COVENANT
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Rev. Kathryn Ransdell
New year’s/Epiphany
Sunday, Jan. 3, 2010
The calendar turned to a new decade and all the merriment of the season has turned to the January blahs. The deepest days of winter,--the Vancouver rains—and the promise of spring is still a ways off. The taking down of the lights and the ending of the goodwill toward people.—January is just so, January.
One of my American forefathers, Thomas Jefferson, once took a Bible and literally cut-out the passages he did not believe should be in the Bible and created his own version.
I’ve often thought that if I could do to the calendar what Jefferson did to the Bible, I would just cut out January. Skip it all together, go from Dec. 31 to Feb. 1 and just do away with all 31 of these blah days.
This year, though, I can’t simply crawl into my January hole and show up again on Feb. 1 to see if I see my shadow. Not only must I like this month, I must also be inspiration, pastoral, “responsible”—because Gary is away.
So let’s just name this reality for a minute: Gary is gone for the next 3 weeks. Which means you get me and my sermons. And, I’m not Gary. You have a capable staff and board also at the helm of this ship guiding us all while Gary is away, but it is my unique opportunity to give the sermons.
I’ve spent the last 10 years working at churches where the congregation really liked the lead pastor’s sermons and the associates, well, you know, it’s just not like the pastor’s sermons. And even though I may look put together and polished up here with alb and stole, and I may “look” the part, I will be honest with you and say, “I’m still learning and growing.” I don’t know everything yet. I’m the mother of a toddler, so there is no way I have enough brain cells to memorize my sermon as he does. Gary has about, well, let’s not say how many years on me, but he has a couple. So maybe the theme of the next 4 weeks can be: Let us all give one another an extra dose of grace. And even try to have a bit of fun.
An extra dose of grace is what I give myself every January. It’s an interesting change in position: in December, the secular culture pushes against our spiritual reality, telling us to be merry and bright while we are trying to be repentant and wait. And then we get to January, and the secular culture is repenting for past debts--money and calories--and waiting for the spring, and all of a sudden we in the church spring into this mini-liturgical season called Epiphany where we realize that what just happened in the stable is, well, God manifesting on this earth. It’s a big deal. The church is merry and bright.
This moment of realization that what happened in that stable MATTERS—that Eureka moment—is lived out over 3 Sundays when we read the Scriptures of the Wisemen visiting the baby, then of John baptizing Jesus in the Jordan, and then of that crazy miracle where Jesus turns water into wine at someone’s wedding.
Hold on to your January blahs—there’s some manifesting of God’s presence right here among us even as we sit with our secular debts and wait for the spring.
And there is this mystical sense that what is asked of us right now, in this moment, having been to the stable and explored just a bit, is a response.
Now, what will that response be?
I can give you one way I don’t want to respond: Because of how Epiphany overlaps with the New Year today, we celebrate both events in our worship today. It’s the first time we’ve seen one another so we say Happy New Year.
I turned on the tv yesterday to see the report of the English Bay Polar Bear Run—where you crazy Vancouverites run into really, really cold water to celebrate the New Year (and of course raise money for local charity). Jim MacLean Cruickshank asked if I was there on Friday….um, no. I do not want to jump into freezing water.
So thank goodness that I am not Eastern Orthodox in the Greek tradition. Listen to how they celebrate Epiphany Sunday:
Following the Divine Liturgy, the clergy and people go in a Crucession (procession with the cross) to the nearest body of water, be it a beach, harbor, quay, river, lake, swimming pool, water depot, etc. (ideally, it should be a body of "living water"). At the end of the ceremony the priest will bless the waters. In the Greek practice, he does this by casting a cross into the water. If swimming is feasible on the spot, any number of volunteers may try to recover the cross. The person who gets the cross first swims back and returns it to the priest, who then delivers a special blessing to the swimmer and their household.
Of course, I don’t see that the priest is jumping into the water….and yet, Epiphany is a season of being so amazed at the divine-with-us, that we do have such a gut-level, heart-felt RESPONSE that we do things like running into freezing cold waters without overthinking it.
For the polar bear swimmers, somehow that response to the New Year is fun. For Christians, finding our response to Christmas is our work this Epiphany season as we watch God manifest in our lives.
We do have these two festival days overlapping—New year’s and Epiphany. Our Scripture from Jeremiah is the passage assigned to New Year’s Day and our Scripture of the story of the Wise Men is the passage assigned to Epiphany.
I first met this New Year’s passage from Jeremiah in 1996 when receiving a call from my grandmother asking me if I would lead the service for my grandfather’s funeral. He died a few days after the New Year. I was a senior in college, serving a tiny rural church, but had not gone to seminary and had not officiated a funeral. I have no idea what I’m doing now—I really had no idea what I was doing then.
Even though I was 8 months away from beginning seminary, which means I had no formal training in leading a funeral, she asked me because that’s always who my grandmother was. She always looked for ways to involve and uplift and encourage her grandchildren. For those of you who are grandparents, I hope you know the significance of your presence in these people’s lives. Mainly her mentoring was through letters she mailed. She believed that I could preside at my grandfather’s funeral, so I believed and hoped that I could too.
Having no idea what to do, I chose the Scripture based on the lectionary year, and it was the first week of the New Year when the lectionary gives us this passage from Jeremiah. And the hope in this passage fit for my grandfather’s story, what I knew of it as a grandchild, having been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and having his retirement taken from him. He was a civil engineer by trade and farmer on the side, having inherited a farming life from his family. What I knew of him was spending time with him on the farm, not just with the cattle, but also with his garden, something he was very proud of and to this day, I can feel in my fingertips that sensation of shucking 10 buckets of black-eyed peas.
