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COVENANT SUNDAY 2006
The Covenant Service is the invention of John Wesley. He advocated the
annual renewing of a Covenant, not with each other so much as with God,
and doing that re-covenanting in the presence of each other. The Covenant
is about connection to God, and connection to God means connection to
each other.
Sometimes the connection to each other is difficult, particularly when
we find that the other's are not as perfect as I'd like them to be. But
then, if I cannot connect to other human beings because of their imperfections,
how can I possibly face up to my own, and if I cannot face up to my own
imperfections, then how can I possibly have an honest relationship with
God, and let God work on my imperfections.
Our Covenanting with God, in this service, with other people, is deeply
based in our understanding of what the Covenant is really about.
When Wesley preached about Covenant, he said that the New Covenant, the
Christian understanding of Covenant, assumes that something has been lost.
The Christian knows that the image of God in us is not what it should
be, and it needs to be redeemed. Wesley also affirmed that it is redeemable
only by the Word of God.
This Covenant; God makes it. We cannot earn it or create it. We can only
receive it as gift. But this gift has a sting in the tail. That gift acknowledges
a marring of the image of God in our souls. It assumes a dead honest look
at ourselves, without all the usual defensiveness that we so frequently
employ, a real laying bare before God of the things that we are so afraid
to really look at in case we get overwhelmed by them.
The whole content of the Covenant Service rests on the assurance that
we know that God values and loves us, no matter what the reality we bring
to this service today. God sees in you and me, the possibility that we
are often too afraid to realize.
The Covenant Service instructs us to read from Jeremiah 31 and what Jeremiah
is saying is that God will make a new covenant with his people because
the old covenant had become so hopelessly polluted by the way the people
corrupted it. This wasn't about supplanting an old covenant, but it was
to be the means of fulfillinmg the old covenant, the way it was meant
to be.
What Jeremiah says is that all the old frameworks that people have built
around the Covenant with God are spent, redundant, marred to the point
where their existence is obliterating any view of what they were created
to celebrate. The religious structures have obscured God's presence, have
obscured the people's vision of what they are.
Jeremiah, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, affirms the New Covenant
in the immanent expectation of the judgement upon Israel of 587 BC when
Sennacherib's armies dismantled the country and all its structures.
The people had to learn again to be God's people in heart alone. Their
structures had allowed a form of Covenant, an illusion that was without
the substance, and prevented the people from seeing the reality of their
distance from God.
They had been given a Covenant, they had built a whole rigmarole of structures
around it, and now they were left with the structures that gave them an
illusion of being faithful to the covenant when all they were left with
was the façade of the structures.
It wouldn't be until all that façade had been swept away, like
it was back in the days of wandering in the desert with Moses, that they
would find God was still there, and be able to see God clearly again.
Repentance and surrender to the Grace of God, knows that it doesn't have
to hang onto self-righteousness, to an illusion of well being contained
in structures, but knows that God and the love of God is there: even if
all of these props are no more.
But like with Jeremiah, here has to be a cleansing and purging before
the New Covenant can become a reality. The people, unlike Jeremiah, can
only see the threat of the destruction of their structures. They cannot
see the possibility of God's existence or God's sustenance without them.
But Jeremiah can see further than that. Jeremiah's faith embraces a vision
that exists beyond the pollution, beyond the purging, and beyond the exile,
that there will be a redemption, a restoration of the land-god-people
relationship of the idealized past,
The land… must be emptied, purified and prepared for the return of God's
transformed people.
The link between a changed heart, a new covenant and a new planting in
the land is made very explicit in Jeremiah's sermon in Ch. 31 and 32.
When the heart of the people are turned to God, there is a healing in
the relationships and a healing of the land.
Jeremiah sees a time when power that comes with knowledge of God, the
power once claimed as the prerogative of the priests and prophets, will
belong to all God's people. That knowledge and experience will no longer
lies with the priests, the representatives of structures, but in a reality
of relationship with God.
The structures have become a pollutant, muddying the waters, obfuscating
the realities of what is happening to the people and their relationship
with God.
Jeremiah's prophecy is a bit like getting rid of Ground Elder. I was listening
to an Agatha Christie on the TV last week and Miss Marple tells the Policeman
that there comes a time, when the garden bed is utterly infested with
Ground Elder, the only thing to do is to dig the whole lot up.
Is this a nihilistic approach? No it isn't!
I'm not forgetting that Jesus said "I haven't come to destroy the
law but to fulfil it."
Sharn wrote an article recently for an international journal, and in that
article she points out that traumatic experience may be the source of
strength and wholeness even as it may be the source of ongoing mental
illness. Both possibilities are real.
As human beings, we can't afford to expunge our experiences because they
have as much potential to be the experience that gives us strength and
healing as the experience that brings us wounded-ness and dysfunction.
Is Jeremiah's purging of the land the only way to move forward? Is he
just rationalizing a horrible political reality?
And how does this tie in with repentance? What is it really about.
There is a certain courage and freedom that is needed to sift through
what has been, particularly if experiences have been very powerful and
negative.
The Christian faith offers us a trustable God who holds our experiences
in love and grace, even if we won't, or can't, even if we are ashamed,
or afraid to. It is that security which offers us a safe place to surrender
all that has been to the loving mercy, to the saving healing, heart of
God.
I don't need to defend or hold onto my survival structures of the past
to survive. My Christian faith tells me that God will hold me, whether
they are rotten to the core or brilliantly good and wholesome. God will
hold me.
I can surrender the artificial buttresses I've constructed, that so often
imprison me as much as they protect me. God will hold me.
God has made the Covenant. All I have to do is know that it is made and
always will be, and God will hold me.
That brilliant developmental psychologist of the 70's, Eric Erikson, demonstrated
that a child has more courage if it grows in a safe environment.
A child has more initiative if it grows in a safe environment.
A child has more generativity if it grows in a safe environment.
It is knowing that she is held in the Grace and mercy of God's covenant
that gives the Christian courage and strength and freedom to let go, or
hold onto the past, the actions, the experiences that should have been
or should not have been.
It is the certainty that the Covenant is held by God, not by our fragile
hands, that gives the Christian freedom - freedom so that we don't have
to defend our follies but can honestly lay them at Christ's feet and say.
"I'm sorry God. I trust you with me as I wholly am, foibles, faults,
frailties and fractures, and I yield myself wholeheartedly to you."
It is the assurance of the Covenant that God has created and God sustains,
that allows the Christian to give when others hang on, to love when others
go into self protection, to trust God with the moment of pain, allowing
God to transform the moment into new form that is blessing and wholeness.
As we move to the next part of the Covenant Service, this is our time
to release to God, even that to which we have desperately clung. As the
old saying goes,
"Let go and let God."
The Methodist Covenant
I am no longer my own but yours.
Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you or laid aside for you,
exalted for you or brought low for you;
let me be full, let me be empty,
let me have all things, let me have nothing;
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours. So be it.
And the covenant now made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.
Amen.
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