Morning Prayer: Shannon Cook Choral Amen Hymn of Faith *Jesus Loves Me!* Witness of Scripture: Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16 & Mark 8: 31-37 Anthem *Love Divine, All Loves Excelling* arr. Mack Wilberg. Chancel Choir Sermon *What Endures?* David Spain
Recorded on February 25, 2024
Back in the neighborhood, in the sandlot days of childhood, when the boys on the block got serious about something, it was not enough to simply say what you had to say. To assure honesty and dependability, when you said something really important, you would follow it with an oath —“Scouts honor,” or “I swear on someone’s grave,” or “pinky swear” or if you were really serious “cross my heart and hope to die, stick a thousand needles in my eye.” We were laying our lives on the line with that oath…there was no more ‘all in’ promise than that one.
There were no Biblical scholars on the neighborhood sandlot in those days, no Linus Van Pelt who could quote scripture on cue; and yet, something inside of us knew that when we spoke an oath, when we made a promise, we were enacting something important—it was as if the fabric of the neighborhood and the dependability of the relationships were held by our promissory words. We did not know it—most of the boys (Jimmy or Charles, Randy or Bobby, Mark or Matt, Pat or Joe)–would not have known the name of the Bible’s first book; but we were enacting the crucial story from Genesis. We had no Abraham or Sarah on the sandlot, but they were there with us.
Genesis tells us a long time ago, on the dusty sands of what we call the middle east, Abraham and Sarah received an oath from God, words that forever changed the fabric of their lives, and of all life since that starry night when God set the terms of how God will relate to the world. What God pledged to Abraham and Sarah was a deepening of what God had already been doing. As the Genesis story tells, when God created the heavens and the earth and all the world teeming with life, God set the terms of that life and gave everything a place to be and a way to be, and God looked at creation and said this is good.As the story goes however, the Edenic beginning did not hold and the floodwaters came as order returned to chaos and God grieved. What would God do? “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,’ or would it be “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” God doubles down on the original blessing…repenting of destruction and violence as a way to move forward; so, God paints a covenant in rainbow colors for all to see. Promise is no longer only in the heart of God, for now God has gone public with a pledge.One would think that second chance might be enough, but God decides to go even further, moving out of the sky and down to the sandlot. God says to Abraham and Sarah, “I’m casting my lot with you…I’m going with you from now on.” It is a unilateral pledge…Abraham and Sarah did nothing to earn it or achieve it.All they needed to do was to receive it and then seek to live it. As Stephen Shoemaker summarizes, “God made a covenant with Abraham and Sarah and blessed them and their promised descendants—not for their sake alone but that through them all the families of the earth might be blessed. We can read scripture as a succession of covenants—with God always giving us another chance and calling us to ever deepening relationship and responsibility. Covenant stands for the free, trusting agreement between God and humankind.” (GodStories, p. 4)
We would of course wonder about the wisdom of God’s choice for a covenant partner.As we know when it comes to prospects for the future, Abraham and Sarah had little to offer. Their best years, actuarily speaking, were behind them.And then, there were moments along the way when their actions would not have put them in the virtue hall of fame—like the time Abraham passed off Sarah as his sister rather than his wife in case Pharaoh took a shine to her and would want to eliminate any barriers to Sarah like getting rid of a husband; or the time when Sarah decided the house was too crowded and their wasn’t enough love to go around so sent Hagar and Ishamel packing to the desert to whither away, only to find out God makes covenant with people Sarah would be rid of—an instructive story still today. And then, even with the promise secured, Abraham’s and Sarah’s offspring made their actions seem like minor indiscretions—what with Rachel and Rebekah and Esau and Jacob, and then Joseph and his brothers. God seems to have signed on with a cantankerous bunch to say the least; and yet, that is the story Genesis tells. For all the intrigue of Abraham and Sarah and their succeeding generations, the story to notice is God who promises to abide. What Genesis tells us, and seemingly the rest of the Biblical story as we to this day are still trying to learn and live in our lives, is that the One who pledged to Abraham and Sarah so long ago is the never-giving-up-no matter-what-loving-kindness God; the One who while never keeping us from suffering the consequences of our decisions is still the One who never takes that steadfast love away from us…just as the Psalmist proclaims—“for God’s stead-fast love endures forever.”
