Sermons

Heirs of the Covenant

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
March 12, 2006                           Romans 4:13-25

We are squarely in the season of Lent, and marking this season in many ways. Forty or so of us are participating in a venture called Lenten Covenant groups. Another group of us is working through a series of sermons by well-known preachers. Our children, next Sunday, will be given their One Great Hour of Sharing coin banks. Next Sunday evening, all of us are invited to a Lenten gathering. Come at 5:45; we will eat at 6:00. It’s a true potluck meal so bring a dish to share. There are no huge programmatic goals: we will seek to connect with one another and deepen our ties a little bit, and then share worship together, appropriate for all ages and every age. Signing up would help in our planning, but even if you do not decide to come until the last minute, please do so.

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I am not sure that this is a good confession to make, but I will do so anyway. I confess that I do not remember all that much from my childhood Sunday school lessons. What I do remember is very important: a deep sense of God’s love, a connection with Jesus, the care and nurture of a string of dedicated Sunday school teachers, a feeling of welcome by the bigger church. But if there had been a Sunday school regent’s exam, I would have been up a creek without a means of propulsion, as my high school physics teacher might say.

Except for this…except for the fact that I will always remember the lesson about covenant. I do not remember the year, but I remember the notion of what covenant was, and what it was not. What it was not was a contract, a relationship with clearly defined terms that either side could end, or that could be terminated by certain behaviors by either side. What it was was a permanent, unbreakable relationship that God struck with God’s people long ago, and that God continues to keep even though the people continually do things to mess it up.

This was a simple, profound lesson, worth remembering even now. It is at the very heart of our faith as biblical people, and more so, it is at the very heart of who God is.

It starts with Abraham, and now, more rightly, Abraham and Sarah, as we heard a few minutes ago. “I will establish my covenant between me and you,” God says to Abraham, “and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.”

The covenant was about people and a home, a promise that successive generations would arise and that they would have land, a place to live. Our needs are not much more basic than that, even now. On the human side of things, skipped by this morning’s lectionary passage, was the commitment to circumcision – perhaps a medical commitment, perhaps a cultural commitment, as well as a religious commitment, a kind of a sign.

But at the heart of it all is God’s gracious promise to Abraham and Sarah and their descendents. Including us. It is unmerited and un-earnable. And yet it is.

God’s covenant faithfulness became a pillar of the Apostle Paul’s theology. Where Adam had failed, according to Paul, Abraham did not fail, and Jesus Christ became both a new Adam and the physical embodiment of God’s covenant faithfulness first articulated to Abraham.

It was a difficult matter then; it is equally as difficult and more complex now. And yet covenant theology addresses the question of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity clearly and compellingly. The covenant stands forever, Paul insists, like a tree. Jews faithful to that covenantal promise will continue to be a part of it. And now Christians, those who have learned about God’s gracious promises through Jesus, will be grafted to the tree as well. There will be fussing and debate about circumcision as a sign of membership. Paul dismisses that debate – for whom it has mattered, it will continue to matter. For whom it did not, it need not.

It is about faith, at the end of the day. Our faith to be sure, but more so, God’s faith, the faith of the one who is a promise keeper, the one, even, who raised Jesus from the dead.

Katherine Grieb, whose volume on Romans we have been studying this past year, insists that Chapter Four of Romans contains Paul’s central argument and is therefore central to our understanding of the faith. Abraham is the “spiritual father” of all of us, Grieb contends, not because he did anything, but because he trusted God’s covenant promises. (The Story of Romans, pages 52-54) And we trust in God because God is trustworthy, and by so doing, we have access to the power of God, which is the “power to create out of nothing and raise from the dead.” (Page 54)

The great 20th century theologian Karl Barth wrote rather lofty prose about all of this: “This radiance (of God) obliterates the isolation of personality, the remoteness of the past, the aloofness of peculiarity, and all those purely incidental elements of which the individual is made up, and brings out what is common to every happening in history as well as its dignity and importance.” (The Epistle to the Romans, page 140)

That is to say, this is all about God, and how God acts in human history to redeem each moment, to make important each event, to restore each person. God is not a God above our story, but God is the God of our story, and God has promised, has made a covenant, to be the central character of history, to maintain faithfulness, even when we wander away.

The implications of all this for our living are deep and broad. Eugene Osterhaven writes that “because we are not our own, but belong to Christ…we are as lights in a dark world that shine and glorify God.” (Encyclopedia of the Reformed Faith, page 87) As children of the covenant, as members of the body of Christ, we make God’s covenant faithfulness and gracious promises real to a world n deep need of good news and reconciliation.
Elsewhere in Romans, Paul uses the image of an olive tree to help us understand all of this. There are roots that support the tree and that provide sustenance to the branches. Some branches will need to be pruned because of their lack of faithfulness, to be sure, but God’s agenda is growth, the growth of natural branches that have been a part of the tree since its beginning, and branches that have been grafted on later.

I do not know if you have even seen an olive tree in the Middle East. Some, they say, are as old as 2000 years. They do not grow with linear precision. They are gnarly and tangled. Sometimes they appear to be growing sideways out of a hill. And yet they grow and persevere.

This past November, after what was probably a decade of illness, we removed a large copper beech tree on the church’s East Avenue grounds. The bark was peeling; branches were falling off. Specialists and many dollars could not save it. It took a very rigorous 3 or 4 days to remove it. You can see now where it was, and we are hopeful that after some sections of it are cured that we will have reminders of that extraordinary tree around here some place.

After the tree was cut down, it was determined that it was approximately 125 years old. More than half of this nation’s age, I thought; more than 1/20th of the history of Christianity. Think of every human and technical development that has happened since the time it was a seed and a sapling.

Losing that tree was hard to watch and it still kind of stops you in your tracks when you pull into the parking lot. And yet we are working with the city on a new tree plan, not a replacement exactly, but something new. And whatever takes its place will have its own grace and beauty, will witness its own history, will provide its own shade, will no doubt provide its own headaches to property committees decades from now.

It, like we, are heirs of the covenant. A tree does not teach itself how to grow, nor does it nurture itself. The God who is faithful to each one of us is faithful even to that as-yet-unplanted tree. We do nothing, nothing, to merit God’s gracious promises, and yet here we are, redeemed, restored, grafted in. And by such faithfulness, we will bloom and grow and flourish. We will provide shade and protection to a hurting world, to our youngest and oldest and most in need. And when the time comes, we will pass this on to the next generation, because that, too, is the nature of the promise.

A people. A place. A relationship. Thanks be to God, ever faithful and ever to be faithful, through Sarah and Abraham, through the Apostle Paul, through Christ’s death and resurrection, and even to this very moment. Amen.