Brunswick Baptist Church– 8 March 2009

Bible readings Genesis 17:1-7,15,16. Mark 8:3,13-38

Theme: The covenant community

We cannot properly understand what it means to be church if we do not understand what it means to be a covenant community. From the beginning of time there has been the recognition that covenant lies at the heart of God’s relationship with humankind. One of the earliest was the covenant between God and Noah, a covenant that stretched to all creatures, not just humankind. The promise of the covenant was that God would never again send a flood capable of wiping out life on earth, and the sign of the covenant was a bow in the sky. Not a bow that shoots arrows at the earth, but a rainbow that signifies that the flood of God’s anger is at an end.

The Abrahamic covenant

The covenant between God and Abraham could be said to lie at the heart of the most dangerous situation in the world today, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It is described as ‘an eternal covenant’ and promises Abraham that he will be, as his name describes, the ‘father of a great multitude’, and God promises to him, ‘I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding’. No sunset clause, no use-by date, a perpetual holding. Both Israelis and Palestinians hold Abraham as their ancestor and claim the Holy Land as their God-given inheritance, so that the conflict is not only about land and borders, it is about whose version of the blessing and covenant with God is the true one.

The Apostle Paul wrestled with this genetic interpretation of the Abrahamic covenant, perhaps recognising that it excluded anyone who could not trace  their genealogy back to Abraham. ‘It depends on faith’, says Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles, ‘in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all Abraham’s descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham’. And that makes sense in our day and age because many people whose ethnic roots are not Semitic have converted to Judaism and to Islam because those faith traditions resonate with their own experience of God. African, European, Asian, even good old Anglo-Aussies would identify themselves as Jewish or Muslim by faith if not by ancestry.

Covenants in the Ancient Near East were quite common in antiquity; nations would covenant together for their mutual protection; neighbours would covenant together to protect their boundaries; friendships like that of David and Jonathan were sealed by a covenant of loyalty. A covenant bound the two parties together and defined the way that they would relate to each other. If either party behaved in a way that contravened the covenant conditions, the other was free to declare the covenant at an end.

In the case of the Abrahamic covenant, the condition imposed on the descendants of Abraham was that all male children would be circumcised on the eighth day. We shouldn’t think that this sign of the covenant is an insignificant thing. Men have died because they were identified as Jews because they had been circumcised; some Jewish mothers and fathers refuse to subject their new born infants to what they regard as a painful and unnecessary procedure, but I expect they would be a small minority. The covenant between God and Abraham has always been a costly covenant, exposing Jews to anti-semitic massacres throughout their history, sadly too often perpetrated by Christians. The covenant creates identity; in the Jewish context, physical, social and spiritual identity. What kind of identity does covenant create for you here at Bentleigh. What does covenant mean for this church?

The marks of a covenant community

It is not a new concept to say that the Christian community is a covenant community. But sometimes in our minds and our hearts we can lose sight of the fact that covenant is binding, covenant is what creates a faith community. If we are not a covenant community, then there is no essential difference between us and any other organisation in society; the bowls club, the football team, the Rotary or Apex clubs. Many of those organisations actually do a better job of attending to people’s needs than we do, so what is special about the church? My response is, ‘absolutely nothing’, unless we hold to the covenant that we have with the founder of our faith, Jesus whom we know as the Lord, the Redeemer, the Saviour, or, as Peter recognised in a flash of insight, the Messiah.

Let me suggest three characteristics of a Christian covenant community:

1. Confession

Jesus was being intentionally provocative when he asked the disciples, ‘Who do you say I am?’ I’m sure he knew that he was creating a stir in northern Galilee and that people from the villages were wondering who this mysterious teacher and miracle man was (John the Baptist, Elijah, a prophet). But he wanted to know what his disciples, these men who had been with him for some time thought, ‘Who do you say that I am?’

Authentic Christian community centres around the person, the message and the ministry of Jesus who Peter, and subsequent generations of followers, have recognised as the Messiah, the anointed one, or the sent one, of God. There is in this man Jesus a unique incarnation that leads us to confess again and again, ‘This is what God is like’.

When Christians want to answer the question, ‘What is God like?’, they turn in the final analysis, not to philosophy, nor to speculation, nor to mysticism, they turn to Jesus. Of course that does not immediately answer all of the questions such as ‘How can God allow 200 people to die in one horrific day of bushfires?’ Understanding the diversity of human experience and recognising the movement of God within that experience, is a life-long quest.

