Cut to the Heart

The new covenant is not cut in stone, but on the heart -- of God! A sermon for Lent5b.

SJF • Lent 5b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The Lord said, This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.

Throughout this Lent we have been exploring the concept of covenant. Week by week we have looked at a number of covenants that God made with the earth or with his people. We began with the rainbow covenant from the days of Noah, and then took account of the covenant God made with Abraham, sealed with Abraham’s own blood and in his flesh, and in that of his descendants forever. Then we heard an account of the giving of that covenant at Sinai — the covenant which our Scripture today notes that the people broke. And last week we looked at the healing covenant of the bronze serpent, the one that Moses made at God’s direction to heal the people of their snake-bites — and of how Jesus applied this to himself as a sign of his own New Covenant in his flesh and blood, his saving passion and death. The common element we saw in all of these covenants was their two-part nature as both agreement and sign of the agreement.

+ + +

Today, as I noted, we step back to that covenant cut in stone — the one given at Mount Sinai, the one that the people broke. The prophet Jeremiah promises that the ever-faithful God will provide the people with an unbreakable covenant. And the crucial difference about this covenant is that it will not take the form of something external and general, but something internal and personal. God will not write this covenant in the sky, as in the days of Noah; nor in the mere external flesh of his people’s men-folk, as in the covenant with Abraham; nor on tablets of stone, as he did in the days of Moses; nor in a token or a totem to ward off the pain of snake-bite, as also in the course of the people’s journey under Moses. No — God will write a new covenant on none of these, but on each and human heart.

The new covenant will be immediate in the strictest sense of that word — direct, with nothing intervening or coming in the way between God and the believer. No intermediary or messenger or teacher will be required to transmit or announce or instruct about this covenant. It will cut straight to the heart.

+ + +

Now, it is abundantly clear from the rest of the book of the prophet Jeremiah — and from the records both in Scripture and in secular history — that this miraculous intervention by God into the hearts of the people of Israel did not happen in Jeremiah’s time. The people remained as stubborn, willful and sinful through the time of Jeremiah as they had been in the days of Moses, the judges, the kings and the other prophets; and they would remain just as bad on through the captivity, and the return from Babylon, and the building of the Second Temple. They still turned to idolatry and sinfulness; and even when they turned to the law, it was to that law of Moses and the priestly law of sacrifice and burnt offering, the mechanical and external worship of God.

There were no doubt in Israel those for whom the love of God went beneath the skin, whose hearts were touched by God. There were righteous as well as wicked folks in and before Jeremiah’s time, and in the captivity and beyond. But all that righteousness or wickedness was still measured by compliance or non-compliance with that old law carved in stone.

+ + +

Yet Jeremiah had announced, “The days are surely coming” — that’s a prophet’s way of saying, “I cannot tell you when, but some day something wonderful is going to happen: God will act, and the world will be changed.”

And so it was in the days of the Second Temple, during the Roman Occupation of the land, word began to spread about a man who was more than a man. Word spread even far enough for Greeks to hear of him — Greeks who had adopted, or at least admired from afar, the Law of Moses, and came to worship in Jerusalem. And they came to Philip — one of the disciples who happened to have a Greek name! — asking to see the man they’d heard about, this man called Jesus.

The request gets passed along and finally comes to Jesus who responds, in John’s account, with one of those speeches with which John’s gospel is sprinkled— almost a sermon in itself. Perhaps it is the realization that the accomplishment of his great work — to be a light to all the world — is finally in the process of fulfillment. After all, Greeks are coming to him, literally for goodness’ sake!

And so he launches into that rhapsody on his coming sacrifice and its universal effect. It will be like a single grain of wheat that perishes but becomes a fruitful harvest. For a moment his soul is troubled by the implications of this perishing — of dying in order to bear fruit. It is also very close now — his houris approaching, the hour when the New Covenant will be well and truly cut — in his own flesh and blood upon the cross.

And in response to the trouble on his heart, God speaks in a thundering voice — no, not for his sake, but for the sake of all who heard it.

