RCL Lent 1B
26 February 2012
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Focus text: Genesis 9.8-17 and the Baptismal Covenant
Some of you may
know and others of you may not know that I have served as the co-chair of the
Vancouver Jewish-Christian Dialogue for almost ten years. Our Dialogue had its beginnings when the
provincial government announced its intention to hold a referendum on the
rights of aboriginal peoples in the province as these rights affected possible
settlement of land claims.
The Jewish
community immediately recognized the danger of referenda on the rights of
minorities. Over the centuries Jews have
experienced the potential negative outcomes of such political actions and the
Jewish community in Vancouver was not about to stand on the sidelines in this
initiative of the provincial government.
I was among the Christian clergy invited to attend an initial meeting
and, as the story goes, I have been involved ever since.
Early on in our
Dialogue we determined that we needed not only to look at social and political
issues that affected our communities but that theological and spiritual
questions were also ones that we needed to discuss. It was in the course of preparing for one
such session that I came across the Jewish teaching about the so-called
covenant of Noah.
At the heart of
Jewish theology is the concept of covenant.
A covenant is a solemn agreement where two parties bind themselves
together in an indissoluble relationship.
If one party fails to live up to the terms of the agreement, then there
are consequences to be sure, but the covenant remains. After a period of time and a process of
reconciliation the covenant is renewed and the parties continue in their
relationship.
In the first
five books of the Hebrew Bible, sometimes called the Five Books of Moses or, in
Hebrew, the Torah, there are at least three covenants. The one that most of us are familiar with is
the covenant that God makes with the Hebrew people at Mount Sinai occasionally
called the covenant of Moses. This is a
very specific covenant with a small community of people. To this day this covenant shapes the lives of
our Jewish sisters and brothers, our neighbours and our companions in following
the Holy One of Israel.
But before the
covenant with Moses God makes two other covenants. An older covenant than the covenant with
Moses is God’s covenant with Abraham and Abraham’s descendants. From time to time our lectionary brings us
stories of Abraham and Sarah as well as stories about their descendants, Isaac
and Jacob. This covenant plays a major
role in the spiritual theology of Jews, Christians and Muslims. It is a broader covenant than the covenant
with Moses, touching both the physical and spiritual descendants of this Middle
Eastern patriarch.
Even older than
the covenant with Abraham, however, is the covenant we hear God making with
Noah today. This is not a covenant
between God and the myriad descendants of a patriarch nor is it a covenant
between God and one tribe descended from that patriarch. The covenant with Noah is a covenant made
with all living things: “Then God said
to Noah and to his sons with him, ‘As for me I am establishing my covenant with
you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with
you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you,
as many as came out of the ark.’” (Genesis 9.8-10)
This is the
original covenant made between God and all living creatures, a covenant that
has particular meaning in the Jewish theological tradition. Later generations of Jewish thinkers will
ponder this covenant with Noah and discern that there are seven laws in this
covenant. Human beings are forbidden (i)
to commit idolatry, (ii) to commit murder, (iii) to steal, (iv) to commit
sexual immorality, (v) to blaspheme and (vi) to eat the flesh of living animals
and are required (vii) to establish courts of law. Any non-Jew who follows these laws will have
a place in the world to come and be considered as righteous as any Jew who follows
all the commandments of the law of Moses.
In some ways
this covenant with Noah is a precursor of the covenant you and I made at our
baptism. Just as the covenant with Noah
reaches out to all living creatures, so does the baptismal covenant reach out
to include every human being who wishes to experience the embrace of God’s
faithful and steadfast love.
But our
baptismal covenant also mirrors the covenant of Moses. Just as the covenant with Moses created a
people who were called to witness to the God of Noah, the God of Abraham and the
God of Moses, so too does the baptismal covenant create a people who are called
to witness to the God of Jesus of Nazareth whose life and teaching summons
every human being into relationship with the God whom Jesus called ‘Abba’.
Lent is a
season during which all Christians are called to examine their lives and to
re-commit themselves to the covenant that God made with each one of us at our
baptism. Whether we were baptized as an
infant or a young child or as an adult, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit in
baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.
If we were to return to our baptismal covenant after years of neglect,
we would not be re-baptized. We would be
re-integrated into the community of faith and given the opportunity to
rediscover our fundamental identity as the people of Christ and witnesses to
the resurrection.
In our current
Anglican baptismal practice we make use of a liturgical text first prepared for
the American Episcopal church in the 1970’s.
Every time we baptize or celebrate a baptismal occasion in the Christian
year we renew our covenant. But the
chief renewal of that covenant occurs at Easter when we celebrate the new life
made known to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. That covenant has two parts: (i) a confession of faith in God using the
familiar words of the Apostles’ Creed and (ii) five commitments that arise from
our confession of faith. It is about the
first part, the confession of faith, that I want to offer some reflections as
we begin our Lenten journey.
To confess that
we believe in God the Father is to confess our belief in a God who has a
purpose for creation. It is not always
easy to believe this in a world such as ours where governments kill their own
citizens, where people die of preventable diseases and where the rich seem to
grow richer and the poor poorer. But we
dare to claim that God does have a purpose for this world and that creation was
not an accident or the random result of unknown physical forces. This world and all the worlds, known and
unknown, came into being because God loves.
We may not be certain what that purpose is, but we can be certain that
God knows and that this purpose will come in the fullness of time.
To confess that
we believe in God the Son is to confess our belief in a God who gives us a
pattern for genuine maturity and humanity.
In a society such as ours where advertising and the mass media offer us
false patterns of genuine humanity, where young people are led to believe that
conformity to some one else’s idea of perfection is desirable and where the
quiet courage of thousands of people throughout the world who work daily for
justice and peace is overshadowed by movie stars and so-called ‘reality show’
participants, to believe in Jesus Christ as the model for what it means to be a
human being has a hard time selling itself.
But we dare to believe that true maturity and true humanity, when it
shows itself, has the face of Christ.
To confess that
we believe in God the Holy Spirit is to confess our belief in a God who
continues to work to achieve God’s purposes for us and for all of
creation. This is not always easy to
believe when we face the challenges of our daily lives, especially when we
experience unexplained and unpredictable brokenness, tragedy and loss. But then a moment comes and a light shines
into our darkness pointing us in an unexpected direction and we realize that
the brokenness, the tragedy and the loss were not signs of God’s absence. Light shines in the darkness and the darkness
cannot overcome it.
Today we gather
for the first Sunday eucharist in Lent.
We also gather after the service for our annual meeting to transact the
business of this community. While it is
tempting to see the eucharist and the annual vestry as separate and, perhaps, unrelated
events, I hope that we will see them both as moments to renew our belief in the
God who created all things for a purpose, who provides us with a living model
for whom we are called to become and who continues to work in us and for us in
bringing all creation to its perfection.
As people of the covenant made in baptism and in the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, I hope we will join Noah and Abraham and
Moses and all their descendants in a life empowered by our hope that all God’s
children shall be free and the whole earth will live to praise God’s name. Amen.
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