“Renewing Our Covenant”
Welcome to the real beginning to the 21st Century! Well, welcome to 2001! Except that 2001 is now a week old. So, at least welcome to January. January named for the Roman god Janus, who looks back and forward at the same time, is a hinge month – when we too can look backwards and forwards. It is also the month that gives us Epiphany, which was yesterday. That is the day we celebrate the arrival of the Magi, the wise men to present their gifts to the Christ child. Never in their wildest dreams did they expect a king to be born in a stable. You remember, they went to Herod’s palace, looking for the baby. But when they finally did go to the stable they saw and recognized. They had an Epiphany.
We are also in a new season of light. You may be noticing already, even amid the dreariness of the snow and bitter cold, the daylight hours are slowly but steadily increasing, calling us too, to an Epiphany -- to open ourselves anew to the good news of Jesus Christ. It is a sure sign that winter will end. There is hope. Our slavery to sin and death will end. Emmanuel has come to us! And as Paul tell us so emphatically, Rejoice, and again I say, rejoice!
Epiphany means an unveiling, a recognition. We can be so stubborn sometimes that even if we see the evidence right in front of us we fail to see. We are like the man who really wanted to see and hear God – wanted an Ephipnay. So he went out to a hilltop and yelled and pleaded with God. "Speak to me!" And a bird sang. And disappointed he again begged God to speak to him and all he heard was the sound of children playing in the distance. "Please God, touch me!" he cried and the wind blew across his cheek. And discouraged at not having his plea answered the man prayed, "God, show yourself to me!" And a butterfly flew across his path. And when he got home, convinced that God had forsaken him, his daughter ran out to greet him, but he felt abandoned by God.
We
have a tradition of using this first Sunday of the year as a time of renewing
our covenent with God. I want you to know that when we do this, we stand in a
strong biblical tradition. What I would like to do is to take you through in a
quick bird’s eye view fashion, that biblical tradition of Epiphanies – God’s
revelations to us, and then consider our own covenant renewal.
As we look at the early stories in the Bible, it is very clear that the biblical writers are awestruck at God's marvellous deeds in the time of the Exodus. That is the starting point for Israel’s literary history. From there they look backward to the very beginning, to the creation and they see four stages or dispensations. The first is from Creation to Noah (Genesis 1-5). The second dispensation is from Noah to Abraham (Gen. 6-11) , the third from Abraham to Moses, (Gen. 12 – the end of Genesis) and the fourth from the Exodus onwards. Each of these dispensations is a story of a covenant.
The first is with the original human
beings, (Gen. 1:26-31). The original couple are blessed with the ability to be
fruitful and multiply. Creation is good. The creation of human beings is very
good. You would notice that in this story, people are to be vegetarians. You
get a sense of the grandeur of creation and the creative power of God when you
read this chapter. You would notice that it has a liturgical movement to it.
That’s how we know that it came from the Priestly tradition. This is about a
cosmic covenant – it is with all creation. It encompasses the entire universe.
You can’t be any broader than this.
The second is the covenant with
Noah. (Gen. 9:8-17). We talked a little bit last Sunday about Noah’s story.
God's promise to Noah was to not let the earth revert to the chaos of the
waters. God is concerned for all living creatures and the covenant is with all
living creatures. Noah may eat animal flesh now, but wanton bloodshed and
murder is prophibited. This is still a broad covenant with all creatures but
not as cosmic as the previous one. There is a sign for this covenant. It is the
rainbow.
Third, there is Abraham's covenent.
(Gen 12:1-3) God promises to be with Israel and to give Canaan as an
inheritance. Through Abraham all the families of the earth will be blessed.
This is not as broad as Noah’s covenent because it does not include all
creatures. But it is still broad in scope because it includes all the families
on earth. Later (Gen. 17) we find that Abraham's descendents are required to be
circumcised in order to show that they are the covenant people. The sign of the
covenant is the circumcision.