And suddenly, immediately, it is no longer the prophet’s vague promise, “The days are surely coming...” but rather it is now God’s Son’s own “Now!” “Now is the judgment of this world. Now the ruler of this world will be driven out! And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

It is as if the heart of God himself has been laid bare, and written upon it is the promise and its fulfillment. The New Covenant is now, Christ seems to say, the hour of completion and realization, the time in which the sharp sword of God’s own Spirit will cut to the heart of every human being, drawn to the foot of the cross upon which the Son of God is lifted up — no bronze serpent he, but the Son of God in flesh and blood, revealed in his Paschal suffering, losing his life, perishing, that he may take it up again, and us with it — a plentiful harvest — all of us marked on our foreheads with his cross and on our hearts with his love.

Let us thank God has called us to the foot of that cross, has marked us with that sign, has written his covenant upon our hearts. In Christ we die, like grain once scattered on a hillside, and in him we also rise, and bearing fruit unto eternal life will rejoice with him for ever.+

Hair of the Dog

The Atonement required something of the very thing that caused the problem in the first place... flesh and blood. A sermon for Lent 4b.

SJF • Lent 4b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

Anyone who comes from a culture in which the consumption of alcohol is a common feature will know that in addition to every culture’s favorite strong alcoholic beverage — whether rum or whiskey, bourbon or brandy — each culture also has its own favorite hangover cure. For it follows as the night the day — or more likely the day following the night!— that consumption of too much of any alcoholic beverage will have a definite impact on how you feel the next morning.

Some years ago, there was even a TV show called “Three Sheets” that formed the alcoholic equivalent to National Geographic. A man traveled the world sampling the strongest liquor in every country and getting royally — or democratically — drunk, depending on the country, and then the following morning seeking out each nation’s favorite hangover cure. The first episode of the series began with a search for Belize’s elusive cashew wine, high-power Viper Rum (made with real viper pickled in the bottle) and readily available Belikin Beer; and it ended with a dose of Michelada the morning after. Some of you may be familiar with these very products!

One of the things about many of the hangover cures is that they often include a certain amount of alcohol — including Michelada, which is part beer. The old saying is that you need “a hair of the dog that bit you” if you are to rid yourself of the hangover. And you are probably wondering about now what I may have been up to last night that brings forth this reflection on alcohol and its after-effects; but I assure you last night was not spent in a binge and I did not require a hair or any other part of a dog this morning in my coffee! Even being a quarter Irish I know how to behave on St. Patrick’s Day.

No, I raise this matter of the hair of the dog because of that curious incident from the book of Numbers that we heard this morning. God has Moses create a bronze serpent as a treatment for those suffering from the burning pain of snakebite. This is the same God who on Sinai had ordered Moses not to make any likeness of anything on the earth or under the earth or in the heavens — and yet here God commands Moses to make a bronze serpent; and not only to make it, but to display it before the people as a way to bring them healing from their snake-bites. Now, This is hardly modern medicine, hardly even medicine at all; and it comes from a time and a culture when such almost magical treatments for disease or injury were common. And a major feature of these cures is that they include something similar to, or derived from, the cause of the disease itself. Why, even today you can go to the drugstore and buy what they call “homeopathic medications” many of which contain small amounts of the thing that made you sick in the first place.

Now, this incident might have remained just one of those curious passages from the Hebrew Scriptures explained in a footnote but then quickly passed by if it weren’t for the fact that Jesus not only refers to this incident and applies it to himself — and not just to himself but specifically to his manner of death for our sake and for our salvation. He interprets this ancient incident as a sign: a sign of healing, not just for the snake-bitten few, but for the whole world, enslaved by sin. Originally this sign was just to heal a few people wounded by snakes for their transgressions. But its fulfillment — in Christ on the cross — where he is lifted up — is as a sign of healing for the whole world; for, as the text continues in that biblical quote so famous that it is even held up on signs at football matches — God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him, displayed and lifted up upon the cross. It is not only saving from the pain of snake-bite, but deliverance from the death pangs due to all who have fallen under the sway of the great serpent who connived the fall of our ancient parents in the garden.

