*NB -- for the month of July, I'm preaching a sermon series based on the lectionary readings from 2 Samuel using illustrations from the Gospels. The series is called "Living in the Promise of God", and last weeks' title was "Covenant".
Title: Living in the Promise of God: Covenant
Text: I Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; Mark 6:1-13
Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
A hot news article on Google recently was a tasty tidbit about the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia – which presumably possesses the Ark of the Covenant -- debated as to whether or not it would show the artifact to the world, or keep it to itself. The latter course of action was apparently chosen.
In some Christian traditions the language of ‘covenanting’ has come to replace the standard language of marriage – instead of ‘marrying’ someone, you ‘covenant’ with them, instead. I think that that’s largely a difference in nomenclature, but I did read once about a woman who desired to have a covenanting ceremony with a beloved pet – wherein she promised to love, look after, and provide for the wee dear as long as she was able.
The media had a fit with it. “Woman marries dog!” was the headline. And I thought sheesh, what a riot. What’s all the fuss? But then I began to look around me at the things that make us promises we desperately hope they’ll keep – because we often don’t have the strength to keep our own promises.
A jeweler’s ad bite on the radio: Diamonds so big she’ll love you forever! (Really? I’d hope that she’d love you forever because you’re a good person, not because you bartered for it)
A billboard for a face cream: Taking years off your life! (Wait. Didn’t you live those years for a reason?)
An add for some kind of baby junk: the perfect way to make baby fit your lifestyle. (Um…you did have a choice to have the kid.)
The conclusion that I’ve drawn is that we are, as a society, absolutely stretched so thin that we can no longer really believe anything is permanent or promised. An ad on Facebook promotes a business called Untie the Knot – it’s a divorce service. But I think also that part of that distrust is because we want everything our own way – we don’t want to have to meet halfway, or worse, all the way to be in relationship with someone.
When I was in high school there was a girl I knew who was obsessed with getting pregnant and having a baby. She was from a not-very-nurturing home herself, and I was puzzled by her frantic search for a partner. So I asked her one day, as we were waiting for class to begin why she wanted that baby so badly.
“So I have someone who’ll love me all the time, and who I can love back,” she replied. At 16 I didn’t think that was a good answer. But she did, and by the end of that year she’d gotten what she wanted.
Just this last time I was home visiting my mother I ran into that young woman’s mother, who was shopping with her now 11-year-old granddaughter. A few years after the baby’s birth her mother had met a new man. For this one the title of ‘stepfather’ didn’t fit, so the young woman had given the baby to her mother to raise.
Five or six partners later, she’s still looking for someone who will love her all the time. Each successive partner has promised love, promised fidelity, and fallen short.
Even our culture’s crippling divorce rate aside, we struggle even in our friendships with people. Gossip remains an ever pervasive and ever-appealing sin to try to avoid. But who’s often the first to spill the dirt on us when we’re down? Not our enemies, but more often our friends.
But there is a kind of covenant that is everlasting. This is the covenant that God makes with us, not that we make with God.
David remains the greatest king of whom stories are told in the Bible. No one else has succeeded more fantastically or fallen more catastrophically, than David. There are always beginnings, and in the reading for today David is anointed king over all of Israel – he’s finally united the warring tribes – and makes a covenant with the elders of Israel at Hebron.
The true covenant here, though, is not the one that David makes with the elders of Israel (which is a fallible human covenant) but rather the one that the elders of Israel see that God – YHWH – had made with David: “The Lord said to you, it is you who shall be shepherd of my people Israel,” – the promise that God would be with David. Verse 10 lays it out: “and David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts, was with him.”
That one single short sentence, “I am with you” is at the heart of the good news of the Bible, it is at the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it is at the heart of our very own lives.
The greatest promise that is made in our lives has nothing to do with us. We can stand before a minister and make our wedding vows – though I often think that the whole vow should be “I will, and I ask God to help and guide me” – but they mean nothing if we don’t believe that God is with us. We can bring our children to the baptismal font and make those promises that are empty unless God is truly with us. I can kneel before the Bishop and make my ordination vows but they are nothing unless the spirit of God is with me.
And the best part of the message is that truly, God is with us! If there is any truth of human experience is that we will always forsake God in our relationships – but the truth of divine experience is that God will never, ever, forsake us. That promise alone should give our lives hope and passion in the promise.
As David rises a new king after Saul we can almost feel the excitement in the story: what’s next? There is a palpable sense of hope, one what we can relate to in remembering the feeling of our first job, our first love, or even if we’re lucky the feeling of each new day. But that excitement was not born from just from newness or the freshness of a clean start – but that is the purest experience of God with us that we can ever feel. God is with us. Those words alone were enough for David, and they should be enough for us.
The disciples and the people of Judah had the privilege of walking with God incarnate, even though they minds were often too clouded to understand the truth of the amazing man they called ‘teacher’. But people still didn’t believe. When Jesus went back to Nazareth the people of his hometown were first astounded, and then dismissive of him: “who is this? What about all this wisdom?” and the then snide remark as they remember who he is: “oh, it’s just Jesus, who wandered off into the desert. What a nutjob.”
And even Christ is amazed at their unbelief. But God’s promise remains, and Jesus sends out the 12 on the very first mission trip in the world.
And they go. Not with the best gear Mountain Equipment Coop can provide them, not with space-age tents and shoes and clothing, but with nothing except the promise that God is with them.
That is the greatest challenge for us, too. That we don’t wait until the opportune time, or place, to share our faith. But that we do it boldly and risk everything we hold dear for the sake of the Gospel.
But if we are to proclaim to people that they should repent, we should first understand what they (and we) are to repent from. The word ‘repent’ comes from the Greek word literally meaning “to turn around”— to turn from our wordly compromises and collaborations and to place our entire salvation on the promise of God: that because God loved us first we are saved, not because we can show how much we love God back.
If there is any article on which the Lutheran church stands and falls, it is this: that we are all, at the same time, justified and sinners. God’s power is made perfect in our weakness, because when we are weak then we finally realize just how much we desperately need and cling to the promise of God.
The tenderness of the promise of God is not that God will hover over us and directly steer us in the right ways. Our great sin directs us to paths that lead us completely away from God, and we can never, ever, eradicate that sin on our own because even if we try to we are falling back even as we try to move forward. The tenderness of the promise rests on the fact that God does not forsake us and is always waiting for us, watching, with open arms to welcome back the sheep that was lost.
Our covenant is not a promise that we make to God, because then it would fallible and given to failure. Our covenant is a gift from God, made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ, in the promise not that Christ came to show us what it meant to be divine – but that when we rest in the promise of God we can know what it means to be truly human, to reach out in love, and faith, and trust, to bind up the wounded, offer sanctuary to the tired mind, and to gently cradle the broken heart.
May this be so among us. Amen.
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