A Covenant with a Chosen People

Sylvia was in church every Sunday, but her husband was another story.  On good years Stan made it to a service on Christmas Eve or Easter.  You can imagine the rector’s response when Stan was sitting in the pew next to Sylvia on the Third Sunday in Lent.  After the service the rector said to Stan that is was nice to see him, and more than just a tad surprising.  Stan said to priest, “I may not be in church often but you need to know that my wife and I are committed to living our lives based on the 10 Commandments.”  The priest was pleased, but somewhat shocked, and said, “Well, I can see it in Sylvia, but, to be quite frank, I am more than a little skeptical about you.” “Pastor, it is true,” said Stan, “Sylvia keeps eight of them and I keep the other two.”

Through today’s Old Testament reading we encounter the third covenant in the bible: the covenant between God and Moses.  By way of review, on the First Sunday in Lent we learned about God’s covenant with Noah – a covenant with all of creation – and we pondered our Noah-like call to care for every living thing on the planet.  Last week we learned about God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah – a covenant with the entire human family – and we pondered our responsibility to create relationships with all people that mirrors God’s desire for all of us who come from a common ancestor.

Central to the covenant with Moses are the 10 Commandments.  You may be interested to know that the Hebrew translation for the 10 Commandments is Asereth ha-Dibroth, which means “the ten words”, “the ten sayings”, or “the ten matters.”  The English name “Decalogue” follows the Greek and means “ten words”.  It wasn’t until the publishing of the Geneva Bible in 1560 that we find the first reference to the “tenne commandments”.   Far from most popular depictions of large slabs of stone, scholars believe the tablets themselves would have been about the size of a sheet of legal paper and weighed no more than a few pounds each.

A long time ago a rabbi counted all the commandments in the Law of Moses – both the positive things we are to do and the negative things we are to avoid – and came up with 613 distinctive commandments.  While many of them strike us as irrelevant today, the 10 Commandments still seem to be foundational to life itself.  Four of the commandments define our relationship to God and six describe our relationship with one another.  When Jesus was asked to name the most important commandment of all – the one to keep in all of the 613 – he famously replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments hang all the others.” 

Like the other two covenants before it, God’s covenant with Moses is actually a covenant with more than just one individual.  It is a covenant with a specific group of people who are called to live life in a certain kind of way; a way that embodies the 10 Commandments. 

Here is what we need to pay attention to regarding the covenant with Moses.  It does not describe God’s relationship with all of creation nor is it made with the entire human family.  It sets up a relationship between God and those people who were freed from bondage in Egypt and led out into the wilderness.  The covenant with Moses, through which the 10 Commandments are issued, defines how this group of people is to live with God and with one another.

These folks – Hebrews – came to think of themselves as the Chosen People because God picked them to be in a special, unique relationship.  Some people associate being chosen with privilege and prestige.  They may even assume it implies superiority compared to others: “We are better than you” or “God loves us more than you.”  But being chosen is not that.  Rather, it implies responsibility.  It involves being given a task.  St. Paul used the metaphor of an ambassador to describe it.  God’s chosen people were called to live life in a way that helped everyone else to make sense of life.  They were to be lights in a dark and godless world.  They were to be exemplars of all that God dreams for the human family and for creation.

Professional sports teams are always trying to find veteran players who can provide leadership.  They need people who can show the younger players what it takes to be a winner, who can help rookies understand what it looks like to be a professional.  A particular veteran may be added to a team not because he is at that peak of his career or the most skilled or athletic person on the team, but because he can embody for everyone else what it means “to take care of your business”; a phrase often associated with being a professional athlete.

Those people invited into a covenant relationship with God through Moses were tasked with helping others understand what it means to take care of the business of life; not by going around and pointing out to everyone else what they were doing wrong, but by living themselves in a way that was right.  It is like the old quote attributed to St Francis: “Preach the gospel at all times and only when necessary use words.”

Along with our Jewish brothers and sisters, we in the Christian tradition are inheritors of God’s covenant with Moses.  Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the first English Book of Common Prayer in 1549, believed that if the people of England could recite in their own language the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, the Lord’s Prayer, and the 10 Commandments then most of the time they would know the right thing to do and would do it.  This is why these three feature so prominently in our worship life.  And it is why many older Episcopal churches have tablets like the ones we have in our chapel where all three are written out and in plain view for the congregants.

We Episcopalians enter into a covenant with God through baptism.  It tasks us with a responsibility to live our lives in a manner which we believe witnesses to what God desires of all people:

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

I will, with God’s help.

Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

I will, with God’s help.

Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

I will, with God’s help.

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

I will, with God’s help.

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

I will, with God’s help.

Our baptismal covenant stands not in opposition to the 10 Commandments or to Jesus’ summary of the law, but as focused expression of both.  The more we say these words the more they form us and give us a language to express what we believe God dreams for us.  Through our baptism we are called and empowered to be ambassadors, lights, beacons, examples.  We use our religion not as a club to beat over the head those who do not live as we do, but as a witness to all that is good and healthy and full of life as God intends.

Today we add to our emerging Lenten display the image of the tablets.  The rainbow ribbons remind us of God’s covenant with Noah and all of creation.  They invite us to ponder our Noah-like role to care for every living thing.  The paper figures remind us of God’s covenant with Abraham, a covenant that binds together the entire human family by bringing us forth from a common ancestor.  They invite us to ponder our responsibility to live into God’s dream for all people.  And today we add the tablets – a reminder of the covenant of Moses where we are tasked to live in this world in a way that embodies all that it is good and godly.

I will give you a few moments of silence to reflect on what you are already doing to live into the covenant with Moses and also to ponder what one thing you might commit to doing to take the next step in being a faithful ambassador and witness.

A Covenant with the Human Family

God said, “You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.  No longer shall your name be Abram [which means “noble father”], but your name shall be Abraham [which means “father of many”]; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations…  As for Sarai [a name which means “princess”],… Sarah shall be her name [which means “mother of nations”].”

This is God’s covenant promise with Abraham. 

Perhaps you recall from last week that a covenant is an agreement between two people or parties who desire to be bound in a deep, committed relationship.  It declares the blessings of being in covenant as well as stipulations about behavior.  God’s covenant with Noah, which we heard last week, expressed God’s deep desire to be in relationship not only with Noah, but also with all of creation.  I left you with the charge to engage in prayerful discernment around what you can do to exhibit a Noah-like care for every living thing on the planet.

Abraham’s covenant shifts our focus from creation to something else.  Some traditions within the Christian faith emphasize God’s command to Abraham, “Walk before me, and be blameless.”  Certainly there is something good in our Puritanical roots that linger even today.  Today’s New Testament reading shows how St. Paul places the focus on faith.  Abraham believes God’s promise even though he and his wife are childless and well past the years for giving birth.  Is this what we should take away from Abraham’s covenant – the call to be blameless and to have faith in the improbable – or is there something else here, something that we have been overlooking for quite some time?

I think there is.  We find an important clue about it in the new names God gives to Abraham and Sarah.  These names reveal God’s dream for the human family, that we, though diverse, might all trace our lineage to a common ancestor and live together in one accord.  The great faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have Abraham as an ancestor.  We are family, all of us, but it does not take much of a glance at the news to recognize that we are highly dysfunctional.

This past week, members of ISIS raided thirty-three Assyrian villages and took hostage as many at three hundred Christian refugees.  It is part of a systematic effort unfolding in multiple locations around the globe to control and kill members of religious minorities by driving them from their homes, enslaving women, and destroying houses of worship.  It follows on the heels of the beheading twenty-one Egyptian Christians, which follows on the heels of the attack on a kosher grocery in Paris (where seventeen people were killed) and the attack of the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine (killing twelve).

Clearly, this is not what God envisioned for the multitude of nations tracing their origin back to Abraham.  In fact, God must weep.  And lest we Christians play the martyr card too quickly, we need to acknowledge three things.  First, over the long course of human history, there have been many, many times when we have been the ones who brutally persecuted religious minorities.  Second, to the degree that the United States and Western Europe are Christian nations, we have flaunted our military supremacy in Arab countries without thinking through the impact it would have on Muslims around the world.  And third, ISIS is not just a movement against Christians or the west.  It also targets Jews, Shiite Muslims, and other religious minorities. 

A colleague shared this prayer with me.  He offered it at the beginning of a parish’s Lenten program, but I think it speaks eloquently not only for God’s dream for that faith community, but also of God’s deep desire for the multitude of nations that have one common ancestor:

Gracious God, thank you for the diversity of human beings that surround me on every side.  In the ideas, in the hopes, in the dreams, and in the struggles of those who share this earthly life, let me find that through a community of human beings I am made fuller and more alive.  Let the fullness given by community give me the courage to offer my own unique self with humility to the lives of others.  As we all share in the life that you have so graciously given us, may we be the lights of your love to one another.  Amen.

