A Question of Covenants
Throughout the Biblical story, God makes a series of interconnecting covenants, extending from all of creation to specific people in particular contexts. Our challenge is to ask ourselves why we so often choose the most narrow one, yielding to our impulse to focus God’s grace on our lives and make ourselves the center of the narrative. How can we see ourselves as part of the whole and celebrate God’s presence in every aspect of life?
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
Glimpses of Grace on Spotify
Transcript
“Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be”. . . . As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” (Genesis)
How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! (Luke)
When I was a child, most of the pine forests that surrounded our town were divided up among several deer camps for their use during hunting season. The camp my family had was called Po Boy, and the one next door was called Chinquapin (also the name of a parish in Louisiana, of course). As you drove down highways and back into the gravel logging roads, you would see lavender paint on the sides of trees that marked the boundary of the Po Boy hunting grounds. Each year, people who knew exactly where the boundaries were would go out and touch up the paint to get ready for the Fall deer season. There was agreement among the camps as to where the boundaries were, and while no one ever told me the proper course of action to take if someone shot a deer on one side and it ran to the other, I know there was an agreement among the hunters as to what was mine and what was yours.
I thought of this memory when I was reflecting on today’s texts because of the dynamic of covenants. A covenant is a commitment between two or more parties to live in a certain way, to abide by a certain agreement. The parties lay out the agreement, and then there is a degree of trust that each side will live up to the commitment they have made. Those hunters made a covenant with each other, and their covenant laid out where the boundary lines were, noting who was on what side of which camp’s territory. Today’s Genesis reading is a pivotal covenant between God and Abram.
The dynamic of a covenant lies at the heart of much of our understanding of how God works in the world. How do we understand God’s actions towards us and our actions towards God? How is God committed to our well-being, and how are we committed both to worshipping God and embodying the way of life God says is in line with God’s intention for creation?
When it comes to living into this commitment, perhaps we can see the points of tension. Being the humans we are, there is a certain pull towards what some who study faith development call a mythic-membership level or space. In such a mythic-membership framework, the focus goes towards overly-identifying with our familiar ‘group.’ The pattern is to conform, and our identity becomes fused with the direction of a particular group of people. We are usually suspicious of other ‘types of people’ who are on the other side of the boundaries we believe are most important.
In theological terms, we claim God’s blessing mostly or exclusively for our particular group rather than imagining that God’s blessing and presence might embrace a much wider perspective–of which our ‘group’ is a part but of which it does not need to be in control or to be the center.
In such a mythic-membership framework, there is a certain anxiety towards a more expansive view, because it feels like it threatens the safety or control of the smaller ‘group’ who identifies itself as the center of the conversation–or the divine action. Out of such a posture of anxiety and exclusivism, we will constrict our understanding of grace down to the size we are already comfortable with–which of course is the size that places us in control of the boundary markers of God’s actions. Our ego grasping mind wants to place us at the center of life.
Then, in theological terms, we describe ourselves as abiding by “God’s covenant,” which (not surprisingly) has placed us at the center of the area of grace, defined by the boundary markers we maintain, like freshening up the paint on the trees when it seems to wear down.
The way we can tell this is true is that even as I say this or you read this, perhaps we are already thinking of Bible verses that back up our desire to be in control. We are already thinking of the verses we quickly turn to that describe such covenants that place us at the center.
The struggle, of course, is that God has made several covenants. The whole of the Biblical witness explicitly lays out a series of covenants in detail, but of course, our tendency is to focus on the ones that already support our worldview instead of expanding our worldview according to a much wider understanding of how God’s grace works.
Within the whole of the Biblical texts, we can see a first covenant at creation with Adam and Eve that is universal in scope. When that covenant was broken, the actions of our legendary ancestors led to the moment of Noah and the flood, at which point God made another universal covenant with Noah and all creation that remains to this day.