This is where the theme of a covenant comes in, the theme we’ve been exploring these four Sundays in Lent. We started with God’s covenant with the earth sealed in the sign of the rainbow, through the covenant with Abraham sealed in the blood of his flesh, through the Old Covenant chiseled on tablets of stone, we come now specifically to the New Covenant of Christ’s blood shed on the cross, not to condemn the world, but in order that Christ might be lifted up and call the whole world to himself, bringing healing to all who turn to him in faith.

There is an unforgettable line in Saint Julian of Norwich’s reflections on the crucified Christ. From the cross he displays his wounds, and says, “See how I loved you.” It is in his own wounded flesh that healing and salvation lies — in his flesh and in his blood.

And that is the hair of the dog that bit us — for it is in our own flesh and blood that we fell into sin; and it is in our own flesh and blood that we turned from God. In the person of our ancient ancestors Adam and Eve we rejected all that God had planned and intended for us, thinking we could do better on our own. And we have continued to sin, in our own flesh-and-blood, in the wrongs we do towards God and to one another. I would love to say that the church is immune from such ailments, but we need not look very far to see the evidence to the contrary. Our sins cry out like the blood of Abel from the ground. I find myself crying out with Saint Paul, “Who will deliver me from this body of death!”

And the answer Paul found is the answer that rings true still: Only the flesh and blood of one who was truly human — but was also truly God incarnate — could atone for, could heal, the breach and division caused by that ancient wrong, and all our wrongs done since. This is not, as Saint Paul told the Ephesians, our own doing — it is the doing of one who is like us in every way, except only sin. But who is also God. For God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our sins, made us alive together with Christ, when he raised him from the dead. He was wounded for our transgressions, and by his stripes we are healed.

This is the covenant of the atonement — the drawing together of humanity at the foot of the cross to look upon the one whom we have pierced, through our own sins. This is the covenant of grace, of God’s promised forgiveness, healing the wounds that Satan gave us, and the wounds we give each other, by means of his own Son’s giving of himself. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Let us rejoice that God has provided us with the means of our healing and salvation, in Jesus Christ. Let us turn to him, repenting all our failings and our wrongs, toward him who is alone our Savior and our Lord.+

Cutting a Deal

The covenant sealed in flesh and blood: Abraham's, Christi's, and ours... a sermon for Lent 2b

SJF • Lent 2b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
God said to Abraham, I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised.

On this second Sunday in Lent we come to the second great Covenant of the Hebrew Scriptures. Last week we witnessed God’s first covenant — the promise that the he would never again wipe out the world by a flood, and it was sealed with the sign of God’s own name in the heavenly rainbow. I noted last week that a covenant has two parts: an agreement between the parties, and a sign of that agreement, noting that the covenant with Noah was more or less one-sided: God made a promise to Noah and put the rainbow in the sky as a sign of that promise.

In the covenant God made with Abraham, however, we see a covenant in its complete form. God promises Abraham that he will be a father of nations, and promises him the land in which he dwells as a perpetual heritage. And this time around, the covenant is to be signed by Abraham in his own flesh, and the flesh of all of his descendants forever. I’m tempted to say that this time the shoe is on the other foot, but this sign involves an entirely different portion of the anatomy, and the less said about that the better. In fact, the editors of the lectionary were so sensitive and perhaps even squeamish about this that they actually left out all of the verses referring to circumcision, to Abraham’s side of the deal. But I have chosen to include them, however, because I think it is important to see that this covenant has a sign in addition to a promise — and the sign this time was a sign in flesh and blood; literally cutting a deal — which is the way the Hebrew authors consistently refer to making a covenant: a covenant is something you cut — and a cut almost always bleeds.

It is important, however, that we note that more flesh and blood is talked about here than merely that directly connected with sign of circumcision. Remember that the promise that God makes is that Abraham and Sarah, as old and barren as they are, and who are given new names as part of this covenant arrangement, will have flesh and blood descendants, starting with the son promised to Sarah. This couple, childless until their very old age (although Abram had fathered a child through Hagar, Sarai’s servant), would soon have a son of their own, Isaac, through whom the covenant blessing would continue, a sign of the promise revealed in flesh and blood.

There is a great promise here, a promise from God, but it costs Abraham something — it costs him and his descendants forever some pain and some blood, as a sign of the covenant which is to be marked in their flesh forever. It is a covenant that requires some personal sacrifice.