It is a prayer that is expressive of God’s dream for all people, but it is not the reality in which we live.

Some people are saying that America should engage in a holy war as Jihadists extremists.  I do believe that America needs to help those threatened countries and people who want to defend themselves against this expression of evil, but if anything I believe we are called to wage a holy peace.  Our words, our prayers, our actions need to have as their goal not the eradication of those who oppose us and not the elimination of those we fear, but living into the covenant promise that God made with Abraham.  Is there a more important belief in our time than faith in God’s promise that Abraham would be the ancestor of many nations?

Given the world we live in, that would take radical faith indeed.  And some people are doing it.  Last Saturday in Norway, more than one thousand people formed a “ring of peace” outside Oslo’s main synagogue.  It was an event organized by young Muslims in response to recent events around Europe and it took place in sub-zero temperatures.  One organizer said the gathering was intended to show that “that Islam is about love and unity.”  Another stated “We want to demonstrate that Jews and Muslims do not hate each other… We do not want individuals to define what Islam is for the rest of us.”  I find it heartening that there are people out there of all faiths who understand why God brought forth our nations from a common ancestor. 

Another person who understood this was Kayla Mueller, the young American aid worker who was killed on February 6 by on airstrike on the ISIS camp where she was being held hostage.  She wrote this four years ago in a letter to her parents:

“I will always seek God.  Some people find God in church.  Some people find God in nature.  Some people find God in love; I find God in suffering.  I’ve known for some time what my life’s work is, using my hands as tools to relieve suffering.”

She lived out these words by volunteering with Big Brothers/Big Sisters and Amnesty International.  After college she went to India to work in an orphanage and also gave assistance to Tibetan refugees.  She went to Israel to help with African refugee resettle in that country and joined a movement that led her to sleep in front of Palestinian homes threatened with demolition by bulldozers.  Returning to her home in Arizona in 2011, she went to work at a treatment center for HIV/AIDS patients and also worked in a shelter for homeless women.  Kayla was all about waging non-violent holy peace.  

In December 2012, Kayla Mueller moved to a location near the Syrian border in Turkey to help with the refugee crisis.  She wrote home, “For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal.” In August of 2013 she was taken hostage by ISIS after visiting a hospital.  During her imprisonment her biggest concern was not for herself, but for family and friends who were suffering for her. 

When I hear the words of Jesus in today’s gospel reading to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me, most of the time I realize I have only the thinnest and most idealized understanding of what this might mean for my life.  But when I look at Kayla Mueller I realize that she understood to the fullest degree possible what it meant for her.  One person wrote that she “is a martyr not because she was killed for her beliefs but because she was willing to live by them at any cost.”  That helps you and me to find a new place to start.  How am I going to live by my beliefs perhaps not at any cost, but at least at a great cost, or maybe even at some cost?

This morning we add to the rainbow in our emerging Lenten display cut-out paper dolls.  The rainbow reminds us of God’s covenant with all creation.  The paper figures represent the multitude of nations that God has brought forth out of a single person. 

What do you do already to live into God’s covenant dream for the entire human family?  What else might you do?  Perhaps you might write a prayer as beautiful as the one I read earlier.  This, I think, is a powerful way to counteract the very understandable response of fear that grows with each day’s headlines.  Perhaps you will find a place to offer your time, talents, and treasure in a way that brings you into contact with the wonderful “diversity of human beings that surround you on every side.”  Perhaps there is something else.  I will give you a short moment of silence to wait and listen to allow God to put something on your heart.

 

A Covenant with Creation

It was Kermit the Frog who famously queried “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?”  And we might want to ponder why the story of Noah and the ark is so captivating.  Every church nursery has an ark play set and when we renovated our nursery last summer we placed wall stencils of Noah and the ark around the room.  Children, I think, are drawn to the animals and the imaginative possibility that all could get along in tight quarters.  As we grow older other themes emerge from the story: Noah’s faithfulness in the midst of ridicule and his courage in the face of danger; God’s anger at human wickedness and swift judgment of the entire world; and God’s desire to redeem what is good and make a new beginning.

The elements of this story that are historical are hard to determine.  So many different cultures have flood stories that it seems likely it has a basis in fact.  The ice age 10,000 years ago dramatically dropped ocean and inland lake levels.  As those massive sheets of ice (over mile thick) began to melt that water went somewhere, well, in fact, everywhere.  Did it cover the whole earth?  Probably not.  But it certainly made an impression of clusters of people living in various locations around the globe some 7,000 years ago.  Surely their stories and myths are based in a historical event.