Today’s Genesis text with Abram can be seen as the next covenant, with God promising offspring to Abram/Abraham as numerous as the stars in the sky. Of course, those descendents of Abraham include Jews, Christians, and Muslims so all have equal claim to this great covenant of God, and we see the tension of this covenant played out in real time even today.
Then there are the two covenants with both Ishmael and Isaac, Abraham’s two sons. Both children are bearers of a covenant with God, with the Arab people and Muslims seeing themselves as the descendents of Ishmael and thus bearers of God’s blessing alongside the blessing of Isaac and the lineage of his descendents.
Then there is the covenant with Moses, after Joseph was sold into slavery. Joseph became head of pharaoh’s house, but the Hebrew people were later taken into bondage only to be rescued by Moses, who was chosen by God to lead the Hebrew people into freedom. Again they were promised the land flowing with milk and honey.
Then there is the covenant between God and King David, with a special emphasis on the lineage of King David and the protection of the people of Israel, as well as an understanding that his throne would be established forever. So, this is a special covenant claimed by the Jewish people today.
Then, there is the covenant that Christians seek to embody, that was established through Christ, God incarnate in the person of Jesus. The Gospels describe Jesus as a descendent of King David who has brought salvation to the world. While there are many ways to understand our participation in this Christian covenant, we would do well to remember that Jesus himself said in the Gospel of John: I have other sheep that do not belong to this flock. (John 10:16)
On one level, we can interpret these covenants as a series of nesting dolls, with universal covenants on one level leading to more defined and particular covenants. On another level, perhaps we see them as interconnecting covenants that are developed as human history unfolds through time and continues to discern how God is acting in the world.
Here is a key question for us: if God is a God who makes and keeps God’s covenants, and God has made all of these covenants, how do we understand ourselves situated within them?
Put another way, what is it about us that seeks the most narrow covenant that places us at the center of divine grace? There is a particular school of thought within some Christian traditions that claims that the Christian covenant has superseded the ones made to the Jews and others, but the problem with this is that we should ask ourselves what it means to worship a God who would break covenants with anyone. How can we trust?
While we may want to claim an exclusive status for our covenant, that is not what God says at all. To me, this is a blessing, because as much time as we spend mending those boundaries, God’s grace just washes right over them into all of creation. The divine freedom is not confined by our narcissism.
I would argue that these questions of covenants are perhaps the most important questions we can ask ourselves, because we continue to kill one another over a limited perspective of God’s covenantal action. If we maintain a narrow focus on God’s action, we believe it gives us special status (that pesky notion of exceptionalism), that it even gives us license to control others; however, we must come to grips with the fact that God has made expansive covenants that hold all of creation in a relative state of divine grace.
We have a powerful image of God holding us in an embrace of grace in today’s Gospel reading, when Jesus says How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!
The question is always before us: what image of God do we direct our attention to, focus our intention on: an image of God that focuses on more narrow covenants in which we are conveniently placed at the center? Or a more expansive covenant that holds all of creation in an embrace of love, justice, and peace that challenges our narcissistic tendencies?
There is a powerful quote from the great 19th century minister and Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson that we would do well to keep close these days:
A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret, in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshiping, we are becoming.
Perhaps part of the tension or pain of these days is that we are gaining clarity on our particular image of God and ourselves, our theological anthropology. With this clarity, we are called to make difficult decisions about where we invest our lives, who we spend time with, and what actions we take. In other words, we are challenged to live life more consciously, to stretch spiritual muscles we have not used. We become more aware that our life is our practice, and our hearts are called to open, yes, to a more expansive view of God’s love that breaks through the rigid boundaries we want to place to protect our own self-interest.
To return to the image of the hunters at the deer camp, I can never forget that while they spent so much time marking and maintaining the boundaries between the hunting grounds, none of them actually owned any of the land. They were allowed to use it for their own enjoyment, but at the end of the day, they were not the owners. Talk about keeping your ego in check.