Renewing the covenant of baptism

Texts: Joshua 24.1-3a, 14-25; Psalm 78.1-7; 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18; Matthew 25.1-13

In a few moments, in the Lord’s Supper, we shall do as Joshua and the people of Israel did in our reading.  We shall renew the covenant God has already made with us, a covenant that expresses both God’s love and faithfulness toward us, and our own desire to live God’s way in the world.  The word covenant means, of course, a firm agreement to honour, not a contract so much, as a relationship.  While contracts can be easily broken by one party or the other, a covenant is not so easily put aside, for it is founded not on convenience, but on love.  It is a bond between parties who want to stick together through thick and thin.  For the people of Israel, the Lord’s covenant had been forged with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then, when they were slaves in Egypt, with Moses.  The terms of the covenant were simple.  God loved his people and wanted to give them a land and a way of life that would be the envy of the whole world.  In return, God asked for the loyalty and obedience of the people, for without this, they could never hope to develop the habits, customs and ethics that defined the good life that God wanted to give them.  If God was jealous of their hankerings after other loyalties, therefore, it was not because he was a power-freak.  It was because he was God, and knew what would make his people genuinely blessed.

For Christians, the covenant we are called to renew from time to time was first forged in baptism.  In baptism we accept God’s offer of grace and a way of life that is modelled on that of Christ, and promise to live this way for the rest of our lives.  Again, the emphasis here is not on the strict terms of a contract, but on the centrality of the relationship baptism signifies.  In baptism we are made one with Christ in his life, death and resurrection.  In him we enter into a relationship with God which is more like that of a marriage than anything else.  And, as you well know, a relationship like that can survive many mistakes and betrayals so long as the desire to be in relationship is stronger than the shame of failure.  God is faithful.  In the Spirit he gives us the power to be faithful as well, so long as our desire to do so remains.

So why is it important to renew the covenant with Christ, as we do each time that we share the Lord’s supper?  Having exchanged vows once, why should it be done again and again and again?  In the case of confirmation, that is perhaps obvious.  Many of you were baptised as children and were not capable of making the promises yourselves. Confirmation became the church’s rather sloppy way of redressing that imbalance so that you, yourselves, can affirm the promises that make such a baptism complete.  In the early church, of course, there was no such divide between God’s promises and our own.  Confirmation happened immediately following baptism, and had nothing to do with vow-making.  It was a prayer for those who had taken their vows that very day, asking that the Spirit help them to keep those vows.  That is why, in most contemporary churches, we are shying away from the language of confirmation and speaking, instead, of various ceremonies in which baptism (as an already-entire covenant) is re-affirmed.  These ceremonies range from personal re-affirmations to the congregational re-affirmations of the Easter Vigil or the Wesleyan-styled covenant service from which we shall borrow a prayer today. 

In the case of the Lord’s Supper, the covenant is reaffirmed by a re/petition of the relationship forged in baptism.  Here God invites us, anew, to receive his grace in the form of bread and wine, a tangible offering of his very self which recalls the equally real and tangible self-giving of Christ in his life, death and resurrection.  In the Eucharist we then accept this offering, not as the pagans would do through some kind of payment in kind, blood or grain or whatever, but through a sacrifice of thanksgiving.  The ‘great prayer of thanksgiving’ that the church has said over the bread and the wine since the beginning, repeats the story of God’s dealing with us in order to emphasise that it is not our own works or efforts that make the covenant possible, but God’s infinitely patient capacity for mercy and forgiveness.  In the great prayer we are reminded, each time it is said, that we cannot buy God’s favour through some kind of moral performance, but are given this favour as a gift, even before our particular histories begin to unfold.  Our taking of the bread and the wine should therefore we seen as the concrete manner by which the people of God take to themselves, again, the mercy in which we are born, live, move, and have our being.  It is our acceptance of that mercy, our trust in its power to heal and reconcile and transform.  It is to take that mercy into ourselves in the hope that we shall be transfigured, metamorphosed into people who can be as merciful to others and God has been for us.

But there is a final, very powerful, reason for re-affirming the vows of our baptism in such a regular ritual, and it is alluded to in the passages we read from Thessalonians and from Matthew this morning.  In these accounts of the return of Christ to inaugurate God’s new kingdom of justice and peace, there is a simple encouragement to always be ready.  Be ready, they say, keep those supplies of lamp-oil in reserve, for you know not the day or the hour when the bridegroom shall return.  Ceremonies like the Lord’s Supper function as constant reminder that the vows of baptism are not magical.  They are promises that call for ever-new discernment, reflection and action within the particular circumstances of our lives on very particular days.  In the new Testament, of course, oil functions as a key symbol of the Holy Spirit and of spiritual aliveness.  The call to be ready is therefore a call to stay, always, within the region of the baptismal covenant, where you were anointed with oil as a sign that God had poured out his holy Spirit upon you.  ‘Stay awake and alert to everything spiritual’, says the parable, ‘always be alert to the stirrings of the Spirit within you.’  Rituals such as the Supper are therefore, at their very heart, a wake-up call for everyone who has fallen asleep in their marriage with God.  They call us from our seats in an acknowledgement that the covenant is only as real and effective as we allow it to be, right here and right now, in the midst of our lives.  May God give us courage, even today, to be awake and ready for what God would ask of us.