The quest to find Noah’s ark is, for some, the search for the Holy Grail.  For them, if found, it would validate everything the bible says.  A Dutchman by the name of Johan Huibers has gone so far as to build a replica of Noah’s ark that welcomes 3,000 tourists a day.  His enormous attraction features life-size plastic animals to show (in theory) how it all might have worked.  For folks like these, faith is in the details.  If the details are accurate, then the faith is reasonable.

But not for me.  For me, faith is in the meaning.  What does the story of Noah and the ark say to us?  What meaning should we take from it?  Is it only a cuddly story that should be consigned to church nurseries?  Or is it a litmus test for biblical relevance?  Or does it say something important about who we are to be in God’s world?

In this morning’s Old Testament reading we hear the heart of the ark story.  After the floodwaters have receded and after all is said and done, God establishes a covenant with Noah.  It is, in fact, the first covenant in biblical history.  A covenant is a kind of contract between two people or parties.  It speaks of a deep desire to be in a committed relationship.  That is why we understand marriage to be a type of covenant and reflective of God’s love for us.  God establishes with us through Noah a kind of marriage relationship, if you will.  But notice that God’s covenant is not just with Noah and not just with his family and not just with the human family, it is with all of creation.  God desires to be in covenant relationship with all that has been created and thus tasks Noah with preserving every specious on the face of the earth.

How should this covenant inform the way we live out our Christian faith?  It says to me that we Christians have the highest possible reason to care for the health and wellbeing of all life on this planet because we are heirs of God’s covenant with Noah.  Beyond the motivation of naturalists, members of the Audubon Society, and tree-huggers everywhere, we have a spiritual and theological mandate to preserve life in all its forms.

Did you know that based on geological records, our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals in the past half-billion years?  It is the first mass extinction since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  And unlike the others that were initiated by a massive volcanic eruption or an asteroid strike, this one cannot be traced to a single naturally occurring event. 

It is typical to lose one to five species a year, but we live in an age when we losing 1,000 to 10,000 species a year.  Think about that for a moment.  On this First Sunday in Lent alone, it is likely that several hundred plants, animal, insect, and aquatic species will disappear from the planet forever.  By the year 2050, it is possible that half of the species now alive will be gone.

Here is where we stand today:

· 12% of all bird species worldwide are considered threatened.

· 21% of all fish species are at risk of extinction.

· 21% of all reptiles are threatened.

· 50% of all primates – our closest relatives on the planet – are endangered.

The numbers truly are staggering and the size of the problem is numbing. 

Those of us within the Christian family have been involved in an on-going discussion that mirrors the national debate on climate change and global warming.  In spite of this week’s frigid winter weather, that the planet’s temperature is rising is an irrefutable fact.  Numbers don’t lie.  What is up for debate is the cause of this warming and what human action can do to make a difference. 

Here is something else that is irrefutable for us Christians: God loves all creation for the bible tells us so:

· Psalm 145:13: “The LORD is faithful to all his promises and loving toward all he has made.”

· 1 Chronicles 29:11: “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours.”

· Luke 12:6: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?  Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.”

· Colossians 1:15-16: “Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.”

The bible also speaks powerfully regarding God’s displeasure at the misuse of creation:

· Leviticus 18: 28: “If you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.”

· Numbers 35:33-34: “You shall not pollute the land in which you live.... You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I also dwell.”

· Hosea 4:1-3: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land.  There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed.  Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”

The bible also speaks hopefully regarding the restoration of creation:

· 2 Chronicles 7:13-14: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Each Sunday in the season of Lent the Lectionary readings will expose us to one of the biblical covenants.  The Worship Committee has come up with a plan to create a visual image that will develop over the course of our Lenten journey.  We begin today with an image of the rainbow.  It is a visible reminder of God’s covenanted love for us and for all of creation.  And it is a reminder of our Noah-like role to care for this world.

I said earlier the statistics around mass extinction, along with the ferosity of the debate about it, is numbing.  It tempts me to bury my head in the sand and pretend that it is not my problem and to believe there is nothing I alone can do about it.  I wonder if Noah himself ever felt that way.

Throughout Lent, with each Sunday’s covenant, I am going to give you some time to reflect.  I am going to ask you to make a commitment that will be held between you and God.  On the last Sunday in Lent I will give you time to gather your thoughts, to commit them to writing, and to make a tangible offering to God that describes things you will do because you want to be in a faithful covenant relationship with God.

