2nd Sunday in Lent
Texts: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16;
Mark 8:31-38; Romans 4:13-25
"COVENANT: GOD'S COMMITMENT
TO CONVERSATION"
Why do we get married? For love? Yes, that's the main reason we get
married in the modern era.
But it wasn't always that way. It used to be tied up with the
politics of bringing two families
together, creating a new alliance through a new joined-together
family; that's why marriages
were always arranged by parents.
I'd like to suggest another good reason for marriage, and it has to
do with our theme for Lent:
Covenant. We belong to a Covenant God, who calls us to live in
Covenant with each other, as
well -- covenants such as marriage. What happens when you are
fortunate to live with someone
for years that stretch into decades? You share everything together.
And if it is a good marriage
founded on trust and love, that everything can range from the most
ordinary of life-sustaining
activities down to the most intimate details of innermost thoughts
and feelings. Two lives in
loving conversation for years can bring the most treasured kind of
knowledge, the knowledge of
what it means to be human. I suggest that an excellent reason for
getting married is to grow in
understanding what it means to be human.
I think that this works a bit like learning a second language. As
you learn about another language,
it helps you learn both your own language better and also what it
means to speak a language in
general. Two lives in conversation over many years helps in a
similar way. In getting to know
Ellen I learn both to understand myself better and to know what it
means to be human. This is a
never-ending process, of course, filled with trial and error. You
know how it goes. Just when you
think you have a loved one figured out, they surprise you again. And
forgiveness may be in order.
You can't proceed in this journey of finding out what it means to be
human with out love and
forgiveness.
And that's why God is a Covenant God, to undergird all our human
covenants with the love and
forgiveness we need. From the beginning, God offered human beings a
Covenant life as a
foundation for our living together in peace. But from the beginning
we blew it. We thought we
could know these things on our own. The serpent said we could know
good and evil if we ate the
fruit of the forbidden tree. Paradise was lost.
So God started anew somewhere with someone. God chose Abraham and
Sarah to make a
Covenant anew. And it is this covenant that is the foundation for
all others. It is in choosing
Abraham and Sarah and their descendants that God seeks to
have a conversation over the years
that not only stretches into decades but into centuries.
In this ongoing conversation with the
descendants of Abraham and Sarah -- and perhaps we should add
Abraham and Hagar for our
Muslim brothers and sisters -- it is in this ongoing conversation
that God of centuries that God
helps to get to know better both ourselves and what it means to be
human. Finally, it is a
descendant of Abraham and Sarah, Jesus of Nazareth, in whom we are
able to see fully and
completely both God and ourselves. We learn what it means to be God
and what it means to be
human. Centuries it has taken, and I'm not sure we know yet!! And
there has been much trial and
error, just like with our own covenant relationships. In Christ
Jesus, there is no error. Only pure
truth of both divinity and humanity. But on our side of the
covenant, of course, there is still trial
and error. The conversation continues. We are still learning what it
means to be human, even as
we learn who God truly is.
Let me give you an example of this trial and error over the
centuries. In our second lesson today,
Paul says, "For the law brings wrath." That's like me saying, "The
Christian religion brings
wrath." We gasp! The Law, Torah in the Hebrew, was their
religion. For Paul to say that it brings
wrath might have been scandalous to some extent. But they might have
known what Paul was
saying because of their ideas of God bringing wrath upon God's
enemies. But it was God who
brings the wrath, wasn't it? Not the Torah. The Torah simply tells
us about God's wrath. But
there's a bible study I do -- I don't have time to do it right now
-- that shows how Paul is trying
to help his readers understand that God isn't wrath. In Jesus Christ
we see that God is love and
mercy and forgiveness and that we are the wrath. The Torah, our
religion, in our sinful hands,
brings wrath, not God. In Jesus Christ, the centuries-long
conversation has finally prepared us to
see and hear that God is love and we are wrath. We project our wrath
onto God, but that's not
who God is.
Our Gospel gives another example. A few verses earlier, Peter has
gotten it right by proclaiming
Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ. But in this morning's story he
also shows himself to be wrong,
the trial and error I'm talking about. He assumes that the Messiah,
as God's servant, is here to
bring God's wrath down upon God's enemies. He assumes that the
Messiah is here to kick butt.
But Jesus goes on to say how the wrath of the Romans will come down
upon him and he will be
crucified. To a Jew like Peter, that's like saying the Roman gods
are going to kick the butt of
their Jewish God. That can't happen if he is truly God's Messiah.
Peter thinks he knows who
God is, but the conversation will prove him wrong. In Jesus the
Messiah, we find out that God is
love, period!, and not wrath. God takes our wrath upon himself in
Jesus on Good Friday and
turns it into love and forgiveness on Easter. That's why Good Friday
is Good. Not because of our
wrath, but because God's powerful love is strong enough to turn
wrath into love and new life.
It's now twenty centuries later. Have we learned yet? Or is it as we
talked about two weeks ago:
we have ears that don't hear and eyes that don't see. God is holding
up God's end of the
conversation, but we continue to fail. I said a moment ago that Paul
saying that the Torah bring
wrath is like me saying that the Christian religion brings wrath.
Well, let me say it: "The
Christian religion, for way too many centuries, has brought wrath."
In our sinful hands, we have
turned the Good News in Jesus the Messiah -- that God is love and we
are wrath, but that wrath
can be forgiven -- we have turned it into the bad news that God has
a wrath that punishes
unbelievers in hell for eternity.
I've been privileged to read the manuscript of Brian McLaren's next book. It is
about being
Christian in a multi-faith world. He presents the dilemma that to
have a strong Christian identity over
recent centuries has meant being hostile to people of other
religions. We are hostile by bringing
that message of God's wrath for eternal damnation. To be friendly
and hospitable to people of
other faiths has seemingly meant weakening one's Christian identity.
McLaren asks, 'But what if
we have been wrong about our Christian identity? Shouldn't there be
a Christian identity that's
hospitable, not hostile, to people of other faiths?' I am saying to
you this morning that, yes, there
should be a Christian identity that is hospitable to all people.
It's the identity that Christ came to
show us, in other words, of who God is and who we truly can be. For
we can be love, too. We
have been wrath, killing one another and breaking apart
relationships, but we can be about love.
God's forgiveness can help us turn the corner.
What about all those passages that seem to say that God is wrath?
you say. Well, we can chalk
that up at least partially to our deafness and blindness when it
comes to our centuries long
conversation with God. But part of it, too, is not hearing what may
sound like wrath from God,
but is actually God's love in pain, watching us kill each other in
wrath. Love doesn't mean all is
well in the world. No, love gives choices, and we continue to choose
the darkness of wrath
turned to estrangement and death. We can't go into that whole long
story yet this morning.
So let me end with this question and answer: If we human beings have
this habit of projecting
our wrath onto our gods, then how can the true God of love ever get
through to us? How can our
deafness and blindness ever be healed? The answer: Covenant. It
takes God's commitment to
have a conversation with us over centuries that we might finally
hear and understand who God is
and who we are created to be. It took God starting somewhere with
someone, Abraham and
Sarah. And even with much trial and error among their descendants,
the conversation finally
became flesh in Jesus Christ, so that we can see that God is love
and that we are created to be
love.
Christ's followers have also endured many centuries of trial and
error in this conversation, this
Covenant. But, again as always, God starts somewhere with someone.
Could that someone be
you and me? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran,
Portage, MI, March 4, 2012