Lent 2

Sermon preached by the Revd Olga Fabrikant-Burke

This Lent, the Lectionary encourages us to reflect on covenants. Last Sunday, our Old Testament reading focused on God’s covenant with Noah. This Sunday, it is the covenant with Abraham that stands front and centre.

What comes to your mind when you hear the word “covenant”? It may be that the thought of a divine-human covenant fills you with excitement at God’s willingness, indeed, his desire, to enter into a special relationship with human beings—with Abraham and his descendants, as well as all those who, like most of us, have been grafted onto Abraham’s family tree by faith. But if you are anything like me, that excitement is served with a side dish of dread and trepidation. Am I good enough for this covenant? The covenant, after all, reminds us about our duties and obligations; attached to its no doubt astonishing promises are stringent stipulations, commands, de- mands, and commitments.

Somehow, this sombre note seems thoroughly appropriate for our Lenten path, even if more than a little terrifying. Our Scriptures wag a disapproving finger at us, or so we think. Are we upholding our side of the bargain, our side of the covenant? We feel duly chastened. Are we doing enough? Well, we may not be performing up to the required standard, but surely our feelings of guilt count for something and win us at least some brownie points with God in this ruthless covenantal arithmetic.

Don’t get me wrong. Far be it from me to ridicule the pursuit of holiness, and there is no doubt that aspirations to self-examination are perfectly at home in the season of Lent. But keeping our side of the bargain is not what our readings are about. And this is not what Lent is all about either. Most important of all, this is a serious misunderstanding of the covenant with Abraham. In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul emphatically rejects such interpretations of Abraham’s story, making it clear that the promise rests on divine grace alone. While Abraham is indeed commanded to walk before God and be blameless, the promises that come next are not made dependent upon Abraham’s obedience. The point is that God’s holy character does require us to be blameless, but God knows us too well and loves us too much to make his promises conditional on our performance and our compliance.

Ultimately, God’s covenants—the covenant with Noah, with Abraham, with David, and the new covenant inaugurated in Jesus Christ—are covenants of promise—God’s unconditional promise of extravagant grace, self-giving love, and undivided loyalty. At the heart of the covenant lies the divine promise to forgive and to redeem, to reconcile and to heal, to bless and to make new, to build and to plant. God has made an irrevocable commitment to give life where there is none. This divine mission to fulfil his covenantal promises does not depend on Abraham’s efforts—nor on our efforts for that matter. Although it might sound counterintuitive, even border- line scandalous, God takes all the duties and obligations upon himself. For us, there are no terms and conditions and no fine print to contend with. The holy Creator of the universe binds himself in a covenant to his mortal and fallen creatures, with absolutely no strings attached. The covenant, therefore, is God’s work, a divine gift, from beginning to end. Following Abraham, the only fitting response to God’s incomparable gifts to us is to fall on our faces in worship.

So far, so good—who in their right mind would say no to such a generous gift? But as is often the case with human beings, it gets complicated.

Take Abraham for example. Our Old Testament lesson carefully excises Abraham’s reaction to God’s promises, but it is worth taking a moment to reflect on what happens. “Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’” Long story short, the future father of many kings and many nations did not cover himself in glory. The apostle Paul, who insists that Abraham “did not weaken in faith”, is blatantly putting too positive a spin on the situation. The truth is that Abraham, in his heart of hearts, at least initially, thought that the promised gift was too good to be true. Abraham struggled to believe. Might it be true of us too? Do we recognise ourselves in this description?

If the gift was too good to be true for Abraham, from Peter’s perspective, it actually proved rather disappointing. It did not come in a sufficiently pretty wrapper. Ever since he met Jesus, Peter was gearing up for God’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and simply had no time for all this morbid talk of suffering, rejection, death. And yet, God’s fulfils his covenant not in a military parade, but on the cross; he sinks to the depths of degradation in order to make good his ancient vows. Such outlandish divine actions confused and confounded Peter. ... And what about us? Do we find God’s purposes and ways of working in the world confusing and perhaps more than a little disappointing? Are we, like Peter two thousand years ago, still hoping that we are following a triumphant king rather than a suffering, humiliated servant?

For still others, the gift that God gives in his covenant is simply too challenging, too difficult to accept. It is not the sort of gift you can set above your fireplace and admire how it twinkles in the light. It entails a radical overhaul of our lives. “Take up your cross and follow me.” The gift of the covenant is the cross—both the cross on which Christ died and the many individual crosses on which we die. Shortly after Abraham heard all those amazing promises, he also got a taste of their costliness as he went up the mountain to sacrifice the son of promise, Isaac. Peter, for his part, died by crucifixion, if the church tradition is to be believed. And we, too, as all disciples in every age, must take up our crosses. The gift is to be crucified with Christ and enter into the new covenant in his blood so that one day we may be raised with him to life. “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.” Both life and death are integral parts of this divine gift; you cannot have one without the other.

The true Lenten discipline, then, is not to busy ourselves with doing things for God and trying to keep our side of the covenant bargain, but to come to a deeper knowledge and truer appreciation of what our self-emptying, cruciform God has done for us and how he has fulfilled the covenant. So with Abraham, let us dare to believe in the gifts of the covenant. With Peter, let us banish our triumphalism and self-deception and recognise the true gifts of the covenant. And above all, let us ask God to help us accept the gifts of the covenant and allow our lives to be shaped around the reality of Christ’s Cross. This Lent, may we set our minds not on human things but on divine things. And then, let us take up our crosses and follow Jesus.