Enemies, real and imagined

 Genesis 15.1-12, 17-21; Psalm 27; Philippians 3.17-4.1; Luke 13.31-35

Enemies. We all have them. And, if we don’t have any real enemies, we make them up. Or else we paint them in more dramatic terms than is strictly necessary. Observe, for example, what is happening in Ukraine at present. One of the key reasons Putin has publicly offered for invading Ukraine is that Ukraine’s national leadership has been taken over by fascists, even ‘Nazis’, who are oppressing the people. Now, from the point of view of the Ukrainians themselves, this seems entirely false. But from the point of view of Putin, who has in mind the restoration of a past, mythical, Orthodox, Russian empire, the Ukrainian leadership are indeed the evil bastards who are keeping their people from participating in this glorious restoration.

We need to be careful whom we call an enemy. Perhaps we should not call anyone an enemy, even if they explicitly choose that path, and that designation, for themselves. ‘Love your enemy,’ said Jesus in his famous sermon, ‘do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you.’ (Luke 6.27, 28).  This is really tough teaching. If your neighbour is your enemy, what then? If you are the Ukrainian whose house is being raided by the Russian army, what should you do?  If you are an Aboriginal woman who has been raped by a British soldier, and your children killed before your eyes, how should you respond?

Let’s mine our lectionary readings for some wisdom.

The Genesis story talks about the deal or treaty YWH makes with Abram to preserve his legacy against every threat, real or imagined. If Abram is prepared to trust his future, and the future of his descendants to YWH, then YWH will make them prosper ‘as the stars in the heaven’ and the land on which he stands, stretching from Egypt to the Euphrates, will belong to them. Now, if you read this passage in its context, there are probably both good and bad reasons for Abram to feel anxious about himself and his clan’s future. Since arriving in that place, he’d become rich and inclined to feel that others wanted to take what he had. The story of his wife Sarai being given to Pharoah as a concubine is a horrific tale about the lengths that patriarchal culture will go to fight its own paranoia about losing wealth and influence. On the other hand, Abram also got caught up in a regional conflict between various Canaanite city-states in which his nephew Lot was genuinely taken into captivity.

With this background in mind, perhaps we must conclude that the treaty between Abraham and YWH comes about partly at God’s initiative and partly because of Abram’s male, patriarchal paranoia about the preservation of his legacy – legacy here understood as wealth and prestige for one’s descendents – against the indigenous tribes of Caanan. An earlier version of the covenant (in chapter 12 of Genesis) promises something rather different: that Abram’s descendants will become a blessing to all nations. Not their conquerors, but a source of their blessing. Perhaps that is what the covenant is supposed to be about, really. But this later, Genesis 15, version seems more concerned with the ways in which the indigenous nations, the people already there in the land to be taken by Abram’s seed, should be seen as enemies, and therefore a threat to Abram’s patriarchal ambitions. This is an ambiguity that has been played out in that region from the time of Abram right through to the current conflicts between Arab and Jew in Israel/Palestine. And, of course, there are tragic echoes of all that in what has happened here in the colony of ‘Australia’ as well.

The psalmist describes his fear of an enemy that has surrounded him on every side, and his appeal to the Lord for refuge and help. Most every suburban Christian I know usually reads this psalm as if they, themselves, are the psalmist and someone else – whatever or whomever we are afraid of, probably – is the enemy.  But what if that isn’t the case? Have you ever tried to read a psalm, or any other biblical passage, as if you weren’t the hero in the story but the enemy? Have you every considered the ways in which you might be the enemy? An enemy of the earth and of its flora and fauna, for example, or an enemy of the indentured classes of labour who make our clothes? Or an enemy of Indigenous people, because you stole our lands and benefit from our dispossession and hardship? How would that make a difference to your reading of sacred scripture?

