OUR COVENANT MAKING GOD
Jeremiah 31:31-34; 1Corinthians
As our nation ends its official holiday of Thanksgiving, and
we look around the corner of November to the promises of December, hear these
words from Douglas Stivison regarding one of our nation’s most precious
documents: “The framers of the Declaration of Independence 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….The Declaration of Independence, one
of history’s most political documents,
is inextricably grounded in an unshakable belief in humanity’s covenantal
relationship with a loving God…. They were determined to align their political covenants with their
understanding of the divine covenant.
This reflected a profound understand that our lives are shaped by multiple covenants, and that we need to
reconcile, order, prioritize, and align them all.” [LIVING PULPIT, Vol. 14, No.
3, 2005, p. 1] I have told my
Confirmation Classes that a covenant is “a promise between God and people, or
between people and people. We make
covenants all the time: there are sacred ones such as ordination vows, or
marriage vows, or baptismal vows, or membership vows. They are meant to be
kept. When Presidents of the
Ages ago, God offered promises that were sacred and that were
sealed in special ways. Just as the
times when you put trust in someone who broke it, God had choices to make when
people broke their promises: God could either wipe out planet
earth and try for another more faithful civilization, or God could mold
and make over and begin to forgive humans so that they could see that forgiveness
was divine. When the whole world was acting like it was the roaring 20s and
worse (in Genesis chapter 6,) God experienced what you may have felt again this
week, this month, or this year: regret and disappointment. People disappointed
God; don’t people disappoint you? Didn’t you regret being vulnerable with your
heart or your body or your secrets when someone betrayed or harmed you? Writers
through the ages, from Shakespeare’s classic line of Julius Caesar, “Et tu
Brute?’ to modern novelists remind us of the human angst of betrayal. But there
is divine angst too. What is usually the healthiest step to take?
For many, they decide not to associate with the one who has wronged them and
pour themselves into someone else who hasn’t. Many among us survive and thrive
today because they have removed themselves from toxic and corrupting people who
used to influence them. God once decided to do something like that! God decided
not to be associated with those who blatantly and defiantly lived in harmful
ways; God said, (in so many words) “I will pour my efforts into relationships
that, while not perfect, includes good values, good hearts, and
willing spirits at the center.”
God chose Noah and let his “seed” as it was called, along with his wife and
children, repopulate the world, so the story goes. Therefore one way of dealing
with broken promises, according to this story, is to remove ourselves from
those who have hurt us, and move on. Trusting again after broken trust either
never happens, or it happens differently.
Lutheran pastor Roger R. Gustafson described one scene this
way: “They sit across the coffee table from me in my office, in pieces. She, weary and bleary-eyed with crying, staring at her folded
hands; he, guilty and gazing into space, ashamed to even glance at me, his
pastor and friend. He is beyond hoping that there are words to make this
better. It had been a routine business trip, complete with routine dinner
clients, a routine round of drinks before retiring for the night, [then] a
knock on the door from a young lady …. [on a night
when the faithful husband and father failed to form the word ‘no’ on his lips.]
He came home unwittingly transmitting [that incriminating kind of disease] to
his wife. It wasn’t long before the scene in their kitchen. The icy dagger of
betrayal had pierced her innocent heart. He
had broken their covenant. “Ibid, p. 19]
Flashback to Exodus 32, far beyond God’s covenant to Abraham to always
be his God and the God of his people; after God’s Covenant with Moses and the
Israelites, offered if they promised to keep the Ten Commandments. God had thrown every lifeline of faithfulness
that holy scribes could create, and in spite of them all, at the foot of the
Holy Mountain Sinai, God was betrayed. God felt like you when you have been
betrayed, only thousands of times over.
Exodus 32 has the dreadful story of a broken covenant, of promises
broken to the one who gave them life. The holy stomach was tied in knots, and
the holy heart was broken. Certainly by
the end of Exodus there was a renewal of vows of sorts recorded in the 34th
chapter, but God’s trust of people had taken yet another beating. People in
general, God learned, would always disappoint and always make mistakes. Parents learn that about their children;
children learn that about their parents; husbands learn that about their wives
and wives about their husbands. And in our day, the last 30 years or so, many workers
have been socked in their stomachs by corporations that refused to honor
promises for pensions or health care. We are part of a bitter world. But like
our nation, God had a new deal to present; Jeremiah was one of the first to get
the good news, and he told it to a nation that had been ravaged by another
because God had lowered holy protection on them since they had chosen other
gods. So God tried again; God tried to
build a new bridge where the first one was burned by human unfaithfulness. And
that bridge was a new covenant, a new promise, foretold by Jeremiah, and
embodied in Jesus Christ, and instituted at the Last Supper, and described simply
in his new commandment to love one another. Our loving God would abide in Heaven, but also
abide on earth in one we would call the Son, one who would pay the price for
our betrayals, and sins, and heartaches, one who would look at Jerusalem one
day and weep over it as his Father was weeping in Heaven. God had shown two vastly different ways of
dealing with broken covenants.
Friends, if it is ever our hope to grow closer to God, then human
actions most readily will mirror divine actions. The popular cliché is “What Would Jesus Do?”
but the question is broader than that: “What did God do, as recorded in the
Bible, the written record of God’s actions in history?” Today we have found two
ways to handle broken covenants: The first way is to keep our promises, asking God
to give us the strength to do so. And when there are those who break their
promises to us, some choose to cut off those relationships and find their joy
in others. You may choose to take that route with those who have broken their
promises to you- to drop toxic relationships and build new ones. It is not
without tears and pain; God has felt those as well. But there is another way
that God chose to handle broken promises besides cutting people off: it was an
extraordinary choice: when men or women burned the first bridge of their
relationship by their broken promises, God chose to build a new bridge, not one
built on naïve thoughts, but one built on a cautious willingness to try to stay
in relationship differently. That path involved both forgiveness and grace.
Some in our world make that extraordinary choice too. Like the man in the pastor’s office, knowing
there were no words to say to make things better, his relationship could start
to be mended only by his broken and hurt wife, and then only by grace and
forgiveness. There are couples, and
business relationships, and friendships that are restored even today because of
grace and forgiveness. It is a costly path on the part of the forgiver. And
those fortunate enough to be offered forgiveness are wise to straighten up and
fly right. Some of the best relationships I know were built again by this
second path, demonstrated by God in Christ, the one who forgives you, to give
you the power and example for forgiving others.
Two choices God made and still makes; one of two choices we also can
make so that we might have life, and have it abundantly. Choose wisely.
Jeffrey A. Sumner November
25, 2007