Covenant Renewal 2010

01/03/10
Covenant Renewal 2010
Hudson UMC

Today we have gathered together to renew our covenant with God. When all the world around us is putting together New Year’s resolutions that they hope to achieve by sheer willpower, let us know ourselves better. We know that we are called to be more holy than we are today but we also know, and this is incredibly important, that we are not able to become what we are called to be by our own strength and determination. The task before us is not as comparatively trivial as losing weight or reading more. We are setting ourselves once again to become the people of God, to be like Jesus every day and in every way. Basically, we are aiming to be like God was when He became a man and walked the earth.

You may say that this is impossible and, in a sense, you would be right. If I, as your preacher, were standing before you this morning saying that you need to dig deep into your soul, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and be a better, more moral, more loving, more passionate person, I would be asking you to do something utterly impossible. However, that is not the purpose of today’s service. Today’s service is not about glorifying us as individuals, us as a church, or us as a human race. Today’s service is about glorifying God because God has done amazing things in our midst.

Too often, people think about their relationship with God in terms of fear and obligation. They feel that, unless they do this and that, God won’t like them. If that is the way you think about God, this covenant renewal service will do nothing but scare the daylights out of you, because all you can see in it is a bunch of high expectations that you know you can’t meet. However, that is not how the Bible describes God.

Another way that people often think about their relationship with God is in terms of a contractual obligation where, if we do something, then God has to do something. This often goes in one of two directions. First, if we pray and do the right things, God will give us particular blessings like a steady job, a nice TV, a cool cell phone, and stuff like that. The second way this often takes shape is we believe that if we do certain things, like more good than bad, God has to let us into heaven. Aside from the fact that this way of viewing things has nothing to do with how the scriptures portray God, it is a totally arbitrary way of thinking about things. Usually, we use our own standards of good and evil, our own way of counting both the good deeds and the bad ones, and we weigh the different actions differently based on how important they are to us. God really isn’t allowed any say except to say “yes” to us when we die.

Today, though, we take a moment and try to reorient our ways of thinking about God so that they do not reflect what we want to say about God, but what God has actually revealed about Himself to us through Christ and in the Spirit. When we allow God’s own revelation of Himself to shape the way we think about Him, we begin to realize that none of those ways are anything close to how we should think about God. We begin to look at our relationship to God in terms of covenant.

Unlike a contract, there is not one party that states the terms and another party who is bound by them. Covenental relationships are relationships that are characterized by intense mutuality. The two sides are both in it for the benefit of the other and work together to make the relationship a success. So, it isn’t us telling God what He has to do for us, nor is it God telling us what we have to do for Him; it is God making an agreement with humanity where we work together.

Now, it is tempting, when we think of our relationship to God this way, to think about ourselves more highly than we ought to. We might start to think, “Hey, God wants to work with me, maybe I’ve got it all together. I must be pretty good if God wants to work together with me, right?” The problem with this is that, even when we are working with God, it is not as if we are doing our part on our own. When we participate in the covenant that God has made with us, we are not simply doing whatever we think is right, but we are joining Christ in His human life, worship and faith.

The consistent message of the New Testament is that our salvation is rooted, from beginning to end, in Christ. In our reading from John, Jesus says, “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” Jesus is saying that, if we abide in Him through the Holy Spirit, we will bear the fruit that God wants to work in us. If, however, we try to do things on our own, in some way other than by abiding in Christ, we can do nothing.

Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, has this to say. “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” The Christian life is Christ living His life in us. That will have certain implications for our lives and we will be fundamentally changed, but the change is not because we are so good or because we worked really hard, but simply because Christ is living His life in and through us.

As today’s service is based on the one that John Wesley used every year, it is only fitting to share a few words about Wesley’s whole view of this topic. First, Wesley claimed that, in the final analysis, we do not have grace from Christ, but only in Him. What this means is that grace is not something that we can detach from God, but is God interacting with us. Wesley distinguished between a bunch of different kinds of grace, but he always said that there was really only one kind of grace, God meeting us in a personal way.

Another thing that Wesley said, and this is important for us to understand today, is about how we should think about the commands of God. He said that, when we read a command from God, when we hear a moral demand made upon us by the Gospel, we are not to think of it only as a command, but as a promise of what God will work in our lives through grace.

So, as we join together and renew our covenant with God this morning, let us not think about it as if it were laying a bunch of heavy burdens and restrictions on us that we cannot bear. We need to look at the things we are about to say as promises based on the very being of God, that God will indeed bring these things to fulfillment in our lives. However, it will not happen in our lives simply as individuals, but as people who are gathered together as the community of the faithful. We can only fulfill the covenant if we allow God to transform us communally as well as individually. Let us covenant, then, not just with God, but with each other, that we will abide in Christ and bear much fruit. Let us pray.

AMEN