And so it would also be with the covenant that God establishes with us in Christ Jesus. In the Gospel passage today Jesus tries to explain to his disciples just how costly salvation will be — costly to him, as he endures suffering, rejection and death, before he comes to the resurrection in that crowning glory. Peter tries to rebuke him — this is too much for him, too much of a sacrifice, even though it is not he who is making it — but Jesus insists in no uncertain terms that there is a cost to this new covenant, this New Testament in his blood. The cost that he will pay is his life, and he tells Peter and the other disciples that this is the cost to them as well. If they wish to save their lives they must lose their lives for his sake and for the sake of the gospel. They must deny themselves, their very selves — who and what they are in every sense of the word — and take up their own cross and follow him.

+ + +

As you know, every time I baptize a child here at this font I also mark them on the forehead with oil blessed by the bishop, saying, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.” As the hymn we just sang says, “Each newborn servant of the Crucified bears on the brow the seal of him who died.” The early church regarded this anointing with oil and baptism with water as our Christian version of circumcision — an unbloody circumcision marked not in the flesh but by the Holy Spirit. And so it is that even the youngest infant, baptized into this new life, takes up his or her cross to begin to follow Jesus, even before they can walk, as a sign of their own baptismal covenant.

This should not seem so strange to us who worship as our Lord one who first came among us as an infant in a manger. Just as a child was promised to Abraham and Sarah, a child was promised to us, a son given to us, who lived as one of us and died as one of us, but then rose victorious from the grave; and it is through him that we also share the promise of that rising from the dead. Abraham signed this covenant with his own blood; and God signed this new covenant, this new baptismal covenant through Jesus Christ — God signed this covenant in his own blood, the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

We bear the mark of his suffering — his cross — on our foreheads, perhaps invisible as it is marked with holy oil, but it does show up when we are signed with ashes at the beginning of Lent — the minister acting almost like a detective dusting with ashes that reveal God’s fingerprints upon us — each and every one. It is a sign of the covenant we have with God, and God with us, the sign of the cross. That sign is always there, even if you cannot see it, the sign of God’s covenant with you, and you with God, in Christ Jesus our Lord — it is the sign of the saving cross, marked on your own body. Remember it, take it up every day; remember him, and follow him, who is our Lord and our God, who suffered for our salvation and rose from the dead that we might have new life in him. To him be the glory, henceforth and for evermore.

Look to the Skies

On the nature of covenants... from the first one whose sign was set in the clouds. A sermon for Lent 1b.

SJF • Lent 1b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The Lord said, This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you... I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.

We come now to the first Sunday in Lent, and through the coming four weeks our readings from the Hebrew Scriptures will focus on the concept of covenant. On each Sunday the Scriptures will refer to one of the various covenants that God made with humanity, and with the chosen people — including, next week, the covenant which was marked in flesh and blood.

But today we go back to primeval history, to the covenant made between God and every living thing on earth. This covenant is marked with the sign of the rainbow set in the clouds after the flood. God promises that he will never again cause it to rain so much as to wash away all living things; and that the rainbow will remind God himself not to get carried away and destroy all living things by a flood. When God sees it, God will remember — as if God could forget!

This first and model covenant goes far to tell us what a covenant is — what is the nature of a covenant. It shows us that the covenant has two parts: an agreement or promise, and a sign or testimony to that agreement or promise. Think for a moment about the agreements or promises that you make yourselves in your own lives. Even the most basic and simplest agreement is marked at least with a nod or a handshake, isn’t it? That outward sign is what tells you that the other party has agreed; if they just stared at you blankly, how would you know if they have agreed or not? We need at least a wink or a nod if we are not to have serious misunderstandings. And the graver and more important the agreement, the more likely we are to demand more than a wink or a nod, or even a handshake. We are likely to want it in writing — some kind of testimonial stating exactly what it was that was agreed to, and the terms of the agreement; something towhich we can refer back, later down the road, if it appears the agreement isn’t being kept. We want something we can hold up and say, “But you agreed — here it is in black and white.”

Of course, the agreement God made with humanity in this earliest covenant wasn’t in black and white. It was in the colors of the rainbow, set in the clouds to remind all — even God himself — of his promise not to flood the world again.

