Sermon Text - April 13, 2008
"A Covenant of Promise: Blessed Be the Tie that Binds"
Rev. David Kratz
Isaiah 55
As Steve said, this is this Sunday does two things, one is that we’re going to reaffirm our commitment together as senior pastor and as people. Y'all voted on January 13 to call me again to another four-year term and today, what we're doing, you're making some promises and I'm making some promises, we’re saying a prayer to help God help us to fulfill our promises to one another and then we’ll declare that it's done. And we will celebrate it that way, so it's in the sense of formalizing but what I would say it's the kind of ritualizing of our relationship. And that's very important.
It's also the time of the year where we focus on renewing our commitments to one another to be part of Fauntleroy Church. Next Sunday we’ll have a couple folks who will make their first covenant with us. They’ll promise to become part of this community and promise their resources and their attendance and their growth and their service as we try to do those things together as a part of Christ's body in this place.
And then in three weeks or four weeks on May 4 we’ll all get a chance to re-covenant together as we make our pledges of time and talent and treasure to the common work together. The common word in all this is “covenant,” and I want to spend a little time talking about it this morning. It is what holds us together, our covenants, and as a backdrop for that I want to read one of my favorites Scripture readings and the whole Bible. It is Isaiah 55, and it's from the New Revised Version may it be God's word for you.
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. Amen.
It’s one of my favorite Scripture readings. It has a lot of wonderful movements to it for the gift of faith in the image of fulfillment of God’s word. It's not just because it talks about David, although it is important that it talks about David. I don't have any illusions of course that I will be a commander of people, or a great king. After all I know it was written back about four or 500 years before Jesus was born and probably about that long after David had died. David is a kind of emblematic figure, he symbolizes the covenant that God has with the whole people of Israel. And I do identify with him in that way, that he is part of a historical figure on the one hand, who got himself in trouble with a lot of his own human qualities and frailties, he made a lot of mistakes in his life and yet he occupies this symbolic role with the people. Not just as a leader but as a symbol, a representative of the whole people.
I often think about the relationship between pastors, especially senior pastors and congregations, as being if perhaps not unique, at least uncommon. It is after all, a human relationships. You know more than probably, well, not as much as Lyn or my family does, but you know a lot that I am just a human being. And yet if worship is to work, you have to somehow make this transference that if you're going to worship God, you can't hear what I say as simply David's weekly review of the Word of God or something, you have to hear it as something that comes from a voice through me perhaps, but beyond me.
We have shared a lot of the important times of our lives, births and deaths in difficult decisions, times when words are beyond our capacity to really articulate sometimes and yet you trust that I will have some words for those times. And you can definitely hire me and fire me. That's the truth, but yet, we have this not quite employer-employee sort of relationship because we both know, at least I hope we know, that my first commitment is to God just as your first commitment is to God and that our relationship flows from that. So we have this unusual kind of relationship that is both human and yet surrounded and infused with the sense that God is somehow using this human relationship to do something in the world.
That is in a sense beyond our own needs and wants. God’s trying to use us to promote Christ's work in the world and to be a place where people can feel safe. And the way we do that is we shape, we cut as well say in a minute, will cut a covenant with each other because we believe that covenants are the way God acts in the world and the way we act with one another in a sense represents the way God acts in the world.
When we form a church in the Congregational Christian tradition, we know that the church is not just a body of believers. Our pilgrim ancestors were very clear about it – that the church, to be the body of Christ is something more than just a bunch of people who believe the same things and agree on them. They are a group of people who seek to trust God, but who join in trusting one another by promising their lives and their faith to one another.
They are the originators, not the originators of covenants on much, but they are the sort of the part of the Christian tradition that has made covenant a central act of faith. It’s not just a bunch of beliefs about something. It's about committing yourself to a particular body, human body, that’s striving to become the body of Christ. And that's those two relationships, relationship between pastor and people, relationship between you and me and God in this church, is important and we need to take it seriously.
Next week actually we’re having a person from the Congregational Christian Library come to talk with us about how this covenant came to be such an important part of our tradition. But this morning, I want to talk about covenant, and five different things, and a sort of shape it around our relationship and our re-covenanting with one another on May 4.
The first thing to say is that covenants are relationships that we are morally responsible for, not legally. It's important for you to know that the relationship we're about to formalize in this covenant this morning is a moral relationship, that is to say it is based on our integrity. It is not a legal one. Legally, according to our bylaws, you can fire me and give me 60 days notice any time, beginning tomorrow. And if something would happen in my life where I became disabled or something changed I could say to you tomorrow, I want out of this thing and I’ve gotta give you 60 days notice and then were done.
Legally, that's the bind, but morally, morally, we are now committed to one another or we will be morally committed to one another when we say our promises. That is, it has something to do with who we are promising our lives to live together and to love one another as the body of Christ in this place. When you make a covenant with this church, join this church, you're not making a legal relationship. It's not something that we can come and you decide to not come to church for two or three months, we’re not going to send the police after you and haul you back under a fine or imprisonment.
No it’s important for covenants be to be free choices that bind us to one another. One of the interesting things that our forebears talked about is that we are freely bound. That is to say we choose one another. But then in our choice, we become committed to one another, and we believe that those choices, those moral responsibilities actually have more weight than legal ones.
Second thing – we’re trying to form not a contract with one another, we are trying to forge a covenant. The difference is that in a contract you give so much of yourself when you join the church you give so much yourself and you expect so much in return. You give $20,000 and you expect a car in return. I get so much time and I expect so much salary in return. And of course there is some truth to that; our forebears actually derive the whole notion of the legal nature of contracts out of the notion of covenant.
