The Covenant Within

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

October 21, 2007

Text: Jeremiah 31: 31-34 and Luke 22:19-20

I didn’t think I had done anything especially profound. As a youth director at St Mark’s UMC in Midland, Texas in 1961, in a session in the sanctuary with the youth, I was desperate to get their attention. It was one of those days when nothing I said or did seemed to work. Finally I said, “Look up at the cross,” pointing to the one hanging above the altar-table. “This is how much Jesus loves you: he was willing to die to show God’s love for you, to make sure you would not miss your destiny as God’s good creation.” There were a few moments of quiet; then, the usual chaos returned.

I did not think much of the incident, but the pastor, O.A. McBrayer, told me the next day that his daughter, Linda, who was in the MYF, had come home and told him that she finally realized what he had been telling her all those years about how much God loved her. I had stumbled into being an ambassador of Christ.

I was at a training event at St John’s Church in Waco in the mid 90’s. We were learning how to do Logos, an after school program for children and youth which involves Bible study, recreation and music. The training meant that we would go through all of these parts ourselves as adults. A choir director was there to teach us an anthem. The one she chose was a choral version of a new hymn, “I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry.” The hymn is an affirmation of God’s gracious presence through all the stages of our lives. One verse goes like this, with God speaking:

“In the middle ages of your life, not too old, no longer young, I’ll be there to guide you through the night, complete what I’ve begun.”

Being in the middle of a long spiritual night myself, these words and music conveyed to me great mercy---mercy enough to help me through the lonely months. (Hymn 2051 by John Ylvisaker, in “The Faith We Sing.”)

In the midst of our ordinary lives, and in our struggles as persons and churches, the news of God’s constancy and grace appears. Such was the case for the suffering people of Jerusalem. Jeremiah has sown and told them of God’s judgment on them for their idolatries and cruelties. There is a price to pay. Nevertheless, judgment is not the last word. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…..I have loved you with an everlasting love…..I will turn their mourning into joy, comfort them and give them gladness for sorrow.”

In buying our home, we were told that there our community was under a covenant. I asked for a copy of the covenant. It looked a lot like a contract to me, some 20 pages of legal language, with rules and punishments----and a monthly fee.

Fair enough. But the word covenant in the Bible has a richer meaning. “A covenant is a relationship between two parties, i.e., man and wife, or ruler and ruled, in which each party voluntarily agrees to certain conditions of the relationship and gives his or her word to uphold it.” (Van Harvey, A Handbook of Theological Terms, 1964) The difference in the Bible is that God is believed to be the initiator of the relationship and the stipulator of the conditions. And, it was believed, God chose Israel not because of their merit but out of grace: God loves Israel as a father or mother loves their child--- just because they are, not because of anything the child has earned. It is an intimate relationship, “living and dynamic.” Trouble is, the relationship can and did evolve into a one-sided deal: “We are your chosen people, God; so you are bound to protect us, because we are just precious in your eyes.” It was much like the attitude of a spoiled rich kid who knows that his parents will bail him out, not matter what he does.

So, Jeremiah says, God will make the gift of the covenant in a different way this next time. It will be a relationship, not a contract. God will “put my law within them, and I will write it [etch it] on their hearts; and I will be there 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.”

David Steele expresses it this way:
In the Old Covenant, the concerns of God
Have stayed sort of outside
Or alongside human beings.
They've been on tablets, on scrolls, or sermons;
But in the New Covenant
God is going to somehow get inside folks.
The relationship will be more simple, more natural.
Of that Jeremiah is certain.
And in that New Covenant
God will not seem so distant.
Folk will not feel God is watching them
From heaven or a lofty mountain.
No, somehow folk are going to realize
That God is right there with them.
They are going to say:
"God with us,
God beside us,
God within us."
 (Theology Today, January, 1986)

It is no accident that, when Jesus meets with his disciples at the Last Supper, he uses “covenant” to describe what is happening in his passion and death. This new covenant “in his blood” was delivered by his life of self-giving, expressing God’s plan to restore a people of God who would be God’s blessing to the world. Certainly Jesus laid out a way of life, with certain demanding expectations. But the meaning of this new relationship is agape love, received and given. (Harvey)
We know from the gospel accounts of the disciples’s behavior that they were just as prone as anyone to get puffed up about their ties to Jesus. Do you remember that two of them asked if they could sit at his right or left hand when the kingdom came? The asked “Can we destroy those Samaritans who are not friendly to us?” They would have sent the hungry people away. They objected to his attentiveness to the least and the lost.
But, when they did receive the love of God poured out for them in Jesus Christ, their lives were on the road to transformation. And they would see that their calling was to show and tell the love by which God had rescued them. They would see that this new covenant was not about privilege, but about responsibility. They came to believe in a “God who loves and accepts us as we are without our first having to prove ourselves to God.”(“What Language Shall We Borrow: Reflections on Faith and Giving in the Christian Tradition,” by William G. Enright)

When the new covenant gets written in our heart, or when Christ lives within us and we in him, our lives get changed. There is a turn-around and a new purpose, a new perspective on who we are and what we are about. We begin to grow into generous people--- not because we are commanded to be, or so that we will earn God’s acceptance, but because that is simply who we are. Our hearts of stone are replaced with hearts of flesh. We see life as a gift to be given for the love for God and neighbor.
Augustine wrote: “The whole human race, you see, is that man who is lying in the road, left there by bandits half dead, who was ignored by the passing priest and Levite, while the passing Samaritan stopped by him to take care of him and help him. In this Samaritan the Lord Jesus wanted us to understand himself…” (Enright)

The constancy and depth of God’s enduring love is communicated to us in many ways. Can you remember a time when someone’s words or actions, either in a moment or over a life time, made such an impression on you that your heart was indelibly altered? When you were moved to give of yourself, not because someone shamed you into it, but because it truly seemed the natural thing to do, given who you were?

William Enright has written of a man named Joe:

I serve on the board of a small Presbyterian college with a man named Joe. Last spring I received an email informing me that Joe was in the midst of a seven on-seven-in-seven marathon run; that is seven marathons run on seven continents in the space of seven months. In the process Joe raised more than $200,000 for the March of Dimes. I confess that I have always admired but never envied distance runners. I telephoned Joe to ask him why he was putting his body through this fundraising torture. His answer: "Two weeks before I was born my mother contacted polio leaving her paralyzed from the neck down. She gave birth to me while in an iron lung. I never saw her take a step in my life but as a boy every year I pushed her in her wheelchair around the streets of New Albany, Indiana asking neighbors for a contribution to the March of Dimes. That is why I am doing what I am doing." Hold those two pictures in your mind; a small boy pushing his polio-paralyzed mother in her wheelchair to raise money for the March of Dimes, a grown man running around the world to raise funds for disabled people. Generosity is a byproduct of those life changing experiences that shape us and bless us with sacred storylines sitting quietly in the seams of our respective autobiographies, awaiting our discovery. Meantime the world with its suffering poor awaits its redemption.