How many of you recall that grade-school memory device for remembering the seven colors of the rainbow, Mr. Roy G. Biv? Anyone remember that? It seems that although we think of the rainbow as having seven colors, at least some of the ancients did not perceive so many gradations of color. One of the ancient Greeks refers to the rainbow as “three-colored” and it has been suggested that the Hebrews saw it as having four distinct colors. And that these four colors spelled out the sacred name of God himself, to which I referred some weeks back. So they may have understood the rainbow literally as God’s “signature” in the heavens!

+ + +

There is another unusual feature to this covenant, and that is its essentially one-sided nature: if the rainbow is God’s signature, his is the only one on the agreement. Usually, and in all the later covenants we’ll talk about, a covenant marks out an agreement in which both parties have a responsibility to do something. But in this case, God does not look for or ask for anything specific from Noah. It’s true that in a portion of the story not included in our reading, God does demand that Noah and his descendants — which is to say, everybody, all of humanity — are not to eat meat with blood still in it. Adam and Eve, as you recall from Genesis, were allowed to eat of the fruit of the earth — no meat — but God gives Noah and his family the right to eat meat, on the condition they not consume any blood. But this permission to eat meat and the commandment not to eat blood do not seem to be at all linked with the covenant about the flood itself or the promise not to flood the earth again, or with the sign of the covenant set in the clouds. This appears to be a completely one-sided covenant, a promise that God is making to himself as much as to Noah, and the rainbow is there to serve as an aide-memoire for God himself, like a string you might tie on a finger to remind yourself of some task, or a memo you might jot on a sticky-note, attached to the side of your computer monitor.

Still, this is precisely why covenants have such an external sign: the sign is the testimony that a promise has been made, the reminder and proof that the covenant exists. And whether it serves to remind one or both parties, it does its work most effectively when the covenant itself specifies the sign as part of the agreement — in black and white, or in the colors of a rainbow.

+ + +

As you may know, the various churches that make up the Anglican Communion are exploring whether or not we should adopt a covenant that has been proposed for all of the member churches to adopt. This would make more formal what up to now has been a relatively informal arrangement. The discussion is whether we should move from the realm of handshakes, winks and nods, to a written constitution of sorts. There is also discussion as to whether the draft document proposed meets the test of being something that we all can agree to. There seems to be some interest in having some kind of agreement, but no clear agreement as to what that agreement should be. I will be alluding to this proposed Anglican Covenant over the next weeks, but I do not plan to make it the focus of my reflections.

For today I will only say that it seems the proposed Anglican Covenant is a bit short on specifics and long on good intentions; that is, the things everyone is supposed to agree to seem fairly agreeable, but they seemed that way already — so some are asking, Why do we need such an agreement when a handshake will do. As one English bishop put it: if we can agree to it, we do not need it, and if we can’t agree to it, it won’t accomplish anything. And even in England, out of the dioceses that have voted on it, they are ten-to-seven against it.

+ + +

But as I say, this proposed bit of Anglican diplomacy will not form the substance of my sermons this Lent. (Thanks be to God!) My primary interest is in exploring the historic covenants of the people of God, and that will form the content of our Scripture readings over the next few weeks, and my reflections on them.

And to return to today’s Rainbow Covenant, let us remember its most striking characteristic: it is God’s covenant with the earth, a reminder to God to keep his promise not to destroy the earth with a flood. It asks nothing of the earth, or of the people who dwell on it. It is the sign of a promise made by God, signed in the colors of the rainbow, and set in the clouds for all to see. As I said in a sermon a few weeks ago, this is a real, “I’m God and you aren’t” kind of message; God is saying, in effect, “By myself I have sworn.”

What promise could be more faithful, what words more comforting, than a covenant from God, a promise that God sealed with a sign of God’s own making. When we look to the skies and see the sign of the rainbow, let us remember that this is a sign from God and of God, a reminder that God is faithful and never-failing, and will stand fast by his Word. Let it be a sign to us of God’s unchanging compassion, unfailing love, and great faithfulness unto me, and to you, and to every descendant of Noah who dwells on God’s good earth.+