His garden and farm held fond memories for me, and certainly after a debilating journey with Alzheimer’s, to hear the words pronounced at his funeral: their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again. – was like a balm for all of us who watched this strong man languish over the years.
Jeremiah’s vision is for anyone who finds themselves in exile wanting to return home. Because that was his audience: the Israelites who had been conquered by Babylon and taken from the homes and literally moved to another country. And in the midst of them, Jeremiah gives them God’s word of hope: I will gather what has been scattered. They shall once again have a harvest, they shall have herds, the young people will have hope again. …their life shall be like a watered garden –I will give them gladness for sorrow.
All a beautiful vision except for this last sentence: I will give the priests their fill of fatness – I’ve had my fill, Lord, (even this sentence refers to the people being so blessed that the priests who received the sacrifices and lived off those sacrifices would be fat).
What a great Scripture to begin the New Year with – when we once again have a clean slate and can vision where we want to go in the year ahead…I want to ask you not where you want to go as an individual person isolated in this world; rather, how can we work together to go in the direction of the kind of hope that Jeremiah describes?
What I’m trying to say might best be seen in the story assigned to Epiphany—what I sometimes want to call the Legend of the Three Wisemen.
Now, if you are like me, Christmas carols have grown old and the decorations need to go away for another year, so hearing this story on the first Sunday of the new year is kinda like having Christmas leftovers on New Year’s day: a bit soggy and perhaps one-day too long past freshness.
So let’s set aside all the Christmas overtones of this story and see it as an Epiphany story: a manifestation that God is here with us on the earth…and what happens when EUREKA! You discover this stable and now have that gut-level need to respond. Explore this story as an outward and visible sign of how God speaks to people—even those who appear not to be in the main cast of characters—and offers them physical mileposts to guide them on the journey. They saw a star. And followed. They dreamed a dream. And went home a different way.
As Tim and Donna led the children this morning in a parade of following the star, we too are called in this day, in 2010, to follow the star towards this magnificent vision of the kingdom of God described by Jeremiah’s words.
Following is our response. The link between this New Year’s passage and this Epiphany story is that it is in choosing our response—living out our Epiphanies—is what leads this world towards the kingdom of God. What will allow us to go home a different way?
How you choose to go home another way matters. Our response to the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ matters. The simple Zulu chorus we sang earlier is a reminder to those crafting a spiritual practice of response: Always we pray. Always we give. Always we bless. Always.
So if you don’t know how you will respond yet, here is a rule of thumb: always pray, always give, always bless.
Our physical response to the covenant matters.
You have probably heard that word covenant in connection with the covenant God made with Abraham. Let’s not go down the stream of bad theology and speak of the Old Covenant and the New Covenant…let’s just look at this covenant.
There’s really interesting learning to be had when it comes to understanding how ancient near eastern cultures, including the Hebrews, “cut covenant.” There were all kinds of treaties and alliances and covenants in existence then, as there are today between nations, peoples and cultures.
Scholars equate the kind of treaty established between God and Abraham as a suzerain-vassal treaty, which means it wasn’t a parity treaty (a treaty between equals) or an unconditional royal land grant treaty (meaning no response required). In a suzerain vassal treaty/covenant, it is the suzerain who dictates all the terms, lays down the law, makes certain promises, and explains the sanctions if the covenant is violated. And it is the Suzerain who decided to continue to “cut covenant” with the people, and, it was the people, who decided to keep the covenant by doing the actions prescribed in it.
Not only is the covenant lived out in actions, even the Hebrew word for covenant is more of a verb than a noun: “to cut covenant,” making allusions to the physical sacrifice that is made for the covenant.
Epiphany is this incredible 3-week set of stories dropped smack in the middle of the blahs of January that takes us to three miraculous manifestations of God’s presence in this world: the Wiseman, the Baptism of Jesus and the wedding at Cana. We again get to peer into the story and affirm that what happened at the stable was real. It mattered.
If this is true, then what is happening in our hearts, minds, souls and bodies is real too as we choose our responses to this story and move towards this vision of the kingdom of God. That’s REAL – God is manifesting in our lives.
So how will I keep covenant? How will you respond? How do we go home by a different way?
I’m reading a history book of BC because I love history and knowing the past somehow helps me to understand my present. I’m enjoying the narratives of the people who came and saw this beautiful land and reported back. Their sense of awe and wonder of the topography and climate is much like what I felt when I sat on the seawall wondering what life will be like in Vancouver. I remember having this thought: With beauty like this, Vancouverites don’t need to be told there is a God. Their work is to learn how to respond—how to give thanks—for such an incredible gift of beauty in nature.
As I have been received into the United Church of Canada’s traditions of covenanting within the Presbytery today, I want to invite you into a tradition from my Methodist roots. Every year, Wesley asked his people called Methodists to join in a Covenanting servicec that culminates in the collective reading of this prayer. For the past 15 years, I have joined with a congregation in saying this prayer, and I’m just not ready to let this year be different.
This is a prayer that asks God to give us the grace (we ask for the grace to even know how to respond), that we may keep covenant for the year to come. Join me.
I am no longer my own, but thine.Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.Put me to doing, put me to suffering.Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,exalted for thee or brought low for thee.Let me be full, let me be empty.Let me have all things, let me have nothing.I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,thou art mine, and I am thine.So be it.And the covenant which I have made on earth,let it be ratified in heaven.Amen.
May the rule of thumb—Always pray, always give, always bless—guide you in your response. May May you receive an extra dose of grace, so that as you journey through these Epiphany stories and experience a Eureka! Moment, you have the strength to respond.