The fourth dispensation is the
covenant making at Mount Sinai in which the covenant is with a specially elect
and particular people. The Biblical writers stand at the narrowest point of the
final dispensation but sees God's grace as having been distributed as widely as
can be imagined. This story we have in Exodus 19. At this time, the liberated
slaves have run away from Egypt, they have gone through tremendous hardship,
crossed the Red Sea, and have arrived at Sinai, the sacred mountain. At that
time, God says to the people, "You
have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and
brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my
covenant, you shall be my treasured
possession out of all the peoples." God took the initiative to
redeem them – bore them on eagle’s wings. Now God seeks a response from the
people – if you obey my voice and keep my covenant. It placed them in a
situation of decision. They are summoned to a task within the divine purpose.
You may remember that Moses experienced this earlier at Sinai, where God called
him to participate in God’s historical plan. Now all the people experience it
at the same sacred mountain. It was immediately after this that God gave the
ten commandments and the laws that were binding on the covenant people. These,
by the way, were not considered burdens, rather, the law was a means of grace.
This time, the sign of the covenant was keeping the Sabbath.
So, the Biblical writers standing in
the time after the exodus see very clearly God’s action throughout this
history. They can recognize it. They can see epiphanies all along the way. They
see how in each of these dispensations, God initiates, human beings respond,
God promises, human beings also promise and a loving relationship is established.
And they called it a covenant. This is not like a legal contract, like one you
would make with your landlord, or buying a house or whatever. This is more like
how you and your spouse would enter into a marriage covenant, to a loving
relationship.
One of the first problems with this
for most of us is the problem that the man in my story had -- recognizing God’s
revelation. Sometimes God’s revelation comes and hits us in the face, and we
don’t see it, because we are expecting to see God in a different place or a
different way. This is why the Magi went to the king’s palace. But the reason
why that story got written down and we talk about it even today 2001 years
later, is because when they went to that unexpected place – a stable with cows,
sheep and other farm animals, they recognized. They could have easily said to
themselves, this is absurd. There is no way that a king would be born in a
stable. But they had an epiphany.
Epihanies come to me everyday – I
don’t see all of them, by any means. This year began with news of a funeral. A
lady whom I had come to admire very much, Guadalupe Reyes, died on Dec. 31. I
came to know her only recently, as Mary Gonzales’ mother. But it was clear that
she was a very powerful woman of God. On Tuesday, it was like all of Pilsen was
at her visitation and funeral. Amidst that large crowd, Dhilanthi and I stood
at the open casket of this small and frail looking woman and remembered her
covenant with God. And God was present there. Clearly in the way that she
incarnated Jesus Christ in her community. Mary told me how the day before she
died, she wanted her friends to come and have a party with her. How she wore a
Santa Claus hat and sang songs with them and how she encouraged them. Today,
two community buildings in that neighborhood that today, two centers that she
herself started, one for mentally handicapped adults called Esparenza and
another for children’s after school tutoring and arts education called El Valor
are named for her.
Today, following our worship, I am going
downtown to Chicago Sinai Congregation to speak at the memorial service of my
friend and colleague, Werner Heymann, who was the executive director of the
Interfaith Council for almost 25 years. He was about the closest I Jewish
friend I had. The way that he incorporated his faith into his life, was a
revelation from God to me. I expect the memorial service today will also be an
epiphany for me.
But those are in the past. Like
January I look backward and forwards. Yesterday, we heard from Representative
Barbara Flynn Currie that she would work with us in MAC to fundamentally
restructure that way schools are funded in Illinois. In the testimonies that we
heard from the churches, in the prayers that we prayed, in the commitments that
were shared, I saw God’s presence. Epiphanies happen all the time and in
unusual ways in unusual places. We just need the eyes to see.
A second problem we often have is
remembering the epiphany. Other images, stories and just the business of life
often crowd out our epiphanies – and this is particularly true during hard
times which is ironically the most important time to remember. But we tend to
forget, not only the epiphanies, but also the covenant we made with God.
