Lent 1 March 1, 2009

Genesis 9:8-17                                                                    

Mark 1:9-15     

                                                                   

He sat in my study in the church back in Illinois, a very important man, rich and powerful. He wanted something from little our church: a place for his daughter’s wedding. The family had been “members” of the more fashionable parish in the next town, but they never attended church so the rector there had declined to do the daughter’s wedding. Now this proud father found himself in an unusual position, begging. “I will make it worth your while,” he said. “There will be a contribution. What does your church need?”

 

Now I was actually prepared to do the wedding anyway. I tend to be a pushover on these things. But I thought I’d play along with his game and, smiling at him, I replied, “Well, we very much need a new education wing for the parish house.” Our relationship went down hill from there, though I did do the wedding. We got, as I recall, a couple of hundred dollars for our trouble.

 

Except for his arrogance, however, this man was not so different from any of us. We live in a world where relationships are based on rational exchange. You do something for me and I will do something for you or pay you something in return—money being the “currency” for exchange relationships. This is so customary for us we don’t even think of it. In fact, we tend to resent relationships that are not based on exchange: supporting people on welfare or disability, paying to educate other people’s kids, foreign aid to poor countries, caring for the elderly, the unborn.

 

Behind our society of rational exchange relationships is our understanding that each of us, each individual, is his or her own center. That each of us should be as free as possible to pursue our own wishes, seek our own maximum fulfillment, “find ourselves.” The State, the Church, other institutions of society, exist only to help us pursue our individual ends. Hence it was perfectly natural for that father to come to me to “buy” his daughter’s wedding. Why should he not expect me to be glad to “sell” it to him for a proper exchange?

 

Well, today, with these two readings, we find ourselves in very different territory. It is one where relationships are based not on rational exchange, something for something, but on covenant. Covenant is the basis for relationship in Holy Scripture—and indeed in the Church. A covenant relationship begins with a free gift to someone, and is sealed by that person’s response to the giver. Once entered into, a covenant extends for ever. It is a given, and life consists of building up—in religious language, glorifying—the relationship, not escaping it to pursue one’s own ends.

 

Marriage is the most familiar example: “for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until we are parted by death.” But baptism is a yet more fundamental covenant relationship: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own for ever.” The relationship between God and Israel is a covenant: God delivers Israel from slavery in Egypt and brings her to the Promised Land. Israel responds by keeping the laws of God embodied in the Ten Commandments, celebrating the relationship. We Christians are people of the New Covenant: Jesus dies for us on the Cross and we respond by living out his Gospel, building up the kingdom of God.

 

The story of Noah is familiar to us from childhood because of all the cute pictures of the pairs of animals gathered into the ark. But its point in the Bible is to dramatize a covenant: the covenant in which God promises never again to destroy Creation and we respond by honoring that concept of Creation and undertaking to live as part of Creation, in a holistic harmony obedient to God’s natural law.

 

Now all of this may be seeming to you, I’m afraid, very weird. What is he talking about? What does this mean for my life? When is this homily going to be over? How do I get out of here? He’s preaching at me today, not talking with me! Well, bear with me. Let’s look a little deeper at these two ways of understanding relationships.

 

As I got to know that rich father in my story better, I came to see that for all his wealth and power, he did not seem to be a very happy man. I discovered that he had been fired from his job as CEO of a major defense contractor, I suppose because he failed to perform his side of an exchange relationship to the satisfaction of his board of directors. He was unhappy with the man his daughter had chosen to marry; the boy wasn’t up to his high standards. Whenever he approached me, always because he wanted something from me, he had to begin by impressing me—taking me to one of his fancy clubs for lunch. It was never enough that he might just ask me to love him, accept him, help him because I wanted to or because my ordination covenant obligated me to. I could only imagine what a whole life lived on those terms was like for him. But so much of all of our lives is like that, isn’t it? So much of our world, based on exchange relationships.

 

Now imagine how different life becomes for you and me when we realize that it is really all based on covenant relationships. God give us life because God love us. God doesn’t ask us to agree to a bargain with him ahead of time, a quid pro quo. God only offers us laws, ways of living, designed to nourish and guard our loving relationship with him and with each other—the Ten Commandments.

 

In marriage, the covenant relationship is like a safety net. We do not wake up every morning thinking, how must I perform today so that my spouse will continue to accept me (or how must my spouse continue to perform to be acceptable to me!). I wake up knowing that however I live that day, my spouse will love me, and vice versa. There is this wonderful room in a good marriage for each of the partners to flourish in mutual love, to grow into themselves as they grow into each other.

 

Now expand that picture of covenant in marriage, and look at it as the basis for all of society. We can let go of all the excessive competition, winning by beating others out. We can let go of judging other people, looking to see whether they’re getting something for nothing. We can live all of us together “nourished by a common sense of what is good and just, as well as a common expression of what is beautiful.”*

 

The gospel reading today is, as always on this first Sunday in Lent, the story of Jesus’s temptation by the devil in the wilderness. It comes right after his baptism, where he hears God speak the words, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” That baptism, like our baptisms, is a covenant. Jesus goes—the Bible says “the Spirit immediately drove him,” into the wilderness, to test his response to that covenant relationship. For forty days and forty nights, Satan tries to tear down the covenant between Father and Son, to break into it the way a virus breaks into and infects a cell. He offers Jesus a messiahship based on power instead of love, centered on himself instead of on his relationship with the Father, on certainty instead of on faith, on—we can now say—exchange relationships rather than covenant relationships.

 

The evil one tries the same temptations with us. Lent is about recognizing the ways in which he is working on. Lent is about rejecting his ways and turning our hearts back to God’s covenant of love.

——-

* A.J. Conyers, The Listening Heart: Vocation and the Crisis of Modern Culture (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2006), p. 110. I am indebted to the book generally for enriching my understanding of covenant in distinction to exchange relationship.