Sermons

Covenant and Crash

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
April 2, 2006                                  Jeremiah 31:31-34

It won the Best Picture Oscar several weeks ago, even though I was personally pulling for the “Wallace and Gromit” movie. “Crash” depicts 24 hours or so in the life of present-day Los Angeles. It is compelling, frustrating, often profane, occasionally sacred, focusing on matters of race and the ways that simple, seemingly random human encounters both reflect and give shape to our experience.

On an even deeper level, “Crash” provides a lens to the ways that the early 21st century world in which we live is spinning apart. All throughout, I could not help but think that what we need to be doing is hanging on to one another, clinging to one another, but what we are doing instead is pushing each other away.

The issues of “Crash” are all around us – racially, to be sure, but even more so in the ways that we connect, or do not connect, with one another. Without giving too much away, there are conflicts beyond race. Mother and son. Husband and wife. Employer and employed. Brother and brother. Many more.

And if we are disconnected personally, as people to people, then that is true as well in our city of Rochester, and the many communities from which we come. We are finding it difficult to come together in a moment when little else is needed except for us to come together – schools, jobs, crime.

And in the church – even more do we need to say more?

If we stayed right at this spot, at this intersection of despair and disunity and crash, in any of our constellations, our prospects would be grim. But we do not and they are not. We are called to something new, and given the gifts and resources so to experience it, for the benefit of our souls and the healing of the nations.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant.” The prophet Jeremiah uttered those words on God’s behalf in a circumstance of despair, political crisis and theological hopelessness. You will remember the context – reform followed by destruction and exile. A prophetic critique of religious practices and the broader stage of geopolitical upheaval. A veritable mirror of our times.

And what the prophet prescribed was something altogether old and altogether new. A new covenant. Not like the old one, but connected to it. A covenant established from the inside-out, with the law written on the hearts of the people.

This covenant, Patrick Miller writes, will be about obedience but will not be rule-driven. (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume VI, page 815)

Ronald Clements writes that this is not a new law, but a new way of knowing and keeping the law. (Interpretation Commentary: Jeremiah, page 191)

Walter Brueggemann insists that this covenant “looks not to a displacement of Judaism but to a reconstitution of Judaism in a mode of glad obedience. (Introduction to the Old Testament, page 189)

As we have noted throughout the Lenten season, covenant has been, and is, a central biblical and theological theme. It has been even more so for we Reformed and Presbyterian Christians.

Theologian Jan Rohls reminds us that the Westminster Confession, for centuries the sole doctrinal statement of the American Presbyterian church, is strong on covenant. In Westminster, God’s relationship to human beings is always a covenantal relationship – only because God makes a covenant with human beings is God accessible to us at all. (Reformed Confessions, page 68)

Clark Williamson helps to define the terms: “Covenant is never properly understood as enforced legality with dangerous power coercing our agreement. (Covenant states that) we are created for proper relationships with God, ourselves, one another and nature. Covenant is possible,” Williamson writes, “not because the covenant partner is worthy, but because God commits God-self to new kinds of solidarity. Covenant is a social prescription for hope – what human life might yet be like.” (See Essentials of Christian Theology, edited by William Placher, pages 169-170)

That is why this is so crucially important for such a time as this, more than an archaic doctrine that seemed important once upon a time. It has been central to our tradition for a reason, ever clear and compelling in a season of “crash.”

Miroslav Volf, whose theological mind has been defined by the experience of balkanization in Croatia, writes that now more than ever we are called to “hold on to each other in solidarity,” to make “a covenant of justice rather than oppression, of truth rather than deception, of peace rather than violence.” (Exclusion and Embrace, pages 150-151)

Volf envisions a covenant as a relationship that is self-giving, that transcends the notion of taking sides. This is true for nations and communities – a civic covenant based on moral commitment. It is even more true for the church, the body of Christ. “The cross,” Volf writes, “teaches us about how to renew the covenant…strengthening covenants that are fragile, repairing the covenants that are broken, and keeping the covenant from being completely undone.” (Pages 153-154)

I will restrain myself to one Theological Task Force reference this morning! We approached our work from many angles, and though we never defined it in quite these terms, the notion of covenant was never far from us. How do we rejuvenate, restore and renew a covenant community that has been, in recent years, defined by conflict and decline?

Early on in our final report we state that “We worship and serve a covenant-making God…whose unbreakable covenant with Abraham, Sarah, and their progeny is now, by the raising of Jesus Christ from the dead, extended to the Gentiles…In this covenant we have a new vision of what the human family is called to be…Our relations to others are transformed and reoriented.” (See “A Season of Discernment: The Final Report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church,” Lines 82-97)

Can it be true that we in the body of Christ – in this church and in the church anywhere and everywhere it gathers – are bound together by a covenant, by our baptism, called to worry less about who’s in and who’s out and more abut how we show forth the new heart that God has promised to effect within us? (Miller, page 816)

What would it look like for us to take our renewed covenant seriously and allow it to spill over into a vision of restoration and reconciliation for all of God’s human family, to overcome tendencies and impulses to spin apart and rather to hold on to one another, because God so desires to hold onto us?

The current Geva production of “Inherit the Wind” addresses some very, very current issues through the fictionalized lens of the Scopes “monkey” trial, issues that have a great deal to do with our civil covenant. But at the end, there is a poignant, non-political moment. Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow character, has just soundly defeated Mathew Harrison Brady, the William Jennings Bryan character.

Bryan, by the way, was a devout Presbyterian, combining a deep evangelical fervor with a strong social commitment. He ran unsuccessfully for President and stood unsuccessfully for General Assembly moderator at the time of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. But I digress!

Brady has suffered a stroke or a heart attack or both. Left in the courtroom are Drummond and Hornbeck, the H.L. Mencken character. Hornbeck the cynical reporter gloats, and Drummond refuses to have anything to do with it. Apparently more gracious than the real Clarence Darrow, Drummond insists that he and his opponent – in spite of their immense and intense differences – are connected to one another, personally and morally. “You smart-aleck," Drummond says to Hornbeck. “You have no more right to spit on his religion than you have to spit on my religion. Or my lack of it.” Hornbeck responds: “Well, what do you know! Henry Drummond for the defense, even of his enemies!”

There they are, in my terms, a little covenant community drawn together, bound together, so much more than they are driven apart.

The movie “Crash” does not end neatly or happily, and as I have said I will not spoil it for you. But there are moments, covenant moments, when people come together. A white, racist, violent policeman and an African-American woman whom he has terrorized the night before come together in an unexpected way.

It may be a cinematic cliché, but it may also be a vision, a glimpse of community, a glimpse of the commonwealth of God.

“The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant…I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people...they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

Thanks be to God for this promise. In the name of the one at whose table people will come from east and west and north and south, the one we call Lamb of God. Amen.