But if covenants are only about what you can get and what I have to give in order to get what I want out of it, we missed the whole notion of creating a community. Because one of the one of the deals about covenant is that the purpose of a covenant is for the common good, rather than our self-interest.
You see the only reason I enter into a covenant with the car dealership is because I want a car. I don’t want a formal lifelong relationship with the salesperson. I don’t want to give my life to the Honda of Corporation of America. I simply want a car. I’m willing to give $20,000 to get that car, but no more.
When we promise to be in relationship to one another, we promise our lives. We promise to give ourselves our hearts to one another in order that we can shape a community of faith where heart matters. And it's not just another commercial relationship in which we get some commodity for our own self-interest.
Sometimes people wonder about that with making pledges, you know, they say well, I'm only give so much because that lousy sermon last week was terrible. Or I didn’t like the way they made a decision about that. Covenants are different than contracts because in covenants what we do is we commit all of ourselves to one another and then we work out the details along the way.
Marriages are like that. You stand up and say in goodness and bad times, in good health and bad health and then you know, you come along the way and get sick and you have to work out the real details of what those words mean. And that with us too – we’ll have to work out the details of what our relationship is all about. There’s going to be an assessment a little bit later this spring, will have a chance to get some feedback from you about how things are going and where you think things should be improved. And that's about taking care of the details along the way, but it happens within a context of our common promises to one another. And that's a very significant context. It's not as if we're dealing with strangers, to whom we’re simply evaluating as an object, but were relating to one another as covenant partners who are seeking together to build the body of Christ in this place.
Another thing, but an important thing, is that our covenants with one another are not simply a way to get jobs done. It's not like this covenant that we’re shaping this morning is just simply a way for me to do your work for you. It is that we together are trying to shape the way the body of Christ works in this time and place. And our covenant, the way you treat me the way I respect you, is important for us to define what it means to be the body of Christ in this place.
When you make a covenant when you join this church, then the covenant that we all have changes slightly because of the different new people that join us, so that we are a different people because of the people that become part of this particular covenant known as Fauntleroy Church. It's not that we need more people in or to do more things, it’s that we need more people, we need new people to become a new people together as the body of Christ.
One of the things about the other way we do pledges this is that we don't pledge money in order to just get a job done that we want done. I'll give you $500 if you get new carpet in the sanctuary. No, we put all of our money into a pot and then when we get together in June we’ll decide, with the help of the budget committee and the church council, how were going to spend our common pot. We define the community by the promises that we made by the people who are part of it. It becomes a way for us to not have a stagnant group of who is and then new people, it becomes a way of always looking at ourselves as new people who are becoming something that God is intending us to be in this time and in the future.
Lastly, I want to say that our covenant is not possible; no covenant is really possible, without a common covenant with God. One of the things that you may not know about ordained ministry, but when we become ordained in the United Church of Christ we have to make certain promises. We have a certain code of ethics and so forth. We promise for instance to preach and teach the gospel without fear or favor. I will speak the truth in love – we make that promise.
We say, I will nurture and offer my gifts for ministry of the church. I’ll seek to call forth and nurture the gifts of others in the church and join their gifts with mine for the sake of the mission of Jesus Christ and the health of the church. In other words it’s not just my church, it’s our church, it’s Christ’s church really together and my job is not to just be a virtuoso but to be an enabler of your gifts. I promise to regard all persons with equal respect and concern and undertake to minister impartially, that is I shouldn't be playing favorites, I should be loving all of you alike. And I will not use my position, power, or authority to exploit any person. I will not use my position for personal financial gain, nor will I misuse the finances of the institution that I serve.
And there are more. But the point is that my role is to be a community person and to help you be the best community person that we can be as part of this body of Christ. When you join the church it's not like you’re going to be even happier or better off financially or whatever. It is you join the church because together you believe you can serve God better together than you can all by your lonesome.
It’s one of the heresies actually of the American Christian faith is that we think we can just be Christians all by our selves. But our forebears realized that for us to be people of God, we need other people to be part of that. We need the inspiration that other people bring to it and we certainly need God's always holding out to us the fuller purpose of what it means to be people of God. Otherwise we get stuck in only thinking about maintaining an institution rather than having the institutions serve God.
And finally, we believe that we are here to promise needs to serve God, not just ourselves, because sometimes we get discouraged. I don’t know about you, but I get discouraged now and then. I get discouraged about my own performance, I think sometimes about how weak our faith is and how often our faith is simply a footnote to our lives and not a central chapter of our lives, as Otis Moss said in a recent interview.
I sometimes get discouraged about the face of the world and whether there is any place in the world for a kind of tradition like ours, but then I remember that it's not really our job in the end, we are part of a larger covenant that God has with the whole world, and that's why I love this chapter of Isaiah 55. It's about God calling us to the waters to get refreshed, no matter who we are. It’s about God calling us to listen to the word of God and not just the echoes of the sound of her own brilliant language. It's about God forgiving us, abundantly pardoning it says. It's about God holding for us this image of what it means to fulfill.
When all the hills again burst into song and our life can be full and rich, and we are going to actually find the promise that God has for all the human race. It is in promising ourselves, not just one another but to promise ourselves to God in these times of re-covenanting that we discovered that covenants are best renewed by these kinds of common searches for the source of love, for the source of hope, for the source of the trust that holds us together.