In the name of God, who creates, redeems, and
sustains. Amen.
What
if I told you there is something more meaningful than the grind of daily life, that
we are prisoners to a false reality which surrounds us on every side? That is
the premise of one of my favorite movies, The
Matrix. Part of what led to its popularity was the philosophical depths
that the movie presented: what is real, and how do you know that it is real? The
main character in the movie is invited to be blissfully ignorant of the true nature
of the world, or to go deeper into that truth. This is the same invitation with
which we are presented in our readings from Genesis and Mark this morning.
As
we continue our Lenten exploration of covenant, we’ll focus specifically on two
questions: “what does God do through the covenant?” and “what is expected of us
in the covenant?”. The idea of the Biblical covenant is life changing. As we
explored last Sunday, the covenant shapes both our identity and God’s. In the
covenant, God is defined as steadfast and is present with us in Jesus. And
through the covenant we are defined as the beloved of God. But it is quite easy
to go about your life and be unaware of how this covenant shapes you.
In
2005, the results of a massive study on the religious beliefs of Americans reported
that most of us believe in moralistic-therapeutic-deism. Which is the belief
that there is a distant god that generally stays out of the affairs of
humanity, this god wants us to be nice to others, and the goal of life is to be
happy. When the protagonist of the movie is first learning of the concept of
the Matrix, he is told “The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here even
in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church,
or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind
you from the truth.” But both in the movie and in our lives, there is something
truer than this false reality which surrounds
us and demands our entire live, giving nothing in return. As the movie
progresses, you learn more about the false Matrix and the true reality that
lies deeper. And the same is true in the faith journey, the deeper you dive
into the Christian story and embrace the idea of covenant, the closer you come
to finding reality itself, namely, God.
You can go through life,
unaware of the concept of covenant and still live a life that would be considered
to be full, meaningful, and happy. But the covenant is almost like a divine
harmony with which God created, redeemed, and sustains all of Creation. If you don’t
hear the music, you can get along fine. But if you can tune into that divine
song, you can find a sense of rhythm that moves you with deeper purpose, you
can find a beat that picks you up when you are low, something that joins your
voice with others through the ages.
So the question then
becomes- what does covenantal living look like? To consider what God does
through the covenant, let us turn to our reading from Genesis. The Lord says to Abram “I will make my
covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Scholars
tell us that the book of Genesis actually has multiple authors who have made
their contributions to the text. For this reason, sometimes there are multiple
versions of the same event, just told from different perspectives. So I’d like
to consider how another source in Genesis describes the covenant as well. In
chapter 12, the Lord says “I will
make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great… and
in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” This is the purpose of
the covenant from God’s perspective: blessing. The covenant is not about
Abraham, or his sons Ishmael and Isaac, but rather is about blessing all the
families of the earth. God certainly worked through Abraham and the nation of
Israel, the blessing is not just for Israel, but for all.
By delegating this
blessing, God creates a sort of community that is crucial to our salvation. It
is only through being together that we can find the blessings that God has in
store for us. The gifts that come from God are healing, compassion, generosity,
friendship, love. But the instruments of delivery for these gifts is Abraham
and his descendants. By faith, we are included, both in the receiving and the
delivery of those gifts of blessing.
Before we move on to
considering what the covenant expects of us, I do want to point out that though
Abraham is remembered as the “father of Israel,” this all happens because of
Sarah, his wife. The text says “I will bless her, and moreover I will give you
a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of
peoples shall come from her.” Though the Bible comes out of a patriarchal
culture and too often ignores the role of women, such an inclusion as this one
invites us to remember that God’s blessing can come from places we might not
expect. Sarah is the instrument through which the blessing of offspring comes.
God’s blessing can come through Sarah as easily as it does Abraham, through a
homeless veteran as easily as it does a wealthy politician, through an
undocumented immigrant as it does a priest.
The question that shapes
our lives though is “what does the covenant expect from us?” Here, we turn to
Mark, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up
their cross and follow me.” That verse is one that is very well known, but not
as well understood. What does this mean? “For those who want to save their life
will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of
the gospel, will save it” is just as counter-intuitive and disturbing today as
it was when Jesus said it.
In the context of the New
Testament, “denying yourself” meant to give up your identity. Your identity
would have been your family, your trade, your community. What Jesus is saying
is something like “separate yourself from all the things that have demands on
your life so that you are free to follow me with all of your being.” When we
follow the covenant, we are given a new identity, that of God’s people. But if
you have other claims on your identity, it will prevent you from living fully
for God.
And as far as “take up
your cross,” it really is as simple and uncomfortable as it sounds. The cross
was an instrument of capital punishment for criminals. To take up your cross
means that you will run into those in power. A lot of modern day theology, and
specifically the Prosperity Gospel, says things like “come to God and find a
solution to your problems,” but, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote “when Jesus bids
us to follow him, he bids us to come and die.” It may be true, but it is not
exactly comforting.
It’s noteworthy that Jesus
says “take up your cross and follow me” and not “follow me and take up your
cross.” The cross comes before the following, but we tend to try to do the
following first, hoping that the cross never comes up. The cross is the entry
point to following Jesus, not the conclusion. There are two points that come
out of this word order. First, following Jesus is something that we can’t do in
our spare time or for a few hours on Sundays. There is a story about a person
who arrives at St. Peter’s gate in Heaven and is asked “where are your scars?”
This person is perplexed and asks “scars?” St. Peter then replies “was there
nothing down there worth fighting for?”
As we saw in Genesis, the
covenant is about blessing, and being the vehicle for God’s grace. The covenant
asks for all of our life and transforms it into something even greater. The
joys of the empty tomb on Easter only comes after the cross of Good Friday. If
we are to follow Jesus out of the empty tomb into the power and the glory of the
Resurrection, we must have first gone through the cross. What must you deny and
let go of in order to more fully follow Jesus?
And the second part of the
cross coming before the following is that we are not called to have a martyr complex.
Sometimes this verse is use improperly when people talk about having “crosses
to bear.” As Jesus puts it, taking up the cross is a means of dying to the self
so that we can live for God, but if living for God is not the result of taking
up our cross, then it is not a cross worth bearing. The call to take up the
cross is not a call to be a doormat. I want to make this clear- abuse is not a
cross to bear. Often this verse is used by victims as a way of rationalizing the
need to stay in an unhealthy relationship. If you are in an abusive situation
that you need help getting out of, please let me know. And the abuse doesn’t
necessarily need to come from a person, as the abuse might come from severe
depression, alcohol, or some other addiction. Though being a paradox, the cross
is about finding life and true joy, not being the victim of violence.
In this second week of
our exploration of covenant, we see that God blesses in the covenant, and often
this blessing comes through others, even those we might not expect to be
bearers of God’s blessing. Jesus invites us to cast aside the things that lay
claim on us and prevent us from fully investing ourselves in the Kingdom of
God. Being freed of these competing allegiances, we are then able to follow
Jesus into the fullness of the love and peace of God.
But as I said at the beginning
of this sermon, the covenant is the deeper reality upon which our life and faith
is built. It’s very easy to go through life ignorant of the blessings that are
all around us, captive to things like money, fame, prestige, and ego that
prevent us from following Jesus fully. The invitation to covenantal living is
the invitation to go deeper in our faith, to slow down and pay attention to
what matters most, to grab hold of the abundant life that God offers to us most
fully in Jesus.