Sometimes we need others, preachers, mentors, spouses, friends have to come
alongside us to remind us that we have in fact seen God’s revelation and are
people of the covenant.
The people of the Exodus dispensation, keep breaking the covenant with God and God's servants had to come from time to time and remind them of their epiphanies and help them to renew their covenant with God. This is what Moses did when he preached the sermon contained in Deuteronomy. The book of Deuteronomy is a sermon, you see – a long one. Moses preached it to the Israelite community before crossing the Jordan, with the wilderness experience still fresh in their minds and as they faced the hazards of entering Canaan. It was important to give the people a fresh call to commitment and to renewing the covenant they had made with God at the sacred mountain.
Then you remember how Joshua reminded the people, at that large gathering at Shecchem (Joshua 24). He reminded everybody of God’s goodness to them through the generations – of how the epiphanies were given, recognized and acted upon. Like an evangelistic preacher he admonished the crowd. “Choose this day whom you will serve …. As for me and my family we will serve the Lord.” And you remember how prophets throughout the Bible kept bringing people back to this core memory of God’s faithfulness in delivering them.
The third difficulty we have about
this is following through. We may recognize God in even in the most unexpected
places, and we may keep remembering it our covenant renewal, but in order to be
faithful to the covenant, we need to follow through. This we see in the life of
Jesus.
Last week we talked about what
happened just eight days after his birth. They took him to the temple for the
circumcision and the prophetic word from Simeon and Anna was an affirmation to
his parents about what the shepherds and the wisemen and all the fuss was about
on Christmas night. In one week his parents were assured that all that was said
by the angels in the annunciation and visit to Joseph were all true. It is an
affirmation that Mary and Joseph’s obedience was honored, that God was being
true to the covenant.
Next we meet Jesus when he is 30. Since the whole country was coming to be baptized by John, he too, came to be baptized. We find him, standing in the water with the crowd who press in from the Jordan banks for baptism. He is now ready to begin his public ministry, and it opens with a humble baptism that identifies him deeply with the people he has come to redeem. What could bind him more closely than to wade into the muddy Jordan with people weeping for their sins, quietly urging the hesitant Baptizer to wash him too?
It is out of this act of utmost humility that Epiphany comes. As Jesus prays, heaven's glory opens and God's Spirit-dove descends upon him. Suddenly, all those first inklings of vocation that stirred in childhood, the unshaped consciousness of call, the inner yearnings and searchings, are brought into sharp focus. And God names him with the name only he may bear: "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." This affirmation is the defining moment for him. And then at the height of his ministry when opposition had begun to mount and things were getting to be shakey, there was that powerful epiphany of the Transfiguration, where again the affirmation came "This is my son, my chosen, listen to him."
We are all covenant children. God
did not put you on this earth without a plan or purpose. When your parents
brought you to the church for dedication, a covenant was established or
affirmed. When you met Jesus and gave your life to him, a covenant was
established and in your baptism, a covenant was affirmed. And God keeps sending
us epiphanies to remind us of God’s presence. Often it is in the most
unexpected way – through a bird that sings, the soft caress of the wind on your
cheek, a butterfly that flies across your path, the hug of a little child.
Do you remember your own Epiphanies,
your own covenant making? Last year, did God initiate covenant renewal for you,
through various events, celebratory events or difficult events, and did you
respond?
I want to invite you to a covenant
renewal. I want to invite you to go back to your Sinai – to your Calvary. Take
a minute to recall that time when at the foot of the cross you experienced
God’s grace flowing to you. Take a minute to reflect on other times in your
life when you were led back to that covenant making experience so you could
renew it. Did anything happen in 2000, that led you back to that covenant
making experience that made you renew your convenant with God? And what about
this year that’s just began? Is God initiating covenant renewal for you, right
here and now, on this first Sunday of the 21st Century?