Comments for Jim

Sunday, January 24, 1999

Rev. James A.Todhunter

" Living In Covenant"

JOSHUA 24:14-15, 25-28; ACTS 2:42-47; MATTHEW 4:12-23

When we receive new members into this faith community, as we have done this morning, we all recite together our church covenant. What is covenant, and why is it so central to our self-understanding as a people? The covenant concept is rooted deep in antiquity. Noah and Abraham entered into covenant with God. When Joshua led the tribes of Israel into the Promised Land, he was faced with a tremendous challenge. They were in a hostile land. Each of the tribes of Israel had a distinct and separate identity. Joshua knew that to survive, two things had to happen. Somehow, they had to unite and not splinter. And they had to reaffirm their trust in God. So there on the plain of Shechem, the tribes of Israel entered into a covenant; actually renewed an old, old covenant.

Let me muse aloud with you about covenant this morning. First, why do we need covenants? We need covenants because the world is still a dangerous place. Covenants are based on mutual trust. It is important, of course, to love one another; but trust has to precede love. Learning to live in the real world is a process of learning who you can trust, and who you can’t. And it is a process of learning how to trust. And that can be a slow and painstaking process. We need to live in covenant because to be fully human and happy we need to be surrounded by a group of people we can trust.

Secondly, we live in covenant in order to learn how to rebuild trust. The story of the Bible is the endless tale of covenants entered into, covenants broken, and covenants renewed; covenants between God and us, and covenants among us. We need to learn how to rebuild trust through the renewal of our covenants because conflict is always a given. Take the marriage covenant, for example. When a couple proudly tells me that they have lived happily married for so many years and never so much as raised their voices at each other, let alone ever had a real fight, I seriously wonder. I believe that conflict is always a given - always a possibility in any relationship, and among any group. Why is this so? Because everybody is different. Because the more we get to know one another, the more aware of differences we are. Over Christmas I gave the wedding meditation for a young couple (the bride had been in my youth group). And one of the things I stressed is that the closer and more intimate we become with one another in life, the stranger we become to each other. It is a paradox. And a stranger can easily become an enemy. I believe that if we are honest, we would admit that we are frequently shocked by how strange those closest to us can sometimes be.

Christians in particular struggle to have a healthy appreciation for conflict. A community in covenant is not a machine, the purpose of which is to function in a well-oiled and efficient way. A covenant community is a teeming organism. Conflict is always present in some form or another. After living and working in churches for some thirty-five years, I am convinced that most conflict in churches is based on conflicts between deeply cherished values. People rarely fight one another just to be fighting. Instead we experience conflict when we feel something important may be under threat - values like justice, compassion, honesty, and trust itself. Values and people are always in a state of flux.

But living in covenant carries responsibilities. There is always a danger that conflicts can move beyond an understandable conflict in values, to a conflict among people. It seems to me that whenever arguments (in any covenant relationship) take on a righteous edge, we must be wary.

The senior minister of the church I grew up in, Roy A. Burkhart, in the midst of any community or church fight, was famous for always lifting up the question "But what is the remedy?" In other words, the ultimate goal is always healing and health. And the immediate task is always to try and discover what one can do to move that agenda forward. Now notice, I didn’t say "the ultimate goal is to fix the problem." If human beings and their relationships were like machines, that might be so - replace a fuse, or buy a new part. But when a person in a faith relationship talks about healing, we are talking about a process at the center of which we find God.

Whether we are experiencing conflict in a marriage covenant, an extended family, a church, a denomination or even a community, we need to clearly affirm that we are talking about who God is and how God brings about healing. That is written into, so to speak, our covenant relationship.

Let me outline for you what, in my opinion, that process of healing is. First of all, we always must start with the reality of God’s grace. We start with the understanding that it is God who takes the initiative, God who comes to us, God who reaches out, and God who showers grace upon us. We start with the given assumption that we are really lucky and blessed that God never treats us the way we sometimes treat each other. Thank God for that good news! God does not scheme, God does not keep score of rights and wrongs, God does not cover-up or spin, God does not get tangled up in excuses or unintended consequences. God sees and understands the messes we make before we ourselves do, and has already reached out with an amazing grace that is truly astounding. God’s love is not measured or meager or calculated. It is an overwhelming downpour of healing love and forgiveness. So the first step in the process is the recognition that God is already on top of the situation, knows what is needed, and is working it all out. That is really good news.

First, God starts the process, and then each of us has to look into our own hearts. It is a serious theological error to say that our confession makes God’s forgiveness possible. It is the other way around. God’s amazing grace makes our confessions possible. God’s grace brings who we are to consciousness. God’s amazing grace shows us by contrast how poorly we love one another. I said earlier that living in covenant is about living in trust, but it is also about learning how to rebuild trust. Because we are who we are, each is us is fully capable of betrayal, deceit, cunning, manipulation, spinning and all the rest. Every conflict is characterized by anger. And we deal with anger in a variety of unhelpful ways in all our relationships - ways like blaming, undercutting, backbiting, etc. But beneath anger there always can be found feelings of hurt and loss. Feelings we would avoid feeling.

Lois and I have had a running argument for some time that has been very frustrating to each of us. We just can’t get around it somehow. On the couples’ retreat last weekend, it came up again. So we sparred for a while until, I finally said. "Look, let me tell you how bad I am feeling about...." and then went on to share some feelings of real pain that are very hard for me to talk about with anybody. Then suddenly the argument wasn’t there anymore. What I was left with was the realization of how alone I was feeling in this hurt and how hard it was to share it with her. And somehow, my unwillingness to share that with her had become a barrier between us. And the running argument was somehow related to that. Lois could say then "If I know how you feel, then I can better know what I can or can’t do to help. If I don’t, I can’t."

What we need to confess, again and again, is not simply our wrongs and failures and misdeeds (which of course are endless) and need confession. We need to confess to those closest to us our deepest hurt and pain. If we don’t, we give up on one another. And trust is lost. So looking at ourselves involves taking responsibility for our responsibility in backing off from love and trust. That is a breaking of covenant.

And finally, that brings us to the question of what is the remedy. When we recognize that God’s healing is always there at work, and when we recognize that we are each, personally, in need of that healing and let ourselves welcome it into our hearts; then we can move toward the question of what now is the remedy? I am always amazed at how much healing can take place when people feel they are being heard, and that being heard will make a difference. And I am amazed at how simple that truth is, yet how resistant to it I am. I am always relearning it. I personally fail continually in this. Yet once such compassionate listening occurs, it can truly can lead to remedies. I think a remedy is always something that must send the message that trust needs to be re-established. The generous gesture. Don’t most married couples eventually learn that the best way to end a fight is not to declare a winner. The best way to end a fight is when someone says "I love you too much to let this go on any longer. Let’s stop fighting because we care about each other." Then the remedy is, instead of fixing the other person, fixing something else. Tinkering with the family schedule; finding more time together, improving the process, and so forth. But those answers presuppose a basis of love and trust, that is, take place within a covenant that has been renewed.

I believe that what distinguishes the way Christians in covenant deal with conflict from the way the world does, is that reconciliation sometimes requires the generous gesture. I believe Christian reconciliation carries with it the ability and courage to set aside one’s own sense of being hurt and wronged, and "love people anyway." Love them in spite of how you may feel right now.

No one has ever put this better than St. Frances of Assisi in his famous prayer. Yes, we get real when we are honest and open about our hurts, our needs, our pain. That must be shared if we are to be understood and healed. But the Christian challenge beyond this is to then move out of self and into reconciliation. In so doing we ourselves become true peacemakers.

AMEN

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