"The Poetry of Covenant" San Williams, UPC
Genesis 9:8-17
Our summer preaching series is titled, “The Poetry of Faith.” The inspiration for this series comes from the Walter Brueggemann quote that’s printed on the top of your order of worship: “The church on Sunday morning, or whenever it engages in its odd speech, may be the last place left in our society for the imaginative speech that permits people to enter into new worlds of faith and to participate in joyous, obedient life.”
So this summer we are listening to the odd, imaginative speech of the Bible as well as hearing from some more contemporary poets who can evoke new worlds of faith and draw us deeper into joyous, obedient lives.
We began last week with the Poetry of Creation and this morning we focus our worship on the Poetry of Covenant. Our reading today is God’s covenant with Noah, a covenant that includes all creatures both human and non-human.
Read Genesis 9:8-17
This past week, fourteen of us from this congregation joined other Christians from Austin and San Antonio to work on constructing a medical clinic and build houses in Miguel Aleman, Mexico, a community just across the Rio Grande from the town of Roma. Like much of the border region, both the land and most of the people are poor. Natural beauty is scarce, and litter is everywhere. If the border areas had it own flag, it would be the plastic sacks that cling to nearly every fence post and scrub brush along the barren land. The border areas are populated with people, many of them, from the southern regions of Mexico, Central and South America who have come either to find work in the malquiladoras—the American owned factories--along the Border, or in the hopes of coming to the United States. Our work on the medical clinic and the houses is distinctly low tech, slow and labor intensive. I can imagine that at some point in the project—perhaps at about 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, when the temperature has peaked at over one- hundred degrees and you’re reaching for what must be your five hundredth bucket of concrete for the day—you might wipe the sweat from her face and ask privately: “Why are we here? We live in Austin. What do we have to do the people of Miguel Aleman?” Well, one way to answer that question is to remember that we are a people of the covenant. Our outlook on the world is colored by our faith in God who is committed to the welfare of all living things everywhere. “The earth is the Lord’s,” declares the biblical poet, “and the fullness thereof, the world and all that dwells therein…”
One of the most influential Biblical scholars of 20th century was Bernhard W. Anderson. His book, Understanding the Old Testament, was a standard text book in many college and seminary classrooms. Anderson’s thesis was that the unifying theme of the Bible was the notion of covenant. In more recent years, Biblical scholars have tended to dispute Anderson’s thesis because, they contend, the literature and theology of the Bible is simply too diverse to fit within a single concept. Be that as it may, the Bible has a meta-narrative—an overarching story. How better can we understand this story than as the story of God’s unfolding covenant. If covenant strikes you as a vague, out-of-use- word, substitute the word relationship. Covenant, broadly defined, is God’s irrevocable relationship aimed at the welfare of the whole creation. “As for me,” declares, God to Noah, “I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you…” “All flesh” is repeated five times making clear that the covenant is not restricted to humankind; it includes all animals who are “with us.” The phrase “every living creature,” is also repeated five times underscoring the interdependence, the interrelatedness of all living things. You know that song, “All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir?”
All God’s critters got a place in the choir
Some sing low and some sing higher
Some sing out loud on the telephone wire
And some just clap their hands, or paws
Or anything they got.
The poetry of covenant sings of the interrelatedness of all living things with one another and with God.
But as you know this covenant with Noah is only one formulation of the covenant. The Bible also tells of the Sinai covenant with Moses designating Israel as a covenant people. Still later God makes a covenant with David and the monarchy of Israel. Then the covenant is made flesh in the person of Jesus. And finally the disciples of Jesus, the church, become stewards of the new covenant by proclaiming the reconciliation of the whole creation.
For a visual image of God’s unfolding covenant, picture an hour-glass. At the top is the covenant with Noah which is as wide as all creation and includes every living thing. Then with the giving of the Sinai covenant, it narrows to a particular covenant people, Israel. Then the covenant narrows even further when it becomes associated with David and his royal linage. And in the middle, the covenant narrows to a single individual, Jesus of Nazareth. In this one individual God’s intention for all humanity is revealed in a person. But then through this one person the covenant once again begins to widen in the creation of the community of disciples. But God’s covenant doesn’t stop with the church. The church is only the means, the instrument proclaiming that God’s covenant, God’s love, God’s blessing is for the whole world. One of the places in scripture where the poetry of covenant finds expression is in the beautiful hymn found in the first chapter of Colossians, which concludes, “For in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”
Perhaps the most poetic/prophetic voice of the last century was Martin Luther King. King was reflecting his covenantal view of the world when he wrote:
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
So practically speaking, what the covenant means to us living here in Austin is that the quality of life across the border is not irrelevant to us. Nor, for that matter, marine life in the Pacific Ocean, or polar bears in the arctic, or the rain forest in Brazil. These are matters of concern—not only for reasons of self-interest—but because God’s covenant draws us into relationship with all living things. Covenant awareness means that how we live must take into account what Dr. King called “an inescapable network of mutuality.” You’ve probably heard the statistic indicating that if all humanity used the amount of resources required by the United States, we would need five planet earths to sustain the consumption. The greatest challenge to north American Christians today may well be summoning the courage and the love to shape our lives in response to a greater good, a larger vision—the welfare of all creatures—human and non-human. Such covenantal life will demand changes; it will require us to consume less. But such is the life God calls us to live and it is the only life that gives the world a future and a hope.