EXODUS 34:10ff - CONVERSATION CONCERNING the COVENANT COMMUNITY

 

 

A.  What’s the same about the Ancient Israelites we read about in the Old Testament and the Christian church?

 

1.  COMMUNITIES - Both are community of believers brought together and kept together by God showing himself in a saving act and making an agreement (covenant) with them.

- The saving act in the New Testament was God becoming human, living among us as king, defeating evil on the cross and rising again.  

- Any thoughts on what was God’s saving act was in the Old Testament?

- In what sense did this reveal who God was?

 

2.  CONTINUITY - The church is continuous with Ancient Israel.   Jesus was a Jew.  The 12 disciples were Jews.  The people of the first church were Jews.  It was only with the apostle Paul that the gospel became widespread among the Gentiles.  Jesus changed the way we should live and surpassed the law given to Ancient Israel, but he was also its descendant as we are. 

 

3.  CHOSEN - God chose Israel to show the rest of the world his holiness and greatness, as we heard in the Bible reading.   In the New Testament, Paul continues this language in his letters - he talks  about the elect in Christ - essentially, God has chosen the church to be the people who show others his great deeds.

 

 

 

YHWH said to Moses, ‘I now make a covenant with the people of Israel.  In their presence I will do great things such as have never been done anywhere on earth among any of the nations.  All the people will see what great things I, YHWH, can do, because I am going to do an awesome thing for you.  Obey the laws I am giving you today.  I will drive out the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jesubites, as you advance.  Do not make any treaties with the people of the country into which you are going, because this could be a fatal trap for you.  Instead tear down their altars, destroy their sacred pillars and cut down the symbols of their goddess Asherah.

- Ex 34:10-14 GNB

 

 

B - Fight Club, Hermeneutics and Covenant

 

It’s in confronting passages like this that our Bible reading habits tend to break down.  This isn’t quiet time light reading that we can digest over muesli and coffee to come out with a ‘thought for the day’.  We can decide to skip back to our favourite passages or we can face the truth: that this passage and many others - in fact, almost all the Old Testament, is difficult to understand.  We need to spend some time with it to listen to God speaking first to a community perhaps as long as three and a half thousand years ago.  That requires real patience.  It also requires help. 

 

Since Martin Luther we’ve been emphasising how everybody is meant to have access to the Bible and that it isn’t only priests who can understand it.  Unfortunately we’ve taken that to mean the Bible is easy to understand.  I don’t think it is.   It’s not simply God’s word to us.  It is the book that records the faith of the Ancient Israelites and the early church.   A cricket rule book would make no sense if someone couldn’t go to see a cricket match.  The two are tied together.  In the same way, the Bible has to be understood as a book tied to events and people that lived a long time ago. 

 

It only took four hundred years for Exodus and the other first five books of the Bible to be totally forgotten by the Israelites and make no sense.  Does anyone know the story of Josiah rediscovering the Book of the Law?  It’s found in 2 Kings 22 and 23, as well as in a similar form in 2 Chronicles.   If it was strange to them, it’s going to be strange to us. 

 

What we have in Exodus 34 is the basis for the community of believers. It is like a contract.    It is a little like a creed or a confession.  The best word for it is a covenant.  In our planning meetings we were asking what it is that binds us together as a community, what shared thinking and shared goals and shared beliefs.   Perhaps what we were looking for was the terms of our covenant.

 

Who’s seen Fight Club?   We’re going to watch a scene from it now.   In this scene Tyler Durden is laying down the first covenant of his organisation. 

 

[watch scene 56:12]

 

A group of men become connected to each other in a community that meets once or twice a week - the Fight Club.   To join, you have to begin to change your priorities -  you have to be prepared to take risks.  You must obey the rules of the community - otherwise you don’t belong to the community.  

 

Yet Fight Club is only the first step.  Out of it grows Project Mayhem.   Project Mayhem is a mission to change the world.   It aims to shock people out of their greedy, complacent lives, their slavery to debt.   To join you have to be completely dedicated.  You have to prove your dedication by standing outside Tyler’s house for three days while the members taunt you.  If admitted you are set to work to further the mission.   You don’t just come along once a week.  You live in Project Mayhem headquarters.  You are initiated into a 24/7 community.    Let’s watch a scene which shows this process. 

 

[second scene]

 

Fight Club grew more intense - from meeting once a week to total commitment.   Our idea of church seems to have gone the opposite way.   The Israelites were a covenant community that demanded total commitment.  Jesus demanded the same of his disciples.  But we compromised this.   It can be blamed on Emperor Constantine who in around the fifth century declared Chrisitanity to be a state religion.  It went from a community of committed converts to a birthright.  Christianity got weakened down to a mass on Sunday and confession every now and again.  

 

Thankfully the Reformation began to turn that around.  But Martin Luther and John Calvin didn’t go far enough.  There was another group during the reformation who are our spiritual ancestors.  They are often called the anabaptists or mennonites.  We had two of them visit us this year.  They believed the community was a covenant community that involved a personal commitment from each person in it. 

