February 26, 2023
St. John’s United Church of Christ, Union, Illinois
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Luke 22:14-20[1]
Today I want to
talk about “Covenant.” A covenant is an agreement between two parties,
generally between people and God, stating their relationship and stipulating
their future rights and responsibilities. It provides the arrangements within
which ordinary life can flourish. It defines the common center of value that
holds the community together and creates the conditions for free and
responsible interactions.
Remember Noah
and the Rainbow Covenant, where God promises to never again destroy the earth
with a flood. Remember God’s covenant with Abraham, to make him the father of
many nations, the ancestor of the “people of the book” as Jews, Christians, and
Muslims are known.
Covenant is a
powerful idea. As an arrangement created by God who makes the covenant, it is a
gracious gift. God gives us the covenant as a means of providing us with peace,
justice, happiness, freedom, and all of the good things in life that are priceless.
The covenant stipulates a way of life based on the gift. In order to make the
promises of the covenant a reality, we must respond with faith and obedience.
We must live up to our obligations, take care of our responsibilities.
The covenant is
a gift in the sense that it can be refused. We have to agree to the covenant.
We have to choose to let God be our God. But, because it is based on our
agreement, on consent rather than coercion or force, it creates a relationship
between people and God where we are accountable to one another. We are in this
together. For the promises of the covenant to be fulfilled, both God and people
have to do their part.
God makes a
covenant with us, and we receive the benefits of belonging to the people of
God. God is especially concerned with justice and peace as the basis for human
flourishing, and God’s promises make peace and justice a reality. We also take
on some responsibilities as part of that covenant. God’s covenant with Moses
and the Israelites involved a lengthy list of laws and rules about proper
behavior. And that seemed to work… for a while.
But promises
get broken, agreements are forgotten, and temptation draws us away from the
commitments we’ve made. We all know what it is like to break a promise, or to
have a promise that was made to us broken. I don’t think any of us is a
stranger to that feeling of hurt, disappointment, betrayal. It breaks down our
relationships. It ends friendships. It divides families. And it is so hard to
build up a trust which has been lost.
All of the
historical covenants appear to have been broken. It’s part of human nature, it
seems. If we follow the story through the historical books of the Bible – Joshua,
Judges, 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st and 2nd Samuel, etc. – we see God’s people
repeatedly breaking the covenant. God, of course, gets angry with the people
and so allows them to be conquered by different nations and even exiled from
the “Promised Land.”
And yet… God
never gives up. The prophets record the words that God speaks over and over
again: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”[2]
And the fact that after all we human beings have done to one another and to the
world, God still has hope for us, is truly amazing. We hear that hope in the
words of Jeremiah: “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.”[3]
The promise, I
will be your God and you shall be my people, is fulfilled in the life and
destiny of Jesus Christ. The new covenant that Jesus speaks of during the Last
Supper is the covenant that God writes on our hearts. It is the covenant of
love that goes with us all the way to the grave and beyond. It is the promise
of forgiveness, the gift of God’s grace. It is the way of the servant, giving
ourselves to others in the name of the one who gave himself for all of us.
Radical grace is
a term coined by the 20th century theologian, Karl Barth. He was
trying to respond to the Reformation idea of grace, proposed by John Calvin and
others, that there is election or predestination. The Calvinist view of
election teaches that in eternity God chose some individuals from the mass of
fallen humanity to be saved without regard to any merit or foreseen faith in
them, but solely based on God’s choice. Those elected are predestined to go to
heaven.
Barth recognized
in the church’s language of predestination an attempt to express the sovereignty
of God. For him, this is the sum of the gospel—that God elects humanity and
that this election is utterly unconditioned by any human merit, preparation, or
disposition. But Barth’s reinterpretation of the doctrine of election rejects
any form of double-predestination whereby some are elected to salvation and
others to damnation.
Christ, has
elected humanity for salvation. But Christ is also the one chosen before time
to restore the broken covenant between God and humanity. The election of any
particular person is always an election “in Christ,” and the election “in
Christ” is an election of all persons for salvation and eternity. In this way,
Barth removes speculation regarding the eternal destiny of any particular
person and transforms it into an affirmation of radical grace. Radical grace
means everyone is saved. The covenant is no longer dependent on our choice, but
given no matter what.
The reality of salvation
can only be fully affirmed if the event is seen to come to humankind as a gift
that is already actual and complete. The gift is effective whether or not it is
acknowledged by the recipient. The alternative, describing salvation as in some
sense dependent on a human response, would imply that salvation is a mere
possibility not yet realized in human existence. The gospel would become yet
another law by which humanity was condemned.
Jesus didn’t
come to condemn people to eternal damnation. In John’s Gospel, we read: “Indeed,
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that
the world might be saved through him.”[4]
Who did Jesus condemn? No one. Who did Jesus forgive? The disciples who
deserted him, the Roman soldiers who killed him, the Roman and Jewish ruling
elite who condemned him to death, yes. Was he forgiving us all forever, for all
our sins? This is the gospel.
Don’t give up
on each other. Keep forgiving one another. Keep on loving one another, even
when it is hard. Keep on serving others, even if they don’t recognize or
appreciate what you are doing. Keep building the kingdom, the reality of God’s
peace and justice and love that has been promised in the new covenant of Jesus
Christ. Let God’s radical grace rain down upon us all. Amen.
[1] The
scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard
Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of
the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
[2] Jeremiah
31:33.
[3]
Jeremiah 31:34.
[4]
John 3:17.
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