Pastor Karen Karpow
January 2, 2011
Wesley Covenant Service
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Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message
may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel. Ephesians 6.1
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One evening this week my little white cat, Lily, was
sitting on my lap, and I was petting her, and she was purring. IÕve had this cat for about fifteen
years, so this is a scene that has been played out countless times. So peaceful, such a nice end to the
day. And suddenly she turned
around and bit me!
Why was I surprised? Well, we have a deal, you see. The deal is this:
I buy her food, and most of the time I put it in her dish. (Sometimes Serge does, and very
occasionally Anna or Beth.) I
clean her litter box. I clean up
the fur balls and rodent parts. I
use the FurBuster to clean her up when sheÕs shedding. And I pet her. LilyÕs part of the deal is to inhale
her food, use her one mighty tooth to catch any rodents that get into the
house, get white fur on everything, and purr ecstatically while I pet her. Thus it has always been.
Lily biting me is definitely not part of the
deal.
All of our relationships have deals. Some of those deals are explicit and
spoken, but many of them are unspoken.
An explicit deal might be the one we make with our childÕs piano
teacherÑso many minutes per week of lesson, at a certain time and place, in
exchange for a certain amount of money, with expectations that the child will
practice a certain amount each day.
We might agree in advance on the cancellation policy, and whether the
child will participate in the annual recital. A deal like that covers most of the things we would expect
to happen as part of the relationship with a piano teacher.
Our relationships with our loved ones are much
trickier. There might be an
explicit part of the dealÑa wedding vow, for instance, that says ÒI take you to
be my beloved,
to have and to hold from this day forward,
for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
until we are parted by death.Ó
That is a very beautiful and powerful agreement. It is a promise made before God and
witnesses to keep working to be together, no matter what. However, itÕs not very detailed. It doesnÕt cover whose job it is to do
the dishes (or clean up the mouse parts), or when it is time to turn out the
lights, or what constitutes a good dinner. So many unexpected things happen as part of our intimate
relationships, that it would be hard to craft an explicit deal in advance that
would cover them all.
We have all sorts of relationships with many different
human beings: spouses, family, friends, acquaintances, church members,
co-workers. But there is Another
who desires our attention. God wants
to be in relationship with us. As
with all relationships, there is a deal involved. GodÕs deals with humanity are called covenantsÑbinding and
solemn agreements, with promises made on both sides. The first covenant God makes with humanity is the one with
NoahÑthat God will never again destroy all creation with a flood. God makes a covenant with Abraham, to
give him descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky, and land for them
to live in. The peopleÕs part of
these covenants is fairly simple:
to accept GodÕs goodness and strive to follow GodÕs will.
After God rescues the people of Israel from slavery in
Egypt, God makes a covenant with Moses and the Israelites. This covenant is much more
detailed. It begins with the Ten
Commandments, and includes many other laws that the people are to follow. God defines the festivals that the
people are to keep; how they are to treat each other, and strangers, and
aliens, and slaves; social laws, religious laws, property laws; laws about what
to do when you break a law. God
promises to protect the people of Israel, and to bring them into the Promised
Land. The people promise to follow
GodÕs lawsÑespecially the one about not worshiping any other gods. When it is time to finalize the
covenant, Exodus tells us,
7 Then [Moses] took the
book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said,
ÒAll that the Lord has spoken we
will do, and we will be obedient.Ó
This covenant was in force for centuriesÑthe
obedience, not so much. GodÕs
people messed up over and overÑfailing to worship only God, failing to act with
justice and mercyÑand there were consequences for those failures. God became angry, even letting the
people be carried off into exile.
But God remained faithful, and restored them.
In todayÕs scripture, God tells us through the prophet
Jeremiah that a new covenant is coming.
This one will be different, not like the one with Moses, which they
broke anyway.
33 But this is
the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says
the Lord: 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. 34 No longer shall they teach
one another, or say to each other, ÒKnow the Lord,Ó
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.
This new covenant will be different. Instead of page after page of written
lawsÑtoo many laws to memorize, so many laws that it must have seemed
impossible not to be breaking at least one all the timeÑGod is going to write
the law on our hearts. Instead of priests
having to tell people what God says, instead of religious scholars deciding who
is okay and who is not, everyone will be in direct relationship with God. And under the terms of this new
covenant, all sin will be forgiven.
This covenant has been fulfilled, in Jesus. On one side of the covenant is GodÕs
promise to complete, in and through us, all that God declared in Jesus. What does that consist of? In Jesus, God promises that our sins
are forgiven; God promises eternal life with God, beginning now; God promises
never to abandon us, sending the Holy Spirit to be our companion and our
guide. On the other side of the
covenant is our promise to live for God, rather than for ourselves.
In 1747, John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist
movement, urged his followers to make their deal with God explicit, to enter
into the biblical history of covenant-making, by renewing their own individual
covenants with God. He wrote a
service that was first used in 1755, published in 1780, and has been used ever
since by Methodists all over the world.
It is often used at times of beginning and recommitment, such as the New
Year. This is probably the most
deeply, uniquely Methodist thing that we do.
In a moment we will begin a version of WesleyÕs
original service that I have modified a bitÑthe original is somewhat archaic
and hard to understand. If you
look at your bulletins, youÕll see that the service is divided into
sections:
The invitation;
Adoring God, our Creator and Redeemer and Sustainer;
Giving thanks and remembering all we have received;
Confession;
and finally, the Covenant itself.
Each of these sections is punctuated with some time
for silent reflection. I recommend
that you take todayÕs bulletin home and reflect on it during the weekÑthereÕs a
lot there, more than I can take in while IÕm reading it out loud.
Are
you ready?
Jeremiah
31.31-34
31
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. 32 It will not be
like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand
to bring them out of the land of EgyptÑa covenant that they broke, though I was
their husband, says the Lord. 33
But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after
those days, says the Lord: 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. 34 No longer
shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ÒKnow the Lord,Ó 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.