Readings for March 18, 2018, 5th Sunday in Lent

• Jeremiah 31:31-34 
• Psalm 51:1-12 
• Hebrews 5:5-10  
• John 12:20-33

"Covenant on Our Hearts" Pastor Kinsey
In the final episode of Season 2 on This Is Us, Kate finally gets married!  If you’re not familiar with it, this is the show about the triplets, now in their 30’s, that weaves-in the storyline of their childhood, revealing the tragic death of their father, which continues to shape their adult lives.  
 
The episode’s drama starts, when just hours before Kate is supposed to walk down the aisle, she walks away, without telling anyone where she’s going.  And – spoiler alert! – it looks like the wedding may fall through.  She leaves the family cabin in search of ‘something old,’ for good luck, because Toby, her husband-to-be, forgot to pack her dad’s old t-shirt, she’s nostalgically been holding on to.  
 
But she has an idea. She drives in town to their childhood ice cream shop to get a pint of her favorite flavor she used to eat with her dad, as the ‘something old.’  But that was 30 years ago, and, now under new ownership, they don’t carry it anymore. 
 
In a growing panic she calls her mom, who’s already walking on egg shells, worried she caused Kate to drive away.  In a rare moment of intimacy, Kate shares the recurring dreams she’s been having about her wedding – in the dream though, she’s not getting married, she’s watching her mother and deceased father walk down the aisle, to renew their vows on their 40th anniversary.  Her mom asks Kate why Toby, her fiancé, isn’t in the dream, which Kate hadn’t thought of.  And then the call ends abruptly, still without knowing where Kate is! 
 
Now her mom’s in a panic, and in the next scene, we find Kate clutching her dad’s funeral urn sitting on a tree-stump where they used to sit in the woods, 3 decades ago, just the two of them.  It looks like it could be disastrous, but Kate actually has had a break-through!   She realizes she has to let her dad go, so she can give herself fully to Toby and her new life, and she will end up pouring dad’s remains alongside the tree stump.
 
At the wedding ceremony, everyone is reunited, brothers and sister, moms and children, and, Kate and Toby, happily pledge their love for each other, so that we know what a perfect match they are.  Kate has found the one who is even better for her than her dad was, just as dad promised her.  Instead of walking away, she is ready to walk, hand in hand, and to freely unite, with Toby. 
 
Marriage is the covenant we make between those we love, those we can share our lives with, most intimately, who we pledge to stand by, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death parts us. 
 
It’s interesting, I think, that the covenant promise God makes at the end of the New Testament, in Revelation, about when God’s new age will arrive, is a wedding image as well.  “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,” said John of Patmos, “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”  A beautiful way to conclude the scriptures, and surely one of the most enduring of God’s covenanting images – Marriage! 
 
We’ve been reflecting on God’s ‘covenants’ during this Season of Lent, based on our First Readings: the covenant between God and all humanity made with Noah and his family; the covenant between God and Abraham and Sarah, to make of them a great nation; the covenant between God and Moses that the chosen people would be loved to the 1,000th generation, and also, to save the people from death – and now today’s covenant, that “God will put God’s law within them, and will write it on their hearts,” and “God will forgive their iniquities and remember their sin no more.”
 
The sign of the rainbow; the gift of a son, Isaac; the writing of the 10 Commandments on stone; and the bronze serpent on a pole lifted up – these are all parts of the journey of God’s people, tied to the gift of the Land.  God builds on the covenant of God’s own making, from the beginning, from Creation. 
 
But only here, in the prophet Jeremiah, do we find the language of a “new” covenant.  This is a covenant, needed, after the Exile – after the people of God broke the previous agreements so clearly and decisively, that God in an unprecedented move, empowered Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylonia, to destroy the holy city of Jerusalem, and take them away into Gentile land as captives.  So a new covenant upon their return, will be necessary.  It “will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt” at the Passover, “ – a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD.” 
 
So God doesn’t just re-ink the old covenants.  God envisions something much deeper in a relationship with God’s people.  It will not be as rote as reading and writing the 10 Commandments, as laborious as Catechism class or Yeshiva.  “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD…” 
 
This new covenant will be made with the house of Israel, after the days of coming home and the rebuilding of Jerusalem.  The new law will be ‘within them, written on their hearts!’ 
 