The writer to the Philippians is incredibly circumspect in the way that he talks about enemies. He says that the enemy is not so much opposed to particular people, or even to Christ, but rather to the ‘cross of Christ’. Here the enemy is constructed not as someone who wants to steal your possessions or kill you. The enemy is someone who is allergic to suffering in the cause of righteousness or justice. Indeed, this enemy’s ‘god is their stomach’, an ancient way of speaking about the sin of gluttony or personal acquisitiveness. The sin of accumulating all things to yourself at the expense of many others, the sin of narcissism, we might even say. There is a sense, here, in which the writer wants, actually, to critique the acquisitive nature of the covenant we read about in Genesis 15. Here, it is Abram who could be understood as the enemy, for he seems concerned only about his legacy, the land he steals from others, and the prosperity of his own family and clan.  The writer to the Philippians prefers a citizenship that is not so attached to such things, but participates in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of a commonwealth that is ‘in heaven’, that is, in a place and a time that has yet to arrive. In that ‘heaven’ which – I hope you will agree, is a figure for some more hopeful and just future – Christ will transform the humiliated bodies of all who have suffered injustice and degradation and marginalisation, into the form of his own glorious body. In other words, all that is wrong and unfair will be put right. All that is broken will be restored. This is good news for all who suffer, or who are broken and marginalised. But you have to take a leap of faith.

Finally, in Luke’s gospel, it is instructive to learn something about how to regard the enemy from Christ, whose enemy is Herod, the puppet-king of the Roman occupation, who is obviously so afraid of Christ’s teaching that he has put out a ‘hit’ on him. Christ’s response to this news is quite extraordinary. Rather than go into hiding, rather than gathering a militia to protect himself, what Christ does is offer a lament over Jerusalem, a city divided against itself, a city that will at once listen to a prophet’s preaching and honour a prophet’s office, but also, in time, kill that prophet for speaking inconvenient or uncomfortable words.  Jesus himself, as indicated in the final verses of this passage, will himself be welcomed by the Jerusalemites as a prophet and even a messiah, but a week later be killed by those same Jerusalemites. Here the enemy is within. Not the other, someone from another group or tribe, ethnicity or religion. The enemy is your friend, your comrade, your congregation, your synagogue, your church, your ethnic group. Those closest to you and about whom you care the most. In the face of enemies such as these, Christ teaches us simply to lament, which is an ancient way of naming the evil and injustice of which we are capable, and then simply living, with tears, in the truth of it.  Here there is no hint of revenge or strategizing towards getting the upper-hand. There is a simple acceptance of the awful truth of the situation and a deep-down trust that if anyone can make this better, it is certainly not ourselves. It is God alone.

That’s kind’ve how I see the situation here in the colony known as ‘Australia’ as well. I long ago abandoned all hope that we, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, could ever dig ourselves out of the hole we find ourselves in. We are too busy imitating the coloniser by fighting with each other to present a united front. Although the Uluru Statement from the Heart piques my interest. A deeply compromised and conservative document, it yet represents the closest we have yet come to speaking to our colonisers with one voice.

Certainly, there is little political will towards justice from the coloniser, at least insofar as the political class can be said to represent the will of the people. Colonisers, and particularly the mining, forestry and agricultural companies that continue to enjoy extraordinary levels of subsidised support from the taxpayer, benefit enormously from our dispossession and marginalisation. And they continue to destroy, wound, and maim country in order to make their squillions. In my estimation, we have little to look forward to from these sectors but an endless charitable paternalism, breadcrumbs from the imperial table.

 What can the person of faith do, then, except to be as honest and as truthful as one can be, to name what is actually the case in the presence of the colonising powers, to lament that it is so, and place oneself and one’s people in God’s merciful hands? In this there is a hope, against all evidence to the contrary, that our bodies of humiliation will one day be transformed into bodies of glory. How that might come to be remains, for me at least, a profound mystery. But without the leap of faith which Christian called ‘resurrection faith’ there is nothing to look forward to at all. The last enemy, after all, is death.  And its sting is fierce. Unless . . .  unless God is for us, and not against us.

Notes roughly approximating a homily delivered at Koonung Heights Uniting Church on the 2nd Sunday of Lent, 2022.  The live homily can be found here.

