Contract or Covenant?

Sermon given by the Rev. Christine Gowdy-Jaehnig on 21 March 2021

Texts for Year B : Lent 5

Jeremiah 31: 31-34 * Ps. 51:1-13 * Hebrews 5:5-10 * John 12: 20-33

Nearly 18 months ago, I stood with my son Bjorn and his fiancee Anna outside the Duluth Aquarium and officiated at their wedding. They were entering into an exclusive relationship and they, two witnesses, and I all signed a document which I then mailed off to the State of Minnesota. Bjorn and Anna received back a marriage certificate, showing they were legally married in the eyes of the government. In the marriage ceremony itself, they made verbal vows to each other. All this makes marriage sound like a contract, but in my homily, I urged them to look upon their marriage as a covenant.

Perhaps there is no longer a distinction to be found in current usage between the words covenant and contract (after all, the word covenant is sometimes used to describe agreements between members of a homeowner’s association). However, I use the words to mean two distinct agreements. A covenant is more than a contract, solemnly made and gussied up with a ritual. Contracts are conditional: we are obliged to keep the terms only if our partners are doing the same. They are temporary; we are bound by them only as long as it suits us (provided we pay the consequences of breaking them). Contracts are governed by the pursuit of one’s interests. But Covenants are different. They are unconditional; we are still obliged to keep our part even if the other party doesn’t. They are durable: we … [say in the] marriage covenant ‘until death do us part.’ [Bjorn and Anna chose to use the word “always.”] Covenants are governed by the demands of love.”

As Jim pointed out last week, Covenant has been a theme throughout Lent this year. Today, we heard Jeremiah speak these words of God to the Israelites in exile in Babylonia: “I will make a new covenant with the house of Judah and the house of Israel.” This is not the first Covenant that God has made. God made one with Creation: “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind … nor will I ever again destroy every living creature.” God made a covenant with Abraham. In it, God did not ask anything of Abraham beyond participating in a strange (to modern sensibilities) sacrificial ceremony. God promised to give Abraham land, make a great nation of his and Sarah’s descendants, and through them to bless all the families of the earth. When Abraham and Sarah’s descendants are rescued from slavery in Egypt, God initiates another Covenant, but this one is a mutual covenant. That means it contains expectations for both parties. Abraham and Sarah’s descendants promised to live a certain way that marks them as be God’s people.

Why isn’t this mutual covenant a contract? Two things occur to me. The Ten Commandments brought down from Mount Horeb by Moses and other parts of the Torah are not just a list of obligations, a bunch of rules that restrict the freedom of the people in ways pleasing to God. Their purpose is to shape positive human relationships with God and each other. They serve as boundaries to keep humans from suffering self-inflicted wounds and chaos. The blessings were not simply a reward for obedience, but the consequences of obedience. God’s blessings are in large part dependent upon the choices of the people. As Barbara Brown Taylor said, “To ignore [God’s laws] is to wander into the ways of death …, where God’s faithfulness is of little use.” When considered from this perspective, the actions the covenant obliges God’s people to take are actually life-giving and freedom preserving gifts.

The second reason is that God doesn’t act as though it was a contract. When His people turn away from him and seek a better deal elsewhere, Scripture shows Him to be hurt and angry, but He sends prophets to reprove His people and call them back into relationship with Him. He doesn’t shrug His shoulders and start from scratch to create another People for Himself. Scripture contains the lament of people who feel abandoned or ignored by God. Did God really turn away from His people for months or years? We don’t know, but that doesn’t sound like the God Jesus shows us. Despite His people’s periodic rejection, God continued to be their God and worked to fulfill His promises. Allowing or sending His people into exile in Babylon might not seem to be acting in their best interests, but the prophets interpreted it otherwise. And the Israelites discovered that although they had lost land and Temple, they had not lost God. God was still with them in that strange land and they developed new ways to worship (the synagogue), and retain their identity.

So, what is with this new covenant that God is promising? God said: “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. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” Perhaps, having seen just how hopeless His people are at keeping the covenant, God once again steps in to help His people.

