Monday 23 February 2015

Sermon, Sunday 22 Feb, 1 Lent: A Covenanted Community

Over the course of Lent, we'll be reflecting on the theme:
'the kin-dom of heaven: living as God's community' -
thinking about what it is to be brothers and sisters in Christ, and his body here on earth.
Lent 1 explores our communal relationship with God as a covenanted community
Lent 2 takes up the theme of being a cross-carrying community
Lent 3, a reforming community
Lent 4, a beloved community
and Lent 5, a forgiven community.
1st READING: Genesis 9:8-17
2nd READING: Mark 1:9-15

SERMON  ‘A covenanted community’
Let’s pray:
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Noah...
Most of us know this story -
a man, his family,
oodles of animals,
a jolly big boat, and...
water, water, everywhere.
Mostly, when the story of Noah and his ark crops up in worship,
it’s easy to get caught up with all the animals:
the cute and the fluffy,
the small and the furry
the tweets and the purring...
to sing cheery songs about animals going into
the arky arky - in twosies, twosies...
...Apparently they didn’t like wearing onesies -
I do know some humans who wear them, however.
But the story of Noah and the ark is anything but cute and cuddly.
This is a hard story to read, to hear.
Yes, there are animals - all kinds of animals...

Animals bleating and tweeting,
baying and braying,
beaked and clawed.
Clip-clopping and slithering and stomping,
moving inexorably towards the sanctuary of the boat.
Two of each kind - even, unfortunately, midgies.
And then, there’s the rain:
the first drop of rain.
then another.
And another.
Drops making puddles,
drops filling and bursting dams,
pouring into rivers -
rivers overrunning,
overspilling into the sea.
Water meeting water,
rising relentlessly
and, as it rises,
lifting the boat with its cargo.

For 40 days and 40 nights
it rains...
it pours,
and the waters continue to rise.
The world is submerged.
On the 41st day, the rain stops and the waters cease swelling.
The floodgates of heaven close and a wind blows across
the ocean that is the world.
The waters recede, subside.
Slowly.
Bit by soggy bit.
Uncovering the mountain-tops,
the hills,
revealing valleys,
until eventually, after months of waiting,
the family,
and the multitude of animals,
emerge, stand on dry ground.

It’s a hard story to read, to hear...
for everything, everyone, they’ve ever known...
has gone.
The whole world has changed -
their whole lives have changed
under the torrents of God’s watery wrath.
God the Creator, in this act, becoming God the destroyer.

This image of God is uncomfortable, doesn’t sit easily with us.
And historically, there’ve been plenty of people who have rather wished
that we didn’t bother so much with the Hebrew Bible -
so many difficult bits to have to think about;
much easier to think of the nice God of the New Testament.
Of gentle Jesus, meek and mild...
Thinking about the story of Noah, and all those fluffy wee animals,
perhaps we want to make our God
fluffy...maybe even cute ‘n cuddly,
domesticated: a tame God -
for a tame God is easier to cope with
than thinking of the untamed God of great power and might
seen in this bible story.
And, actually, were the animals on the ark really so tame, so fluffy?
I’m reminded of the C. S. Lewis stories of Narnia,
and of the character of Aslan -
Creator and Lord over all Narnia - the great lion...
loving, compassionate, but, as the reader is often reminded:
‘he’s not a tame lion, you know.’

So how do we reconcile our notion of a loving God with the God who confronts us in this text?
It’s not an easy question and I suspect that there’s not an easy answer. 
Sorry about that.
But let’s look again at this picture of God.
In a sky, blue and cloud-free:
another arc - the arc, the bend of rainbow stretching overhead.
And a new word - ‘covenant’ -
is heard and described for the first time in the Bible -
a word uttered repeatedly by God:
Verse 9 ‘I now establish my covenant with you...’
Verse 11 ‘I establish my covenant with you...’
Verse 12 ‘This is the sign of the covenant... a covenant
for all generations to come...’
Verse 13 the rainbow as ‘the sign of the covenant...
Verse 15 ‘I will remember my covenant...’
Verse 16 ‘I will...remember the ever-lasting covenant...’
And verse 17 ‘This is the sign of the covenant I have
established between me and all life on the earth.’
I’m not sure just how much more you could
actually shoe-horn the word ‘covenant’ into these few verses of our text.
Covenant is obviously hugely important given the amount of times
the word is repeated here. 
What’s a covenant? 
And what’s going on?