Garry Deverell

The blessing of faith

Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22.23-31; Romans 4. 13-25; Mark 8.31-38 

In the land of Israel and of Palestine there is a war. Despite the current truce, people are being killed daily, and not only those who carry weapons. Non-combatants are losing their lives also: men, women, and children. Over these past decades since the creation of Israel as a modern state many thousands of families have been left to grieve for their loved ones in numbers that most of us would find unimaginable. I remember an interview with one of those Palestinian women who survived the 1983 massacre carried out by the “Christian Militia” in southern Lebanon, a massacre that was clearly engineered by Ariel Sharon as Israeli Defence minister. With eyes that, even 18 years later, had not done with crying, she described how the militias had entered the one-room house of her family at night. They shot her father and brother immediately, and while they were still alive but helpless, proceeded to rape her mother and herself. She was only 12 years old at the time. Then, after they had killed her mother also, the militias left. 

It is these kinds of atrocities which fuel the resolve of the suicide bombers. For many there seems no better way to honour the dead than to take from the enemy ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life’. And let’s not kid ourselves here. While the war between the Israeli military and Hamas is certainly political, and certainly ethnic, it is also, and most importantly, a religious war. It is very much a religious war: a struggle between two religious laws, the law of Moses and the law of Mohammed, each striving for supremacy over the other, each claiming the land for itself in the name of the God who gave it, and each doing so to the absolute exclusion of the other. The Israeli government has said, on many occasions, that there shall be no Palestinian state while the suicide bombings continue. Hamas, on the other hand, will accept nothing less than the total exclusion of Israel from the occupied territories and beyond. And Hamas is willing to fight for that end with the only effective weapons it appears to have, the bodies of its young. How does one resolve such a deadlock? How does one break this cycle of retributive and summary justice, especially a justice that seems so deeply religious in its culture and derivation? A difficult question, a very difficult question! But one I believe to be essentially religious and theological in character. For whether the individual combatant and his or her superiors have a personal religious commitment or not, all of them speak and think and act within a complex web of religious and theological meaning. Each of them act out their sense of vengeance and of justice within a language and code that is religious to the very core. So there will be no solution to this conflict without that solution being also a religious and theological solution.

Read in the context of this clash of two religious laws, each of them claiming an exclusionary legitimacy over the other, the letter of Paul to the Romans takes on an extraordinary poignancy. For Paul writes as a Jew who sees serious flaws in the use of religious law to make any such claims. Listen to what he says to his fellow Jews in Romans chapter 2, verses 17-24:

If you call yourself a Jew and rely on the religious law and boast of your relation to God and know his will and determine what is best because you are instructed in the law, and if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth, you, then, that teach others, will you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You that forbid adultery, do you not commit adultery? You that abhor idols, do you not rob sacred places? You who boast in the law, do you not dishonour God by breaking the law?

And then again, in chapter 3 verses 28-30: 

For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the religious law. Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not also the God of non-Jews? Yes, of non-Jews also, for God is one; and God will make righteous the Jew on the grounds of faith and the non-Jew too, through that same faith. 

Can you hear what Paul is saying here? The difficulty with believing that one’s own religious law is superior to another’s, and therefore worth opposing to that other’s by whatever means seem necessary, is simply this: that any religious law worthy of that name is impossible to keep. Its righteous demands are way beyond the capacity of even the most devoted of worshippers. Now, if that is so, then the promotion of that law as the highest law of God, the only law, the law to which all other codes must bow in submission, ends up in a profound and tragic irony. God is actually dishonoured by the ones who promulgate that law in his name. And so the law also condemns the very one who would keep it! So what is the law for, according to Paul? Not to save, he says, but to condemn. Not to exalt the one who believes in the law over those who do not, but to humble such a person to nothing beneath the impossible demands of divine justice. And doesn’t this analysis describe the situation in Israel and Palestine so very well? The Jewish law condemns the Jews for their murder, and the Islamic law condemns the Muslims for theirs. And yet the war continues, because these respective laws are applied only and exclusively to the ones perceived as the enemy! 

