June 30, 2024 – Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 12.1-3; 15.1-6
Matthew 26.26-29
Promises, Promises
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Last Sunday before church one of our soon-to-be new members Casey Snyder asked me, “Alan, what does it mean to be received into covenant fellowship?” which was the way I phrased the invitation to join the church. I said, “That’s a good question, Casey,” realizing I had lapsed into church-speak again. I told her it really just means becoming a member of the church, but she zeroed in on the word “covenant,” which is another word for “promise.” And I covenanted – I mean, I promised her I’d try to speak English more often.
But then, as I was making the final edits, I realized the entire sermon is a deep dive into church speak – I blame it on the fact that this is my last one for the next six weeks, so may as well jump in and test the waters.
Most Christian churches take one of three routes to membership: catechetical, credal and covenantal. When you become part of a catechetical church like the Roman Catholic church, you do so by learning the catechism, which is a set of questions and answers. The church poses the questions, the catechist provides the correct answer and church membership is granted. When you become part of a credal church, like the Lutheran or Presbyterian Church, you learn the church’s creeds, the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed and the like, and when you can say the creed with other members of the congregation, church membership is granted. Back in the day, the Congregational church was credal, but over the years we have moved away from that model and now occupy the covenantal. Which means that when our new members join in a few minutes, they do so, not by answering the right questions with the right answers, nor by reciting one of the church’s historic creeds, but rather by all of us reciting our church covenant together. It is in the actual speaking of the covenant with other church members that we enter church membership; it is not receiving a membership certificate, or the minister’s handshake, or the flower pinned to your shirt, but reciting, or in church-speak, “owning the covenant,” making the church covenant our own, which makes one a member of our church. Now I could go off on a tangent here, because I think we gave away something important when we ditched the creeds for covenants, but for this morning we’ll focus on who we are and not who Alan thinks we ought to be.
There are many biblical writers and scholars who read the Bible as a series of covenants, or promises. As we heard last week, at the end of the story of the flood God made a promise to Noah never again to cause the rains to flood the earth. And the sign of that first covenant is the rainbow:
“When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.’ God said to Noah, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”
The covenant between God and Noah is a universal covenant that includes all humanity, “all the flesh that is on the earth.”
A few moments ago we heard the second major biblical covenant, or promise, the one between God and Abraham: “[God] brought Abraham outside and said, ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. Then God said, ‘So shall you descendants be.’ And Abraham believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” The sign of God’s covenant with Abraham are his innumerable descendants.
The third and probably best known covenant in the Old Testament is with Moses. God made a promise to bring the Hebrews out of slavery and into the Promised Land, and the sign of that covenant was the Ten Commandments. And finally the fourth principal covenant of the Hebrew scripture is God’s promise to King David, that a righteous branch would grow from his descendants, who would execute justice and mercy, a covenant that was kept in the person of Jesus.
We talked a little bit about covenants when we spoke of marriage equality last week. We spoke of the marriage covenant between two people who make certain promises to each other when they are married. We recited our Open and Affirming Covenant as a way of reminding ourselves what we as a church promised to do together back in 2009. We talked about baptismal promises and about the promises we make when we become members of a church. I’ve included two of our historic church covenants this morning on the back of our morning insert. The first, the Salem Covenant of 1629, is the promise our pilgrim ancestors made as one of the foundations of the Congregational Church. And the second is the UCC Statement of Faith, part covenant, part creed, which outlines who we are and some of the things we believe as members of that church.
But there are times promises are easier to make than to keep. One of the reasons there are multiple covenants in the Bible is because humanity just could not keep our end of the bargain. All God has ever asked is a little bit of faithfulness, of kindness, of being good neighbors and taking God seriously. And with every new covenant was the tacit admission that the old one wasn’t working. The covenant with Abraham was necessary because of the human rebellion at Babel. The covenant with Moses that freed the Jews from slavery was brought about in part by their own desire for assimilation in Pharaoh’s kingdom. And the covenant with David was meant to be a cure for Israel’s desire to become more like the pagan nations that surrounded them.
The Broadway show that gave me my sermon title this morning, “Promises, Promises,” won multiple awards. It took home two Tony awards, two Drama Desk awards and a Grammy. The play was created by a true Broadway musical all-star team: the music was written by Burt Bachrach, lyrics by Hal David, and the book by Neil Simon. It is based on the Billy Wilder film, “The Apartment,” and it is about a junior executive for an advertising agency who is struggling to move ahead in the company. His path to promotion seems blocked until he gets a brilliant idea: he loans his apartment to lecherous senior executives who have nowhere to bring lovers for their extramarital trysts. This being Broadway, antics ensue, the adulterers get their come-uppance, and the straight-laced junior executive loses his job but finds true love in the end. But I think there’s more than a little irony in the fact that a play called “Promises, Promises” finds its plot in a collection of broken promises, namely marital vows that include the phrase, “forsaking all others, I promise to be faithful to you for as long as we live.”
God recognized how difficult it sometimes is for humanity to keep its promises, to keep our end of the bargain. So there is one more covenant in the Bible that supersedes all the covenants that came before it. Simply put, it is the promise of Jesus. The promise God has made though Jesus Christ is an unconditional one. It is not grounded in how well we behave, on what or how much we believe, on whether or not we tick the correct catechism or credal boxes, it is grounded entirely in grace. God will keep God’s end of the bargain even when we struggle to keep our own, because Jesus has kept it for us. And the sign of this unconditional covenant of grace, is communion. After they ate the bread and drank the wine together, Jesus promised the disciples, “I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Whenever we come to the table, we remember this promise, this covenant of Jesus. And so it is fitting that as we receive new members into our church family, we say they are entering into communion with God and with one another, or as our own church covenant reads, “We covenant one with another to seek and respond to the Word and Will of God.”
And that should be enough church speak to last you until I return the middle of August. Let’s welcome our new members.