Presented February 28, 2021 by Rev. Judy Davis
Based on Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16 and Acts 11: 25-30
In the past weeks I have read a small book by N.T. Wright, a British biblical scholar, titled God and the Pandemic. Many of my thoughts this morning are informed by what he had to say. During this season of Lent I am trying to learn more about the responses we make as Christians toward disasters and how our lives are impacted by those responses.
On this second Sunday of Lent, the lectionary takes us to the Genesis scripture telling of the Covenant that God makes with Abraham. God had already called Abraham to leave the land of his father and go to a new land, and promised that Abraham would be a blessing. Now God makes a covenant with that man, Abraham.
Earlier in Genesis there is the story of God making a Covenant with Noah and with every living creature. A promise that God would never again destroy the earth with a flood. But God’s covenant with Abraham is a promise made to one man, a promise to fashion a people. Yahweh would be their God, and they, the descendants of Abraham, would be Yahweh’s people.
After more than 4,000 years we are here today in that long line of descendants. So my question for us, is what does it mean today to be God’s covenant people?For we—as Christians—follow a man, Jesus, who was a Jewish descendant of this Covenant.
The Hebrew word for Covenant is b’reeth. A word that denotes a promise, a never-ending relationship, a bond or treaty between two people, two nations, or, in this case, a bond between God and a people. Throughout the Old Testament, the prophets saw that bond as permanent and binding. Moses had brought down from Mt. Sinai the commandments, the expectations of God for his people, and when Israel failed God’s expectations, God called them back. God was faithful to entering into the continuation and renewal of that Covenant. Over and over. In Jeremiah we find that God puts his law into their hearts, forgives them, and remembers their sins no more. “I will be their God, they shall be my people.” At the very heart of covenant keeping is: ‘I am yours, you are mine.”
There is another Hebrew word that belongs to the language of Covenant and the relationship of covenanted parties. It defines and qualifies these mutual relationships. Its fundamental meaning is loyalty and faithfulness to a covenant. It is most often used in the context of God’s “steadfast love” that endures forever. It is the kind of love that actively seeks the well-being of the other. It is the kind of love that offers the best the world has to offer and constantly seeks redemption for the one in need.
This Hebrew word is cheh-sed and sometimes is translated as “mercy” or “compassion.” This God of steadfast love is alive and well in the Old Testament narrative and song. Mary Donovan Turner writes:
God sends “chesed, steadfast love … God remembers it, continues it, shows it, causes it, makes it great, keeps it, satisfies it, and surrounds it.”
“This is the kind of love that sees us through weakness, confusion, complaint, temptation, sin, and defeat. It is the love that indwells the human spirit, inspires hope and courage, and enables us to be faithful even when we grow weary of doing good works.”
This is God’s love, and it is the love to which we are called; not just to give back to God, but to give to all of God’s creation. That’s how we show love to God, by loving others.
N.T. Wright writes, “God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings. Jesus, himself, says in John 20:21, “As the father has sent me, so I’m sending you.” As Jesus had been to Israel, so were his followers to be to the world.
From Psalm 106:1 “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever.”
From the Gospel of Matthew: Jesus says “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments." Then Jesus begins to quote the ten commandments. For they are our covenant with God. And then Jesus says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
In Mark 12, when Jesus is asked which is the first commandment of all, Jesus answered, “The first is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these."
That is the steadfast love of God. That is the love that God sent Jesus to this world to live out in the midst of his community. That is the love that Jesus sent his followers to live out in the midst of their world.
When I was about 14 years old, I got a glimpse into this kind of love when one of my beloved junior high teachers had a stroke one evening while attending the wedding of her neighbor. She died that night at the hospital. She was only about 40 years old. A woman deeply loved; her son, my classmate; her husband, a teacher at the college. At her funeral the First Baptist Church in my hometown held a packed sanctuary of students, friends, family—all of us in shock at this tragedy. Then in the middle of the service, unexpected, a tall, slender, elderly, frail-looking man stood up and begin to sing. No piano, but in his emotional voice, the father-in-law of this beloved woman began to sing:
O love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to Thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in Thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.O joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to Thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain
That morn shall tearless be.O cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from Thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.
Some years after, Jesus was crucified, Acts 11 takes us to Antioch, in Syria, 300 miles north of Jerusalem. Antioch is a bustling city with people from everywhere. Many languages, cultures, and ethnicities work together in this city and there is already a Christian community here. Antioch is the first place that followers of Jesus were called Christians. Barnabas has just come up from Jerusalem to check with them, and he is delighted to find this community.
The Apostle Paul also comes to Antioch to help with preaching and teaching. One day a traveling group of prophets comes to town and holds a meeting. Agapus rises to share a prophecy—there will be a terrible famine over the whole world, a famine of wide proportions. We rarely get to witness the new Christian movement in action so soon. A worldwide famine—a health crisis.
There are several ways a Christian community might respond. 1) Oh don’t worry about it God will handle the famine or 2) surely this is a sign that Christ is about to return, these are the end times or 3) this must mean we have sinned and are being punished so we must repent.
But this church in Antioch instead asked themselves three questions:
Who is going to be at risk when this crisis occurs?
What can we do to help, what resources do we have?
And who shall we send?
Just prayerfully asking what can we do to help.
Sounds so much like Jesus: “I was hungry and you fed me. I was sick and you ministered to me … I was in prison and you came.”
And that is what the Christian community does. They agree that they will be fine but they discuss that small, persecuted Christian community down in Jerusalem, some 300 miles away. They will almost certainly have a very hard time in a famine. So they take up a collection they send Barnabas and Saul to Jerusalem with the funds.
That’s it. No time to ask why, no time to question the past or other people’s sin. Just get these people food.
This church was indeed a people of the Covenant with God.
In this past year we, too, have faced a health crisis. And while the government has had to ask what went wrong, what to do to try and fix the crisis, we—as a Church, a community within God’s covenant—have had to ask those same three questions the Christians in Antioch asked 2,000 years ago.
Who is at risk?
What can we do to help?
Who shall we send?
We know exactly what Jesus himself said his father had called him to do:
To bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners; to comfort those that mourn.
And then he sent us to do more of what his father sent him to do.
Two weeks ago my home state, Texas, had another crisis, freezing weather and so many losing their source of heat. There was plenty of blame to go around, but Communities of Faith, Communities of God’s Covenant, needed to ask the questions of who is at risk and needs our help.
God’s covenant, a covenant filled with cheh-sed, steadfast love, a message repeated throughout the Old and New Testaments, and so summed up in the words of the prophet Micah:
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Amen.