There is only one way beyond this tragic situation, says Paul. And that is to relinquish all belief in the efficacy of one’s religious law, whatever its contents, to establish your superiority over another. In fact, says Paul, no human being is able to claim superiority over another because all of us are justified, made righteous and whole, not by the works prescribed by the law, but by faith in the mercy of God to all, and for all. Now, this is where Paul makes a very interesting and clever move, a move that has the potential, even today, to dissolve the power of religious conflict. He invokes the story of Abraham: how God promised that he would be the father of many nations, and that his descendents would live in the land which we today call Israel or Palestine; how Abraham was made righteous and whole not by his obedience to a religious law, which has not yet been given, but by his faith in God’s promise, even when such promises seemed no more that a foolish dream. And that is how it is for us too, says Paul, whether Jew or Gentile. None of us are made righteous and whole by our obedience to a religious law, but rather by our faith in God’s merciful promise. 

Now this is really important stuff in the midst of the religious wars in the Middle East. For the three religious traditions which hold Jerusalem to be holy are also traditions which look to Abraham as the first witness to a God who is one. And Abraham, in a cycle of stories which all three traditions regard as authoritative, is one who is justified not by his obedience to the law-giving of Moses, or of Jesus, or of Mohammad, but by his faith in the merciful promise of God! Can you hear the hope in this proclamation? Can you see the potential there for demolishing the very ground which justifies this war? If Abraham is our common father in faith, witnessing to the one God in whom we all believe, then cannot Jew and Christian and Muslim sit down at table together, not as enemies, but as siblings? If we are justified and made whole not, first of all, by our obedience to the law as we find it in our particular traditions, but by our faith in God’s mercy, than can we not share, humbly, in the wonder of that gift together? And finally, if God promised Abraham that his descendents would live in the land and become a blessing to the whole world, can we not share, as daughters and sons of Abraham, in that inheritance? For the text of Genesis 17.7 is quite clear. The promise is for all Abraham’s offspring, not for Jew alone, or Christian, or Muslim. It is for all Abraham’s seed.

So, let me encourage all of you to prayer. Let us pray, along with Jews and Muslims who share these convictions, that the stories of Abraham may be read and reread in the schools and markets of the holy land. And not only there, but in the parliaments and palaces of Iran, Iraq and Libya; in Mosul where ISIL is holed up; in the White House and at 10 Downing Street; at Kiribilli and at the Lodge; and in the homes of both Meshaal & Netanyahu. Most of all, let us pray that the story of Abraham’s faith may penetrate even into the training and education of soldiers, that they may learn the lesson at the heart of all our faiths: that Shalom, the within and between peace of God, comes only to those who are willing to die – not in conflict with one’s enemy – but to the very idea of the enemy. Only by dying to the basic principles and claims of this dark world, says Jesus, may we rise with him to the peace of our Father’s kingdom.

This homily was first preached at Ormond College on the 2nd Sunday of Lent in 2009.

Claiming God's Faithfulness

Texts:  Isaiah 64. 1-9; Psalm 80. 1-7, 17-19; 1 Cor 1.3-9; Mark 13. 24-37

I hope there are some Monty Python fans amongst you this morning, because I want to begin by recalling a scene from one of their funniest movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Perhaps you will remember it.  King Arthur and his brave companions have just been done over by an incredibly well-educated peasant on one of the King’s estates, and are feeling a little despondent about being part of the aristocracy.  Arthur decides to seek divine guidance.  Afterall, there’s not a great deal for a king to do if even the peasants won’t obey you!  But before his prayer has progressed very far at all, Arthur is suddenly interrupted by a trap-door which opens in one of the clouds above, and a rather grumpy-looking God appears.  Immediately the whole company falls to its knees in eager-to-please obeisance and fear.  But God tells them to stop grovelling. “Oh please”, he says, “stop all that silly grovelling.  ‘Forgive me’ this, and ‘I’m sorry for’ that.  It really gets on my nerves”.  “Sorry, Lord” says Arthur.  “Don’t say sorry!”, says God, rather angrily, “I’m sick of people being sorry.  All those grovelling Psalms really are very boring !”  And after God calms down a bit, they finally receive their mission to seek the holy grail.