Three things seem important to me in this new covenant. First, there is forgiveness. This can not be something new; it is something God has done since the beginning. To have shown steadfastness love for His people, welcoming them back again and again like the prodigal father in the parable, must mean that God forgives as commonly as we breath. In an old Jewish story about creation, God decided to create the world, then foresaw all the sin that human beings would commit against God and each other. The only way God could continue was to decide to forgive the world before creating it. Strange as it may seem, the commitment to forgive comes before creation. And the commitment to forgive must be part of all covenantal relationships. God does not let our sins become impediments to our relationship with Him.

Secondly, God says he will remember their sins no more. Is there a difference between forgiving and forgetting? Are both necessary –for us? Or for God? I don’t know, but I recently read this in the Christian Century by editor Martin E. Marty:

A modern parable has it that God created the world in six days, rested on the seventh, looked around and appraised it “very good” and then, on the eighth day, created rust, one of the greatest divine gifts. Without rust, the world would now be nothing but a cosmic pile of things that never decay, never cease to exist. … God, who created rust, know hows to forget and, forgetting, no longer knows what offended. The one who prays and is forgiven is therefore unhaunted, truly free.

This, then, seems to be another of God’s amazing gifts. We may have a hard time forgetting some of the hurts we have received through the years, we have have a terrible time forgetting some of the bad/awful things we have said or done or left unsaid or undone, things which bring us shame and heart-ache each time we think of them, but God truly forgets. We can get up every morning knowing that between us and God it truly is a new day, a new beginning. We can imagine and live into a new future with God, not poisoned by the past.

The final thing I thought significant about this new covenant is that God says He will write His law on our hearts. God knows us so well. Humans are prone to moral blindness and errors of judgment, character flaws and rampant self-interest, and we are disposed to rebel and break God’s Words –even when it is in our best interests to keep them. God is willing meet us where we are. He knows that we do not have an intellectual problem; many people can recite most of the Decalogue, and if we studied, we could memorize more of the Torah. No, we have a will problem. Part of us really wants to be good, but part of us wants a little excitement, or wants to make sure someone get punished for the pain they caused or feels we haven’t got enough. Sitting Bull said it so vividly, “Inside of me, there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins, I answer, ‘The one I feed the most.’” I think we all know that feeling of battling with ourselves. God promised to help with inner transformation. God said He will be responsible for both sides of the covenant!!

Is this an eschatological promise? Or: did it begin in the 1st century when the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus’ followers? In the Eucharistic prayer we will use in a little while, Jesus says: ‘This is my blood of the new covenant.” The indwelling of the HS leads to greater personal unity, wholeness. I wish I could say there will be no more internal tugs of war, but fewer or shorter struggles is probably more accurate!

This is a marvelous commitment on God’s part. Why is God doing this? Because He doesn’t want a contract with His people. He is not trying to purchase a people for himself. Miroslav Wolf (to whom I am indebted for insights into the meaning of “covenant”) explains it so well: “Here is one way to put it. … [Imagine] purchas[ing] a home. If you are lucky, you’ll get a good deal –you’ll pay less than the house is worth. If you are unlucky, you’ll get a raw deal, and discover that you paid more than you should have. If you are equitable, you’ll hope for a fair deal and your contract will oblige you to pay what the house is actually worth.

“But with love it is different. To give less than you expect to receive is selfishness, no matter how warm your heart feels … To give as much as you receive is to be fair. But to love is to give more than you hope to receive. Is love a raw deal? From the perspective of contractual relations it is. But love has its own rewards. … The return that I get when I practice self-giving love is not more to me, but more to us –more to the beauty of our common love.” And that is what God wants, a beautiful covenantal relationship built upon love, and if He has to give more than He receives, He does. And that is why God is willing to go to such extremes: forgiving and forgetting; showing us through Jesus how great is His steadfast love; and offering to transform our hearts through His indwelling Spirit. This covenant doesn’t guarantee God anything. But, however much we stray, thinking we can find a better deal elsewhere, God is committed to it.

Let us pray:

God of the new covenant:

Thank you for showing us true faithfulness, and for forgiving ours sins and freeing us from their life-sapping burden;

Help us to practice self-giving love in our relationship with you and each other.

This we pray through Jesus Christ, the fruitful grain. Amen