Covenant: What Keeps Us Afloat; A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

Mark 1:9-15

9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. ¹¹And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. ¹³He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, ¹⁵and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ 

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
   be acceptable to you,
   O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

How are y’all doing with your Lenten covenants? Have you found them difficult to keep? I know I have. It’s been a busy, off-schedule week. Lots of weird stuff popped up that needed to be attended to.

For me, that’s par for the course. It’s absolutely not unusual. That’s why Lent provides me an opportunity to look at what’s important and what’s not. It gives me forty days to reconsider how I’ve set my priorities, and how to rearrange things to make the best of what’s going on right now.

For example, on Tuesday morning last week, Karoline messaged me with a picture of a spidering crack in the windshield of our Versa. So Friday morning I found myself at Gate City Glass, realizing that I hadn’t invested time in celebrating Morning Prayer yet.

I had a choice to make: Do I ignore my covenant and pick up Morning Prayer the next day, or do I find a way to make it work where I am?

So I plucked my phone out of my pocket, looked up Mission Saint Clare, and celebrated Morning Prayer on the vinyl couch of Gate City Glass, under the tornado warning that Friday morning’s storm had brought.

Life was going on all around me, and I had to make a space - not find a space, but make a space - to keep my covenant.

Forty days. I can do this for forty days. Can you?

Generally, we do well with challenging things when there is an end in sight. Have you ever heard anyone say, “Yeah, I can work there for a year”? As long as we know there is an end in sight, we’re willing to plow through any number of things.

I think Noah knew there was an end in sight, although I’m not sure God ever told him when that would be. He knew God would bring him out on the other side of the flood, and he wouldn’t be scooping elephant dung indefinitely.

And the good news is that God told Noah, and reminds us today, that

never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood,

and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.

And then God put the sun and the clouds and the rain in just the right spot to give Noah a sign of that covenant.

It’s pretty amazing what God will do just to make a point. It’s pretty humbling to think just how much God will move on our behalf.

Ours is a God who keeps promises. Ours is a God who will reshape the earth and its weather systems both to re-create the face of the Earth and to give us a sign that God is a covenant-keeper.

This season of Lent gives us an opportunity to walk through the covenants we recall in the Bible, starting with Noah. So it might be good to remember what a covenant is.

A covenant is a promise. That is a pretty fundamental description. It might be helpful to think of covenant like a contract. If you do x, I’ll do x. That would be a conditional covenant. I will behave in this way if you will keep your end of the deal. And you will do the same for me.

We’ll look at conditional covenants later.

The Noahic covenant is not conditional. God doesn’t say, “You know, if you can keep yourself out of trouble now, I’ll not try to flush you out again.” God simply says, “I won’t destroy the earth by flood again.” Period. Unconditional covenant.

Now, we can’t make unconditional covenants with each other. There is always a line we’re not willing to cross. In employment, in clubs or committees or boards, in marriage, there is always something we’re not willing to put up with.

That’s because we’re not nearly as patient as God, and we’re a lot more susceptible to abuse.

It may be that one of the reasons God makes us incapable of unconditional covenant is because God knows that sometimes we have a serious ability to beat each other up.

That is one of the worst human traits ever. It probably is the worst, actually.

If your employer is constantly putting you down or taking advantage of you, they’re breaking a fundamental human law of treating you with dignity and respect. That is covenant breaking.

If your spouse is beating you up, physically or emotionally or spiritually, they’ve already broken the covenant themselves. You are not a punching bag.

And the thing is, once covenant is broken, it’s just plain broken. A spouse who stays in an abusive relationship because she made a promise, because she made a covenant, is ignoring the fact that the covenant has already been broken, and not by her!

Which is as much as to say, “GET OUT!”

We can get really caught up, sometimes, in how bad things are; in how deeply we seem to be sinking in all the mess around us. We forget, I think, that the God who flooded the Earth kept Noah afloat for the duration. That God rescued Noah from the terror that the Earth had become.

We can really beat each other up sometimes, and not all the scars are visible. In fact, most of them aren’t. We are really bad at keeping the conditions of our covenants.

Thank God that our Creator’s covenant to us is unconditional. The embrace of our Savior is always welcoming and safe.

God calls to us from our first moment. God cares for us from the very spark of Divine Imagination that brings us into being.

And in our baptism, we recognize that God’s is a love that cannot be broken, that cannot quit, that is fundamentally unconditional. We recognize that the divine water that washes us clean isn’t about making us worthy of God, really. It’s about helping us better feel how deeply God loves us.

When God welcomes us as children, as joint heirs with Christ of the family of God, God covenants never to let us go.

No conditions. No fine print.

Just the warm, strong embrace of Jesus. Just the promise of an Eternal Parent who will always keep us afloat; who will always rescue us from the storm; whose very angels rescue us from the wasteland to witness to God's presence, to proclaim that

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.