Now, like a lot of good comedy, Pythonesque comedy is strong on hyperbole.  That is, overdoing things in order to make a rather modest point.  And whether they knew they were engaging in theological reflection or not, the Python managed to make a rather spot-on theological point in this particular sketch.  And that is that many Christians are far too concerned about being sorry about their sins.  You might be surprised that I say that.  Afterall, we said a rather stark confessional prayer this morning, and clearly I do see a confessional moment as quite essential to our worship of God, whether that be at Sunday service or elsewhere.  We are sinners.  We really do need to acknowledge our guilt before our Maker.  Nevertheless, I also believe that there is a very real danger in becoming too much concerned with confession.  For if we are forever thinking about our sins, we might even become inclined to invent sins to be sorry about—to blame ourselves, and no-body else, for all that seems to go wrong in life.  This kind of attitude seems particularly prevalent amongst Protestants who, consciously or unconsciously, are followers of Luther or Calvin.  Both these venerable gentleman had, on occasion, a rather morbid approach to the sinfulness of human beings.  But I shan’t go into that now.

Instead, I will simply point out that the things that go wrong in life are not always our fault.  Sometimes they are someone else’s fault.  Sometimes they are no-one’s fault.  And sometimes, sometimes, the things that go wrong in life may well be God’s doing.  That is most certainly the view of the prophet in our reading from Isaiah.  In speaking with God about the sins which led to Judah’s captivity in Babylon, the prophet says this:

                            You were angry, and we sinned;

                            because you hid yourself, we transgressed.

Earlier in this same prayer, in chapter 63 verse 17, the prophet says something similar:

                            Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from our ways

                            and harden our heart, so that we do not fear you?

What an alarming suggestion!  We are used to thinking, are we not, that God gets angry because we sin, that God hides Godself from us because we have departed from the terms of the covenant?  Yet here the prophet claims that the opposite may be the case sometimes as well:  that we sin because we experience God’s anger, and it feels cruel and unfair.  Sometimes, he suggests, we fall into a gutter of despair and sin because we find that God has disappeared, and is no longer there to support us, which leaves us with a sense of having been abandoned.  What are we to make of these claims?  How do we make sense of them?  Can we really hold God responsible for some of the chaos in our lives?  Could we dare?  Is God really one who sends calamity without regard to justice? 

Well, I shall not be answering that question in full this morning.  There is no time.  But I would ask you to notice that whatever God may be up to “objectively”, as it were, the particular passages we are examining this morning show absolutely no interest, no interest whatsoever, in  justifying the ways of God to human beings.   What the passages are interested to do, however, is acknowledge and validate the legitimacy of that experience we have been examining i.e.  that sense one occasionally gets that God has abandoned us for no reason that we can readily identify.  Now, of course, when everything appears to be collapsing and life has fallen into a great big pit from which there appears to be very little chance of escape, we are right to search ourselves for character flaws, or sins.  We are also right to search our families, our culture, or even the world economic order for the effects of sin, for patterns of repression or evil intent.  But after all that can be known is known, after all the truth-telling and repenting has been done, it may still be the case that the sky is falling in and it is simply impossible to see any decent reason why.  In that moment, we can only really see ourselves as powerless before forces which seem indifferent to our very real, very present, and very personal pain.  At such moments the words of the psalmist come easily to our lips:  “How long, O Lord, will you be angry with your people’s prayers?  You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.” (80.4).  Indeed, at times like this, our prayers seem to bounce off a God who, far from being indifferent, actually seems to have it in for us!

When life is like that, what are we to do?  Well, this is not a time for confession.  Confession is something we do when we can actually identify and acknowledge what we have done wrong ourselves, or in acquiescence with someone else’s wrongdoing.  Having searched ourselves long and hard, having confessed whatever there is to confess already, there’s no point in going on to invent sins that aren’t actually there.  Inventing sins for ourselves has another name.  Masochism.  And Christians are not called to masochism, which is a form of fantasy and reality-denial.  Rather, we are called to lament what has happened to us, and claim the promise of God’s salvation.  Which is precisely what the prophet does in the passage we are reading.

