Sermons

Toward Covenant

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  April 6, 2003                          Jeremiah 31:31-34/John 12:20-36

Gracious God, it seems as if at moments we are like fragile tree limbs, encased in ice, ready to snap off and fall to the ground. And yet your word surrounds us. We thank you for that word. We thank you that we can be here, together, many of us without heat and light. We thank you for the perseverance of community and the call to be your people. Be with us now and open your word once again to us, in this place, for this moment. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.

More than 30 years ago, Robert Bellah, the well-known sociologist of religion – or at least well known in the niche-market of sociology of religion – wrote a book called The Broken Covenant. (You may actually remember another of Bellah’s works, Habits of the Heart.)

In The Broken Covenant, Bellah put forth the argument that something called “American civil religion” was in deep trouble. Civil religion was not a common set of religious practices or beliefs, at least according to Bellah. It was, rather, a set of common understandings, many of them moral, that undergird American life.

Bellah grew up in the 1930’s, and much of his work explores in an academic way the very personal hunch that America in the 1970’s, and he would extrapolate to the early 2000’s, feels somehow “different” than the America of his youth. It’s an argument we all could make, I would submit, regardless of the decade in which we grew up.

Yet we must be careful about nostalgia. Bellah says that the American covenant, which had something to do with founding a new society based on new ideals, failed nearly as quickly as it was founded. The vision of our earliest documents, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, “with liberty and justice for all,” never quite found their full traction.

These are important questions for us to be asking these days. They would be important questions even without the presence of a war in which people are dying; their importance becomes all the more punctuated because of war – a historical moment that brings into focus many important issues.

Last week following worship, a group gathered for lunch, led ably by Miriam Gale and Rich Ryan. We were encouraged not to opine on the war, (a difficult task for some!) but rather to share our feelings and perspectives. You should try it some time.

I later found a poem by Episcopal priest Blayney Colmore that reflected what I have been experiencing, and what many of you seem to have been experiencing as well. “At the risk of surrendering the high moral ground/from which I prefer to observe the world/ I have recently faced the humbling understanding that my feeling dispirited/in this trigger-happy time/is caused as much by my unclearness about/Everything/ as it is by my clearness about / Anything.” (Blayney Colmore, in “Crossroads,” the newsletter of St. Bartholomew’s Church, March 3, 2003)

Bellah’s conception of the American covenant suggests that for one brief moment, we lived with a set of values and ideals that were common and shared and virtually within reach. And then we forgot them, quickly, dramatically.

To sum up our brokenness, we forgot we were part of a community and decided we were better off going it alone, a kind of moral and political “rugged individualism.” And we’ve been living with the implications ever since.

Why does any of this matter? It matters because the biggest questions we face these days are common, questions of community and covenant. They might not produce unanimous answers, as the current discourse on war indicates. But at least we should be able to provide a common platform on which we might have the conversation.

We have fallen into a caricature of our best society, our best nation. It is still a grand place, mind you, and glimpses of that original promise pop up here and there. And to think of that original covenant is not to hearken back to a moment when everything was perfect – it never was and never will be. The issue is community, connectedness, and how we are neighbors one to another.

What does that mean? What does it mean to live as the sole remaining superpower? What does globalization mean: economically, politically, morally? How does technology serve us? How do we allocate resources in a world defined by the division between scarcity and abundance? What does all this mean?

The answers will never be easy, and they certainly will never be unanimous. But the question that perplexes us, and perhaps haunts us, is how will we even have the conversation?

Even on a local level, it seems that we have given up the hard work of discerning what it means to be community. I am no politician, and I haven’t lived in these parts very long, but it seems to me that the challenges we face – violence in the city, education, economic development – will only be addressed, let alone solved, if we are able to think about some sort of civic covenant, a regional civil religion, that has us talking with one another, and not to or at or about one another.

It is an ecclesiastical problem as well – that’s the big word for it being a “church” problem. We had a good conversation in the Calvin Guild the other day that reminded us that nearly as soon as American Presbyterians got together that began devising ways of separating. And we have been doing so ever since. What Robert Bellah calls “radical individualism” in the culture, we could as well call the same in religious life.

That doesn’t mean that we all need to believe the same thing. Heavens no! How boring that would be. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we need to agree with everybody on everything. Again – heavens no! Imagine every church singing the same hymns and believing the same things and wearing the same color choir robes and teaching their children exactly the same things about exactly the same things. God is more interesting than that and God is certainly interested in more than that.

And yet, imagine us actually talking with one another. Again, last Sunday’s lunch experience remains with us, where we actually talked with, and listened to, one another. We don’t do that very well. We don’t do that individually very well, and we certainly don’t do that well in the life of the church – not this church specifically so – but the big old church out there of which we are a part.

Imagine us actually talking with one another as Presbyterians, as Christians, as people of faith. Imagine us agreeing to raise the sights on our conflicts. Or imagine us praying, together, without ceasing, so that we might catch glimpses now and then of how God would have us to be. And then imagine that conversation – something about renewing the nature of our covenant, our relationships, our community – spilling over and somehow benefiting our culture and society. A little yeast or salt. Perhaps a little light for the world.

What we will do in a few moments can be just that. We will receive a morsel of bread and a little taste from a cup that, rather than turning us into the least common denominator of who we are, raises us to the greatest common factor of who we might be.

And it will give us a foretaste, to use the old, old words, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet – where all have a place and all are fed. At this table the covenant is renewed. We will speak a common language; we will share a common vision.

And we do so not to abdicate our identity as an individual child of God, but to join the choir of children of God, to lead us beyond ourselves, to renew the covenant, to place us in radical community with every other sinner who has a place at the table, and in turn, to take our place in the broadest possible human community so that we make our modest and humble offering about the way things might be.

Theologian William Placher writes that “The table of the Lord’s Supper is his, not ours; it is not our place to institute selectivity that he never imposed. This is a table for sinners who share, one with another, in the heavenly feast by sharing in the presence of the one who died for their sins – in communion with Jesus only to the extent that we share the meal with everyone else who comes.” (Jesus the Savior, page 126)

This meal we will share in a bit certainly raises many questions. What does it mean to be a child of God? What does it mean to be children of God? What does it mean to be children of light, as Jesus suggested in our gospel reading this morning? How does what happens here matter in my life and in the life of the world?

Those are life-long questions, and the answers are most certainly the journey of faith itself. But the point for the moment is that we ask them at the table, in community, in relationship, and that we are the better and the stronger when we ask the questions together even as we seek their answers one with another.

And we know that. We just forget it. And this table reminds us.

It reminds us “that the days are surely coming” when God’s law will be in our hearts and not a matter of political or ideological wrangling. The days are surely coming when the best of our energy will be spent on matters of forgiveness and hospitality. The days are surely coming when we, the people of God and the children of light, will study war no more.

And until that day – that most precious day – we will gather at table and plan for its arrival, a kind of dress rehearsal for that most grand performance, fed by the bread of live and the ever-flowing cup of the new covenant. Thanks be to God. Amen.