This is a covenant God made with the returning Exiles, 500 years before Jesus and the early church spoke the words about the Cup of a ‘New Covenant in Christ’s blood.’  So even when Jeremiah’s language rings harmoniously in our ears all these centuries later, we must be clear about what God’s covenant in Jeremiah is.  It is first to the Jews, as St Paul said, and only then, to the Gentiles.  Israel is the root and stem, we are the branches. 
 
So the most faithful question for us today may be, whether any of us, Jew or Christian, show forth, the new heart and new spirit, that God has promised to effect within us? (Patrick D. Miller; NIB, Jeremiah) 
 
There are clearly issues we have failed at, including marriage and family – but also in every other social contract.  If, for example, we all knew God’s covenants from within, on our hearts, ?would our economy be so rife with inequality and oppression?  How might we be more faithful to all people, providing equal opportunity, instead of propping up a system that favors those who have the most already, and rewards the goal of satisfying our own bassist desires, which can only create economic infidelity?
 
“We defile the holy when we love good things for our own sake,” says Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “deadening our sense of intimacy and connection with God.”  But as a people of faith, “…To [covenant and] make promises, is to proclaim that a culture of mistrust has been interrupted by One whom we can trust [ - by our God]. [And calls us] to live as a sign of God’s faithfulness, …as we struggle to grow into fidelity [with our neighbor].” (by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove CC, August 2, 2012)
 
At our last Lenten Wednesday, we heard from Jennifer Viets about one promising technique of fidelity used in restorative justice, called, the Talking Circle, where a group of people agree to sit in a circle, facing one another, to talk through an issue, a lot like Recovery groups do.  A symbol, like an eagle feather, is held in turn by each person, who, one at a time, speak their truth from the heart, and share their story of sorrow or injustice, or respond to the hurts of others, without being interrupted, except by the One we trust, and let the Spirit of reconciliation and understanding enter in.  It’s small group democracy – but not necessarily small in effect!  As Jennifer told us, her own teenaged son was inspired from his Talking Circle to start a movement for restorative justice, that took a group of youth all the way to the United Nations, and then later spawned the, ‘Gone But Not Forgotten’ quilt exhibit, which is here in our Gallery. 
 
This is the original purpose of God’s covenants with us.  To create trust and love between all peoples, that we may ‘all know God from the least to the greatest,’ as Jeremiah says.  And that we might fulfill that ultimate covenant agreement, to be married to our all-loving-God, ‘in the new city, coming down from heaven.’ 
 
As we continue our Lenten journey to the cross and resurrection, let us lean more deeply into the covenant of our baptismal vows, knowing that God is a God who loves us completely, without conditions, and beyond death.

Readings for the 4th Sunday in Lent, March 11, 2018

• Numbers 21:4-9
• Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
• Ephesians 2:1-10
• John 3:14-21
  

Salvific Promise, Pastor Fred
The covenant promise this week, is a bit more difficult to pick out – “those who look upon the bronze serpent will live.”
 
The specter across the sky of the colorful promise of the rainbow, was much clearer! – God covenants with humanity, to never again destroy the earth by flood, and in the beautiful sign of the rainbow, whenever God sees it, God will remember this agreement, God made.  At the same time, God also initiates the peace we so deeply desire, by setting the example of restraining God’s Self from retribution, from what we might call, a first-strike capability.  God models how we can live with each other, in trust and peace, beyond the cycles of violence we’re currently victim to. 
 
The second covenant was the promise to Abraham and Sarah, that God would make of them a great nation, if they would go to the new place God led them to, and for their trusting faith in God, God would finally give them a son, in their old age, and Isaac, would be the sign that they would have many ancestors, as numerous as the sands in the desert.  Therefore, we call Abraham and Sarah the father and mother of our faith, for us as Christians, as well as the Jews.  St. Paul specifically names, this story, when talking about how we, as Gentiles, are grafted on to the tree of believers, a branch of our Abrahamic God, and that we are saved by God’s grace through the same faith. 
 
Today’s covenant story is less well known, and doubly hard to understand!  As the people of God wander in the wilderness, in our First Reading, no closer to the Promised Land, they grumble and complain, and finally are besieged by snakes.  And only in the face of death, do they acknowledge their impatient ways to Moses, and ask for a remedy.  “8And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live,’” says our Reading from Numbers.  “9So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” 
 
We might wonder, how does that covenant even work?  Looking at a bronze snake, lifted up on top of a pole, protects you from an actual poisonous snake bite?  Wouldn’t it be smarter to carry the antidote in your pocket?  Or just call 911? 
 