The kind of language we are investigating is called LAMENT.  Lament is what you do when disaster has come and you’ve confessed until your mouth is dry.  You’ve confessed and repented of everything you can find, but the disaster just keeps on coming.  The best example of lament in the bible is the aptly named Book of Lamentations, which reflects on the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its inhabitants.  But the two Old Testament passages set for today are good examples as well.  Here the writers tell God that life is pretty much in the gutter, and that God had better do something about it.  Lament is what you do when there’s nothing else you can do.  As a key part of their lamentations, our psalmist and our prophet both point out that God actually has an obligation to do something for them, to rescue them. And they base that claim on two things that they know about God already:  (1) God is a compassionate creator;  (2) God has made a covenant with them, in which salvation is promised to all who abandon their sin and cling to God.  I want to spend a few moments looking at each of these in turn, because I think they give us some important clues for how we might do our own lamenting. 

When the bottom falls out of life, I first encourage you to call on God as the Compassionate Creator.   The prophet says:

                            Look down from heaven and see,

                            from your holy and glorious habitation.

                            Where are your zeal and your might?

                            The yearning of your heart and your compassion?  (Is 63. 15)

                            Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;

                we are the clay, and you are the potter;

                            we are all the work of your hand.

                            Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,

                            and do not remember iniquity forever.

                            Now consider, we are all your people.

Here God is imaged as a father who is also a potter.  The point is clear.  God did not create us with indifference, but with compassion, love, and father-like affection.  Therefore we may count on God to eventually let go of his anger and relent.  We are his own beloved people, the extraordinary products of his own tender imagination.  No matter what we may do, God will not destroy, absolutely, what God has made.

When the tidal wave hits, I would also encourage you to call on God as the senior signatory to a rather special covenant.  The Psalmist says this:

                            You brought a vine out of Egypt;

                            you drove out the nations and planted it.

                            You cleared the ground for it;

                            it took deep root and filled the land.

                            The mountains were covered with its shade,

                            the mighty cedars with its branches;

                            it sends out its branches to the sea,

                            and its shoots to the river.

                            Why then have you broken down its walls,

                            so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit? . . .

                            Turn again, O God of hosts,

                            look from heaven and see.

                            Have regard for this vine,

                            the stock that your right hand planted . . .

                            Restore us, O Lord, God of hosts;

                            let your face shine, that we may be saved.

This allegory of a vine is the story of Israel in miniature.  It speaks of the history of the relationship between God and Israel.  How God created the Hebrew nation in Egypt, and rescued it from slavery.  How God cleared a land for the people to live in.  How they prospered and bore much fruit because of God’s guidance and care.  And yet now, with Jerusalem destroyed and the land in ruins, the fruitful nation has become plunder for others.  In telling this story, the Psalmist emphasises the role of God in the relationship.  God is the primary actor, the protagonist who makes things happen.  That’s how it was with ancient, middle-eastern, covenants.  One party, the stronger party, takes the initiative to grace the other with its protection and care.  All the weaker party is asked for in return is trust and loyalty.  And in the case of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel, even if Israel withdrew its loyalty for a time, the terms of the covenant could be reactivated with a genuine renewal of Israel’s faith.  Here the Psalmist is arguing that Israel has indeed renewed its trust so that, under the terms of the covenant, God should now jolly-well offer his care and protection once more.  And immediately.

As Christians we are members of a ‘new’ covenant that nevertheless owes a great deal to the ‘old’ covenant between Israel and Yahweh.  In Jesus, we are privileged to have witnessed just how seriously God takes his side of the bargain made with Israel.  Through the life and death of Christ, God has shown us clearly and unambiguously that disloyalty need be no impediment.  In Christ, all is forgiven.  This is so not only for the Hebrew people, but for all who are called into the community of God created by Jesus.  As the book of 1 Corinthians tells us, ‘He will strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of Lord Jesus Christ.  God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord’ (1. 8, 9).  On that basis, when the bombs fall on you from the sky and the ground opens up beneath you, you have every right to call on God and demand what is yours: Salvation!  Not just the salvation of your soul, but the salvation of your body and your planet as well.  This is God’s promise and God’s gift to all who are joined to Christ.  So don’t be backward in coming forward.  If life is giving you a hard time, if GOD is giving you a hard time, and you’ve run out of honest confessions, then call on God to honour the promises God has made.  Pour out your lament, and don’t hold back.  Ask for what is yours as a child of God: your salvation, your healing, the liberation of the world from its bondage to decay.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with pleading for what is already yours in the gift of God.

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.