Covenant Renewal 2009

01/04/09
Covenant Renewal 2009
Hudson UMC

Today, we come together to renew our covenant with God. The question I want to address is, “What in the world is a covenant?” If you have grown up in the church, you may very well have heard of a few different covenants. God made a covenant with Adam, He made a covenant with Noah, He made a covenant with Abraham, He made a covenant with David, and we talk about having a new covenant in Christ. There are all kinds of covenants in the Bible. While we might pick up a bit of what covenants are based on the contexts in which we find them, the fact remains that we do not use the word covenant very often, if at all. I want to spend just a little bit of time this morning, before we renew our covenant with God by using the same liturgy that was used among the very first Methodists, to explain a bit of what a covenant is.

If you were to look up the word, “covenant,” in a dictionary, you would find definitions like, “A contract drawn up by deed,” or, “A clause in a contract,” but that wouldn’t really help you, would it? The only thing that those definitions would tell you is that the word “covenant” probably has some kind of legal connotation. Other than that, it might even cause problems. After all, you might very well say, “I know that the idea of a covenant is supposed to be a big deal, but I simply can’t relate it to anything in my life. Why should I even care?” It is a shame that unfamiliar concepts all too often discourage people from reading the Bible and searching out its meaning rather than encouraging them to do so.

The idea of a covenant is an ancient one. It is indeed a legal term, but we won’t understand it if we only think about courtrooms and lawyers. People sometimes say that a covenant is an agreement. This is not entirely wrong, but it is a particular type of agreement. A covenant is made when there are two parties, each of which promise to do something specific. For example, God tells Abraham to leave his hometown and travel off into unknown territory. If he does this, God promises that He will be Abraham’s God and Abraham’s children will be God’s people. Abraham does something and God does something. If Abraham were to stay at home and not do his part, the covenant would be violated. If, after Abraham fulfilled his part of the bargain, God refused to be Abraham’s God, the covenant would also be broken. Neither party is at liberty to go back on their agreement.

You see, in a normal contract, only one party is bound to fulfill the terms of the agreement. God would have been fully within His rights as the ultimate creator of the universe, the one who can do literally whatever He wants, to issue Abraham or anyone else a contract, but He does not do so. God, the great unbounded being, has willingly bounded Himself to us in a way that restricts His own divine freedom. When God made that covenant with Abraham, God was no longer free to violate the agreement. Before the covenant was made, God did not owe Abraham anything, but once it was made, God was made less free for only one reason: to do us good. Our God is so humble and loving that He would rather limit his divine freedom than be God without us. God could have simply ordered us around, binding us to arbitrary rules that made no claim on His actions; and yet He does not. God, the uncreated one, has bound himself to humanity and we have everything to gain from it.

So far, I have emphasized God’s part of the covenant, but, since the whole point of a covenant is that it goes two ways, I would be remiss to ignore our part of the covenant. When God made the covenant with Abraham, Abraham made a sacrifice. It was a heifer, a female goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon. When Abraham agreed to the covenant, he did not only agree to live a certain way, which I will come back to, but he also made a very real sacrifice at that very moment. He put his money where his mouth is and did something to show that he had made a covenant with God. The church has been in the business of helping people make a covenant with God for two thousand years. However, though so many people have joined the church over that time, how very few have done anything as radical as Abraham, to take their covenant with God so seriously that it causes them to make sacrifices, to turn their lives around, and to show the world what it means to have a covenant with God, what it means to be bound to the Lord and to have the Lord bound to you. You may or may not have ever thought about your covenant with God like this before, but we are going to renew our covenant today. I pray that you would consider letting the reality of your covenant take hold of you in a radical way today.

I have been emphasizing the fact that a covenant is something that goes two ways, that it makes claims on both parties involved. God has said to us that, if we love Him, if we do what He says, if we become the sort of people who are following the ways of God and being formed into the image of Christ by the Holy Spirit, then He will be our God and provide for all our needs, watching over us, strengthening us, and preparing us for the age to come. However, it means we actually have to live that way. God is merciful, and has shown us over and over again in the Bible that, when people make mistakes, when we mess up and do not follow Him like we should, there is another chance, but we cannot neglect the serious call of God to live like the people of God are called to live. If we are refusing to be transformed by the Gospel, we are not the children of God. So, even if you’ve gone to church every week of your life, even if you have never given God the time of day, even if you don’t really know what the Christian life looks like, be reminded that we are called to be a covenant people, who abide in God in all things like a branch abides in the vine.

There is a sense in which God has made a covenant with each and every one of us as individuals. We are all individually called to love God and live holy lives, but this covenant is not merely made with us as individuals. It is made with us in community. We are all in this together. We are not individually covenant people but are partakers of the covenant of God insofar as we are participating in the life of the body of Christ, which is made up of all believers everywhere. All of us who renew this covenant today with sincere hearts are bound together: Bound to support one another, bound to join together in ministry and to accomplish the greater good. As we renew our covenant with God this morning, let us remember that we do so, not as individuals, but as a church, a congregation united by the love of Christ. Let us go into this New Year with a fresh and powerful understanding of how God has shaped us, how He is shaping us, and how He will shape us in the days ahead. Let us pray.

AMEN