Across the Near East, serpents, were believed to be both good and bad.  And just like the flu vaccine, the antidote was made from the poison itself.  So, the theological point still holds: The God of the wandering Israelites is stronger than the gods of the snakes.  The God of the chosen people is ‘God of all creation,’ and if God says I’ll take care of you and save you from dying, whether it’s with a doctors vaccine, or with Moses’ bronze serpent on a pole – believe me, it doesn’t matter much, how! 
 
So, the covenant we read about this week, is a salvific promise, it’s life giving!  Like all covenants with God, it is not the kind of agreement made between two equals, like you and I, or like we might make in buying or selling a home.  Our God is a jealous God, as the 10 Commands say, and God is the one initiating the covenant and drawing up the terms.  We can of course, reject God’s covenants.  But, if we accept the terms, we find that, God is a God of life and light, and can only do good. 
 
Still, living within God’s covenants is not easy – and it can be confusing, because we are also bound by our life in the world right now.  And so, we live in this, so-called, ‘in-between time.’ 
 
For example, God does not even take away the snakes, you might notice, in our First Reading.  God doesn’t stop the snakes from biting.  In the same way, we are still in the thick of this limited and corruptible world.  We’re part of the world that has over-used fossil fuels, pushing our fragile eco-system past the ability to sustain life of all kinds, in the way it was created to. 
 
And we’re part of the world too, of human desires, of coveting our neighbors stuff – money, jobs, pensions, schools, homes, trees, and water – which are also, all part of such fragile, social and political systems, which cannot survive outside of the covenant gift, of God’s forgiveness. 
 
This is the world we live in, far from perfect, and able to inflict the bite of pain and death.  But at the same time we live in the world of the New Covenant, which the Son of Man came to ‘live and die for.’  “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus said, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have life in God’s new age.” 
 
And so we live in an overlapping of ages.  This Christian way, does not undo the Jewish belief in the Messiah, who brings in the new age.  But because we believe the Messiah has already come in Jesus, we see the new age beginning with the Passion of Christ.  And that’s where the overlap comes in, and why we say we have a foot in two worlds, two aeons.  We still live in this fragile, fallible age – but we also, by our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, live preliminarily, in the life in God’s new age. 
 
So this covenant agreement today, is not only to look on ‘the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up.’  But to look to Christ who was ‘lifted up’ on the pole of the cross, and see that his death was for the sake of God’s whole world.  It’s a renewal of the covenants of Jesus’ ancestors, the Hebrews, but also a New Covenant, a sacrifice to end all sacrifices – that when we look up and see that his killing by the authorities didn’t bring victory, but we realize that it was Jesus’ life of service and self-giving sacrifice, which God choose to lift up in his resurrection, that brings redemption.  We should be, appalled and horrified, at the blood Jesus shed, and the violence of the crucifixion, so that we are moved to never again participate in the cycles of blood-violence that can only, in the end, hurt everyone. 
 
So on this 4th Sunday in Lent, the covenant of the one lifted up is really a mini-story within the larger gospel story, of a good news for us.  The gospel message is that Jesus died for the sake of the world, and was raised by God on the third day, to inaugurate ‘life in the new age.’  And that, as we believe and become followers of Christ Jesus, we have that life already, even in this ‘veil of tears.’ 
 
Our Lenten journey, these 40 days, is really our walk, and our calling, every day!  As we walk to the cross with Jesus, being renewed by the promises of God, we still will have our struggles and endure back-biting, but we also have the community of faith, to remind us of God’s covenant promises.  In the promise of forgiveness, like when we gather around the font and are able to look one another in the eye – we know we are strengthened for the journey by God’s love, and we are able then to forgive one another.  And when we do that, more and more, wherever we are, with our family, our friends, and our neighbors, we begin to make the world that God desires, and keep a foot in God’s life in the new age. 
 
The original journey that Moses and the Israelites took was 40 years – not just 40 days.  Many of the Hebrews that were liberated from Egypt would never see the Promised Land.  Maybe that’s why they grumbled about the terrible food in the desert, and remembered the meals they had in captivity, as delicious! 
 
For us too, our journey is a life-long walk.  Each of us is called to follow Jesus in our own shoes, on the way.  But, all of us, look to the one who was ‘lifted up’ on the cross, that we might live, and share in the promised new age. 
 
Baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, we are saved already, and we have nothing to fear.  Let us continue our journey as faithful followers, strengthened in the covenant of Water and the Word.