Does it make a difference how we conceive of who God is? The story of Genesis seems to think so…for in the midst of a people who can be difficult to say the least, God still pledges fidelity. What endures in life? Genesis says God’s merciful, loving kindness endures. Who is God, where is God, how does it stand between us and God? It makes a difference which stories are told about God and what church tradition emphasizes.We have heard it said that the God of the Old Testament is fierce and judgmental while the God of the New Testament is loving and kind, as if God went through some kind of personality transition two-thirds of the way through the Bible. To be sure there are enough stories in the Hebrew Scriptures that include pictures of a fierce and harsh deity; and to be fair several pictures in the Christian Scriptures have the same kind of images—see the book of Revelation if you can stomach some parts of it. And yet, despite those disturbing images which are there, the overriding story is of the God slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love to the thousandth generation. Covenant is what endures—and because covenant endures, like Abraham and Sarah before us, we too have a future.
How does covenant sound to our ears? Foreign, to be sure in a culture that is commitment averse and immediate gratification inclined. Plus, honesty admits that the church has done its share of misrepresenting God’s covenant as proclaimed in Genesis. There are times when the church has tended toward conditions, not covenant. Will Willimon humorously yet honestly has written, “Church is where we come to be told where we’ve gone wrong and what we need to buckle down and do right—Sunday morning worship as a time to get beaten over the head about all the ways we fall short of divine expectation and to see if we can chin up to God who raises the bar so high and asks, ‘Are you worthy of my love or not?’” (Pulpit Resource, p.25) Perhaps even worse than that sense of a severe and demanding God, some expressions of the church have had the gall to say that God’s covenant is only for them, only for those who believe correctly about Christ, or who believe what the church says you must believe to be orthodox, which always implies there are many others who are unorthodox. When that happens covenant becomes a tiny little, provincial insider expression of faith—and there is nothing more unbiblical than that, because that perspective has forgotten when God casts God’s love with Abraham and Sarah, it was not to make them exclusive or better than everyone else but so that all the nations of the world could know about the steadfast love of God, and not only a select few.
To say God’s covenant of love endures and is unconditional is not to say it does not matter what we do. To be in relationship with God—which is always a relationship of vulnerability and trust because that is what covenant is—is to pattern and shape our lives in the image of the God whose way is covenant. Of course, we are free to live outside of God’s covenant way of relating.God gives covenant but does not compel anyone to follow. Compulsory love is not covenant it is control. Our choosing to live in covenant or not neither determines nor deters God’s way of being in covenant. A friend of mine has a funny take on covenant…referring to covenant with a modifier. Darn covenant, my friend says—“I’d like to condemn you to the outer darkness and write you off, but God wouldn’t do that, so I can’t either—darn covenant.” “It sure would be easier to wash my hands of this problem in the world but God wouldn’t do that so I can’t either …darn covenant.” “It sure feels safer to wall up and build our own defenses and maybe that’s true but God offers God’s self in vulnerable love and calls us to do so as well…darn covenant.”“You can go your own way,” as Fleetwood Mac sang; but the church at its covenant best sings another song, “Oh love that will not let me go.”
Failure to abide in covenant wrote Frederick Buechner “does not mean God won’t love you; it means simply that God’s love becomes a suffering love: a love that suffers because it is not reciprocated, a love that suffers because we who are loved suffer in our failure to reciprocate.” And so, as in the initiating covenant, God continues the covenant in the Word made flesh—not to supplant or diminish all other covenants but to proclaim that God is embodied at the sandlot with us, part of us, within us, in between us, inviting us to live God’s covenant that seeks to love in an effort to transform hate, that offers compassion to address harm, that strives for justice to repair inequity, that cares for the little and the least and the lost to heal, that lives for beauty and truth and honesty to build community. Jesus’ short-hand way to say that is to give our lives for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of God’s covenant will gain you more than you could ever imagine.
Over the last three months since my father died, some of his phrases have come to mind randomly, unbidden. When someone would do a kind, compassionate, or courageous act toward another, my father liked to say “boy that’s what makes the world go around.” It did not occur to me until this week that it was his way of saying that living in God’s covenant love is what keeps the world moving in the right direction. I think that is what our biblical story proclaims from Genesis to Jesus. Covenant is what makes us well, covenant is what endures…cross my heart.