Today I invite you to ponder what you are already currently doing to care for God’s creation and I invite you to a prayerful discernment about something you are not currently doing, but might do.  One thing.  What is one thing you will do to be in relationship with God by caring for God’s creation?

What the Holy One Can Do with Dust

Williams Wordsworth continues to be one of my favorite poets.  His 19^th century writing – both in lyrical style and in substance – always captures my imagination.   Let me read for you just the first two stanzas of his lengthy work titled “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight

                 To me did seem

            Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;--

             Turn wheresoe’er I may,

              By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

 

            The rainbow comes and goes,

            And lovely is the rose;

            The moon doth with delight

     Look round her when the heavens are bare;

            Waters on a starry night

            Are beautiful and fair;

     The sunshine is a glorious birth;

     But yet I know, where’er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

 

Wordsworth contends that we come into this world “trailing clouds of glory… from God, who is our home.”  We see the world, and everything about it, infused with beauty and mystery and wonder.  But somewhere along the path of life something gets lost, or neglected, or damaged, or discarded, or twisted.  “It is not now as it hath been of yore.”  Throughout the remainder of the poem Wordsworth struggles to recapture that feeling he had as a boy, a feeling of immortality.

 

Do you know the feeling Wordsworth is describing?  Do you remember a time that felt innocent and the world was pregnant with possibilities and each new day was the beginning of a great adventure?  I do.  Is it something you feel to this day?  For most of us, probably not.  Compared to that time, this time is as the prophet Joel described in our first reading: “a day of clouds and thick darkness.”

 

The observance of Ash Wednesday and with the Imposition of Ashes dates back at least to the 8^th century.  One of the earliest descriptions of it is found in the writings of an abbot by the name of Aelfric in his 11^th century work “Lives of the Saints”:

 

“We read in the books both in the Old Law and in the New that the men who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth.  Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we strew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast.”

 

Aelfric goes on to tell the story of a person who refused to go to church for the ashes and was accidentally killed several days later in a boar hunt!  Not to subtle there, is he? 

 

There is a deep, historical penitential element running through this season of Lent.  Early on the church used it as a time to restore the penitent to the church.  A list of grievous sins ranged from adultery to sorcery to fighting in a war.  To this day the church invites us to examine our hearts, review our actions, and confess our sins.

 

Jan Richardson, a Methodist pastor, suggests we make a slight shift in our Lenten focus from strict penitence to something that feels more like what Wordsworth describes in his poem about childhood.  Allow me to read Richardson’s poem “Blessing the Dust: A Blessing for Ash Wednesday” (that Sally Duncan shared with me):

 

All those days

you felt like dust,

like dirt,

as if all you had to do

was turn your face

toward the wind

and be scattered

to the four corners

 

or swept away

by the smallest breath

as insubstantial—

 

Did you not know

what the Holy One

can do with dust?

 

This is the day

we freely say

we are scorched.

 

This is the hour

we are marked

by what has made it

through the burning.

 

This is the moment

we ask for the blessing

that lives within

the ancient ashes,

that makes its home

inside the soil of

this sacred earth.

 

So let us be marked

not for sorrow.

And let us be marked

not for shame.

Let us be marked

not for false humility

or for thinking

we are less

than we are

 

but for claiming

what God can do

within the dust,

within the dirt,

within the stuff

of which the world

is made,

and the stars that blaze

in our bones,

and the galaxies that spiral

inside the smudge we bear.

 

That is quite a contrast to the clouds and deep gloom that mark our adult experience of life.  What would it look like to bring this reality with you to the altar rail as you receive the ashes?  What would it look like to carry it with you through this season of Lent?  What would it look like to pursue the prayer of the psalmist:

 

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

   and renew a right spirit within me.

 

Cast me not away from your presence,

   and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

 

Give me the joy of your saving help again,

   and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit.

 

What would it look like to come out of Lent with a renewed sense of what God is doing with the dust that is you?

 

Wordsworth came to a point where he experienced this kind of renewal:  His poem finishes with these famous lines:

 

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

     Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

          We will grieve not, rather find

          Strength in what remains behind.

May your Lent be filled not with grieving, but rather in finding strength and joy and wonder in what remains in your life.  May a right spirit be renewed within you.  May you be overwhelmed with splendor as you rediscover God present in this world.  May you be filled an awe that comes from knowing how precious you are to the one who created you.  May you come to know anew what the Holy One can do with dust!