The Rev. Virginia W. Nagel
Episcopal Diocese of Central NY (Retired)
The first two readings today, from Genesis and Romans, focus on the word
covenant. It's a word we do not often encounter nowadays. A covenant,
as the Bible uses it, is a contract or an agreement, offered by someone of power
or standing, to someone of lesser power or standing. The covenants we are
reading about today are both offered by God to mortals, humans.
A covenant, in Scriptural understanding, has the authority of a legal
contract. God offers to do this or that for the person or tribe, and the
condition is that that person or tribe obey God's laws and do whatever else God
has put into the provisions of the covenant: worship, provide sacrifices,
whatever. In any case, the lower-ranking party and the higher-ranking party to a
covenant have to trust one another to do what they promise.
Nowadays we tend to find the word covenant used mostly in
financial transactions. A bank who is the person or entity of power (or at least
of great monetary resources) offers a loan to a person who cannot othewise
scrape up the money for a car or house or whatever (that's you or me). Again,
there are requirements on both sides. The bank will give us the money, but we
need to pay it back, under strict conditions...we can't get behind in our
payments, we can't walk away from the debt, we can't skip a payment so we will
have cash to go to Bermuda or whatever. Again, both parties have to have trust
in the other party to make the covenant work. That, of course, is why banks
explore credit ratings and such, to find out if the other party is trustworthy.
Of course, you know that all of us who follow Jesus have a covenant with him
and with God. Basically the form of our covenant requires that we have faith
that Jesus is indeed God the Son, that he died to take away our punishment for
sin, and that his saving death also opens to us the opportunity to live in God's
kingdom, heaven, when we exit this earthly kingdom. Jesus, of course, has
already died on the cross to pay the penalty of our sins, and contracts to make
it possible for us to enter heaven when the time comes...and heaven means
eternal happiness and full participation in all that God has to offer. Our
obligation, then, is to keep faith in God and Jesus, and to obey God's laws and
to live according to the example and guidelines that Jesus gave us. This is what
we promised when we were baptized and confirmed. Baptism and confirmation are,
in essence, covenant ceremonies.
Of course, if we do not keep up our side of the covenant, we risk losing the
blessings and gifts that God promises.
This brings us to Paul's argument that God counts our faith as keeping of the
law. As long as we have a faith in Jesus, we are counted as righteous...able to
enter into heaven. The various failures we all have in the breaking of the law
will be overlooked. Faith, you see, is the key. God has faith in us, in our love
for himself and for Jesus, in our belief that this is the way to live...even if
we fail to live up to it precisely. It is faith that counts toward
righteousness, not picky law-keeping. Of course, we are expected to really try
to keep the law...but faith is the key thing here.
Psalm 22 is appropriate in a discussion of covenant-keeping. It is almost a
dialogue between a sinful soul and God, where the sinner cannot prove that he or
she is innocent, and God is not going to lay out, word for forceful word,
exactly what the sinner has done wrong. Of course, none of us keeps our
Baptismal covenant perfectly. Of course, Psalm 22 expresses the situation of us
all.
The Gospel reading also relates to the idea of covenant, in a way. Jesus
tells his disciples...AGAIN...about his coming arrest, torment, death and
burial, and resurrection. Now, some of the disciples had begun to think that
maybe, just maybe, Jesus might be the long-promised, long-awaited Messiah. And
when they heard Jesus' prophecies, it seemed to them a breaking of the covenant
they had with God, the covenant of circumcision, the covenant that promised that
if the Jews kept God's law, he would care for them and protect them. Over the
years, their concept of a Messiah had become that of a military leader who would
throw out the Roman armies of occupation and re-establish God's Law as the law
of the land....wishful thinking, mostly, instead of the original idea of Messiah
as someone who would help the mlive according to God's law. Jesus' words seemed
at odds with this understanding, and that's why Peter spoke up, and said that
this could not be. It just plain was not what they understood to be the covenant
of the Jews.
And so Jesus started to explain what he meant. He pointed out that those who
followed him would do so not out of a fear of breaking covenant law, but out of
love and faith that his way of living a life is the Godly way. He pointed out
that those who would follow him could not live lives of worldly ambition, but
must live lives of service to others, of demonstrating the qualities of God to
people in the world, just as Jesus himself had been doing. He pointed out that
this would involve being rejected by most people who knew only worldly attitudes
and ways, and might include suffering...even death...as he was about to prove.
And, he promised, death would not be the end, but there was something better,
even beyond death...a new, perfect, wonderfully happy life. In the process, of
course, of saying all this, he was telling them that their understanding of the
Messiah was wrong. Messiah was not to be a worldly ruler or leader, but a
servant, caring for and about the people.
In my own experience, two episodes stand out as illustrations of this Gospel.
The first happened some 35 or 40 years ago in Schenectady. Bishop Allen Brown
was the Bishop of Albany. The deaf congregation met in the Lady Chapel of St.
George's church. One Sunday, Bishop Brown was there, to confirm the confirmation
class at St. George's. He happened to walk past the door of the chapel, where my
predecessor, Father Bill Lange, was celebrating the Eucharist. Bishop Brown
quietly came in the sacrisity door, put his crozier in the corner, took off his
miter, and knelt down and served Father Lange's Eucharist. At the end of the
service, he gave us his blessing and hurried out to join the procession for the
Confirmation ceremony.
The second occurred during a convention of the Episcopal Conference of the
Deaf. We were meeting in western Virginia at the time. The president of the ECD
reminded us, before the beginning of one session, to take out of the auditorium
the paper cups and other trash that we had brought in, closing with the
statement that he and the other Board members had had to clean up after us at
the end of the previous session.
Clearly, being a follower of Christ involves much more than wearing a cross
and showing up for church on Sunday!
How are you doing at your covenant keeping? Can you think of a way to be a
servant, a way to let your faith cover your failings in covenant keeping? Will
you do that thing? This would be a very good way to keep Lent...by growing into
the keeping of our covenants with the Lord Jesus and our Father in heaven. Amen.