 

The idea of ‘covenant’ is just as important to the church today as it was to the Ancient Israelites.  Jesus said ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you...’ (Luke 22:20)   Covenant is the agreement between God and his people.  The Old Testament is also called the Old Covenant; the New Testament the New Covenant.  The Old Covenant was based upon the Exodus - God saving the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and enabling them to be a people, a community showing his grace, set right with each other and with him.  The New Covenant was based upon God saving Israel by becoming the divine yet human servant-king Jesus.  Jesus in his life, death and resurrection perfected and extended the community of believers.   The covenant was created ‘in his blood’.  The covenant was a physical cup in that the covenant brought people into real communion with each other and with God. We tend to think that this Old Testament talk is merely metaphorical - that our Exodus is only a personal one and that our covenant is a private one that we celebrate when we come to a service on Sunday.  But that wasn’t what the original church would have been thinking. 

 

 

This is something our society needs so desperately today.   We are becoming alienated from each other because we no longer have any sort of covenant to even live together as a society.  Where once people had a basic belief in God and paid lip service to a high morality, these days there is an increasing pluralism - there is a proliferation of different views about the world within Australia.   We are influenced by different cultures and no longer are so sure that Western culture has got it all right.

 

This is an incredible opportunity for the church to reclaim its identity.   The idea of the covenant community has such immense importance for a pluralist society.  While people are alienated by different commitments and different beliefs, the church is meant to be a place of true community where there is a common basis of belief and life found in God through Jesus Christ. 

 

Yet many churches are running away from it.  Amongst the Anglican and Uniting churches there is a common desire to accomodate to the world, to make Christianity more acceptable to the rest of society.   Yet in being no different they lose much of their reason for being a community.   And sadly the Anglican and Uniting churches are delclining.

 

Amongst the evangelical churches like Baptists and Churches of Christ, there is a tendenancy among some to pay lip service to our covenant community while spending all their efforts on being hip and cool to attract people.   Anything that is hard or challenging or time consuming is avoided.

 

To give you an example of this, I asked a local minister to talk to the Christian Union on the relevance of the Old Testament for today.  He said that he would rather not because this was a ‘boring topic’.   I have less sympathy with this hipness than the liberal attempts to be loving and tolerant.

 

Other evangelical churches miss another side of God’s covenant - that his special presence and agreement with the church is so that all the nations might see His glory.   We must be outward focussed not inward focussed.  We shouldn’t get tied up with telling everyone else why they’re wrong; we should be positive, we should be loving to everyone while faithful to our calling.   So in our university context, we have a responsibility to embody God’s vision for the community of believers.  This includes, for example, embodying God’s plan for sexuality - that is, that the context for sex is that of a loving relationship between a husband and wife.   That doesn’t mean we start our witness to the university by attacking the Murdoch University Gay and Lesbian Society and tell them they’re evil.   Instead, it’s essential we embody a positive alternative and show our love for people with different views and practices.  

 

C.  Exegesis and Remembering

 

Let’s move on in the text to verse 18. 

 

v18 - Keep the Festival of Unleavened Bread.  As I have commanded you, eat unleavened bread for seven days in the month of Abib, because it was in that month you left Egypt.

 

- Here we see that ritual and remembering are important to the keeping of a covenant community.   YHWH thought this was important enough that he included it in the terms of the covenant.  This relates back to what I was saying about the importance of remembering our story.  By remembering their past with a ceremony, the Israelites are keeping in touch with their roots, they are staying true to God.   Verses 22 and 23 bring this out further, with more festivals to be observed to remember that God is the one who brings them food.

 

-  In the act of remembering, we bind ourselves together and to God.   We are meant to take time to think about the past, the present and the future.  One important act of remembering we do is the Lord’s supper.  However, as I talked about earlier, I think we’ve made this far more symbolic than it was meant to be. 

 

- If you don’t remember properly, things go wrong.  This happens in Fight Club.  There’s no adquate ritual that recalls the origins and ideals of their community.   People start getting legalistic and twist certain things the leader has said.  Project Mayhem goes out of control.  The whole idea of the liberation of the self is lost to conforming to the project, of being efficient.  I think a similar thing happened in Soviet Russia.   Eventually one of the main characters, Bob, is killed in an a mission, and yet even this is not enough to shock them out of what they have become.    So let’s not make their mistakes.

 

- I think another way we can remember better what God has done for us and what he has promised us, is to keep the Christian calendar better, like Robert suggested.   This year we celebrated Pentecost.   We should do that again and add others to it.

 

 

D.  CONCLUSION

 

 

Where have we gone today?   Well, the focus has been on the Old Testament idea of covenant, especially the account given of it in Exodus 34.  We looked first at the similarities between the situation of Ancient Israel and our situation.   There is the same idea of the COMMUNITY of believers, the CONTINUITY between Israel and the expansion into the Gentiles with the church, and the important idea that both are CHOSEN not to be saved but chosen to be God’s messengers of salvation.  

All this is about covenant.  And we’ve been talking about how to understand and keep our covenant with God.   It involves refusing to compromise God’s demands and yet remembering to have God’s compassion.   This is stuff we really need to bear on mind when dealing with issues like sexuality, interacting with other religions and ministering to students who want to be able to live ungodly lives and yet still have the warmth and security of the church.   Finally, we talked about remembering and how to remember.