A covenant is an agreement, a promise, a contract.
It implies that there’s some kind of relationship between the parties involved within this arrangement.
After the destruction of the world,
in the after-math of the great flood,
is there a change of heart,  
an expression of deep heart-rending regret by God,
seen within these repeated assurances ...
seen within the promise made and the shimmering sign of the rainbow?
The story tells us of God’s power,
fierce and wild
but there’s a twist in this hard to read,
hard to hear tale -
for this is, perhaps, a tale about repentance: God’s repentance -
repentance meaning a change of heart;
repentance meaning a turning from,
and a turning towards;
repentance meaning finding a new,
a different way of being and relating;
...repentance that has at its heart   reconciliation -
for repentance is always, always about the restoration of relationship.
In this case, God’s great desire to rebuild and to restore the fractured relationship with humanity.

God reconciles himself to humanity and to the world in this story.
‘God, in goodness and love, chooses to be bound with all creation, promising to preserve and not destroy.’
A bow is set within the sky -
A bow that, should an arrow be fired,
would shoot away from the earth,
and not into it;
would shoot away from the earth...and into the heavens.
A sign that God would rather undergo
suffering himself than ever, ever cause suffering upon humanity and upon the world.
Never again.
Never     again.

This first of all covenants is the model and mark
for repentance, reconciliation, and relationship. 
Over thousands of years, God will make other, different covenants with the people 
he chooses to call his own - the people of the promise.

As God’s gathered people here, and now,
we are inheritors of that promise - we are a covenanted community:
called as God’s own.
The season of Lent is a good time to think of this idea of covenant -
and of our communal relationship and bond with God.
What is it to be God’s community?

Before we explore that, let’s think of the other story we heard earlier.
It too, involved water.
It too, involved repentance and 40 days in the wilderness -
not of ocean wilds, but of barren desert.
We see a man baptised;
discover that this is God’s son - beloved - with whom God is pleased.
God’s son...baptised:
Jesus’ first appearance in the gospel of Mark sees him undertaking a ritual of repentance ...
harking back to that first covenant of God with Noah, perhaps?
As we read more of the story of Jesus, we walk with him to Jerusalem
and discover another sign
another symbol -
another way of being:
the way of the cross -
and the suffering Son of God,
taking upon himself all the pain and muck and mess of humanity:
carrying the weight of all the world
upon his shoulders -
the only shoulders capable of carrying that load.
Doing this, rather than seeing an ancient promise broken.
In this act, we learn about the deep, deep love and faithfulness of God,
but here too, is a twist in the tale -
death is not the end
it is upended,
overturned,
defeated.
Love wins, and hope will have its way.
But before that, before Resurrection Sunday, there’s the waiting time.

As God’s gathered people here, and now,
what is it to be God’s community - a covenanted community?
We are one in Christ, yet we’re also diverse -
a wild and woolly mix indeed, at times,
just like that assortment living on the ark.
And, just like that assortment on the ark,
there’s an art in working out how we manage to live together without clawing - or even biting one another -
though sometimes that happens too.
And because it does, we’re a community of reconciliation:
of second, third, fourth, and fifth to the power of infinity chances.
A community of repentance and of open-heartedness:
to God, to neighbour, and to ourselves;
prepared to change our heart, our direction,
our way of being in the world and among one another.
A community where sacrificial love is our standard:
‘for there is not greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’  [Jn 15:13]
A community bound to God and to each other -
for through Christ, our brother, we are brothers and sisters together:
the kin-dom of God -
God, with whom we are in covenant,
and who we are called to love, to serve,
to praise and to worship, now and always.

And to him be all praise, and honour and glory, forever, Amen.

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