.”  The new minister looked into her eyes and read from her heart, “I am afraid of change, but I want to be loved.”  On her second day, the chair of the Finance Committee said to her, “We are always short of money, so be careful and do not rock the boat.”   She looked into his eyes and read from his heart, “I am afraid to give, but I want to be loved.”  On the third day, the chair of the Pastoral Care committee said to her, “We like the minister to visit everyone.”  She looked into the eyes of this visitor and read from her heart, “I am lonely and afraid to reach out, but I want to be loved.”  Each day someone came to see the minister.  Beyond their words she read from their hearts and sensed their fears and longings.  On Sundays, she gathered with the congregation in worship, and looked into her how heart where she saw written, “God is love.”  The message was so strong that she preached this same messages, with slight variations, for three years.  No one commented, but they people began to ask to sing new hymns.  And they started to give more generously.  They started to speak of their own fears and to hold one another until the pain disappeared.  Some of them even began to catch the gift of second sight and to read the hearts of those they met.

 

Jim Taylor, a retired United Church of Canada publisher and author, recently wrote on his internet blog of “how he is on the downhill side of life” though he doesn’t know just when that happened.  He continues, “I might be here for another two years, or another twenty, but ... my time, as the song says, is running low.  And when the flame finally burns down, I shall want someone with me.  Someone to hold my hand, to stay near me as I take life’s final step into death.  I will not want information or theory about companionship, or community, or caring.  I will not want doctrinal assurances or dogmas I must swallow to be saved.  I will want the real thing. ... All the doctrine and dogma in the world cannot replace a real relationship.  When it really matters, I won’t care a whit about Virgin Births and Immaculate Conceptions, about whether Jesus sit he same as God or merely of the same substance as God.... All I’ll want is to feel God there with me, holding my hand.”