Peter gave the right answer to Jesus’ question when he said, ‘You are the Messiah’. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind the pieces of the puzzle of the identity of this charismatic leader were fitting together; this one for whom he had given up job, possessions and social networks. ‘You are the Messiah’. And yet, in the next minutes when Jesus began to explain what kind of Messiah he was – a Messiah who would suffer and be rejected by the religious leaders and be killed – Peter took him to one side and reprimanded him so strongly that Jesus said, ‘Get behind me Satan for you are not thinking about divine things, but human things’.

I find this interaction between Jesus and Peter one of the most powerful, and most disturbing, in all of the Gospels. I find it disturbing because, even after 50 years of trying to be a follower of Jesus, I still don’t get this one right. I do not want Jesus to die – or anyone else for that matter. I do not have enough faith to leave matters of life and death in God’s hands. I would still encourage a Joan of Arc to take off her masculine armour to avoid being burned at the stake. I would urge Thomas Helwys and Jan Hus to water down their radical teaching to avoid prison and execution. I hesitate before urging asylum seekers to be baptised for fear of the consequences if they are sent back to their homeland. Peter and I are made of the same stuff; we do confess Jesus as Messiah, but we find the Cross difficult.

And that leads to the next non-negotiable characteristic of Christian community.

2. Cross

Jesus’ response to Peter, to the disciples, and to a whole crowd of people who were listening, was ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 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’.

This is the essence of Christian community; we do not live for ourselves, for our personal fulfilment whatever that means. We live prepared to lose everything in the holy vocation of following Jesus in the world. The example of Jesus, and the example of countless mothers and fathers in faith, teach us that authentic Christian discipleship is dangerous, because it calls us to a courageous commitment to righteousness, and that can bring us into conflict with the powerful in politics, in commerce and in religion. Whenever I am intimidated into silence by the powerful in the face of injustice, persecution or tyranny, I become a follower of Peter rather than a follower of Jesus. Whenever I overlook the distress or deprivation of another because it is too costly or inconvenient to intervene, I fail to take up my cross as a follower of Jesus.

A covenant Christian community is one which has its eye on the suffering and need of the world, not on its own self-preservation, growth and wellbeing. This is indeed a hard saying, but every time we break the bread and take the cup, we are reaffirming our commitment to a crucified Messiah who calls us to take up our own cross, whatever that cross may be. And that leads to a third characteristic of a Christian covenant community.

3. Communion

‘Jesus took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many”’.

Communion, eucharist, the Lord’s table, the Lord’s Supper, it has many names and takes many forms. For some its significance lies in the mystery of bread and wine transformed in the ritual into the very body and blood of Jesus – not an interpretation that we would use within the Baptist trasition. For us it is an ordinance, a ritual observance that acts out the death of Jesus on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world. Sadly Christians have fought battles over their theological interpretation of the communion, but surely its significance lies in its reminder that the church was brought into being through the death of Jesus, however that is understood. If circumcision was the sign of the Abrahamic covenant, bread and wine are the sign of Christian community. It is at the table that we proclaim, ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again’, and remind ourselves that ours is a hope in the future together with our risen Lord. It is at the table that we most express who we are, and it is from the table that we go into the streets to live out our faith.

Conclusion

Brunswick Baptist Church is a church with a long and proud history of Confession to the salvation of God through the person of Jesus Christ. It is a church that has placed the Cross at the centre of its understanding of what it means to be a Christian community and understands that Communion is the primary symbol of the centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus for Christian faith.

All of that you already know, but how you express those truths must change from generation to generation. Sometimes when I listen to young people talking today, I think I must be in a foreign country. Language changes, culture changes, technology changes.

If our confession is to be meaningful to each new generation, we must learn to speak in a language and with images that convey the truth that Jesus is Lord. When we use the word ‘Lord’ many people today would think of the Dark Lord Sauron of ‘Lord of the Rings’ or Lord Voldemort of ‘Harry Potter’.

If we are to take up our cross as Jesus commanded us, then we must be discover what that means in our daily lives and in the life of our community here in Brunswick. Jesus death on a cross on the hill called Golgotha is the great symbol of God’s love for all people, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only son’. But it is also the great symbol of the capacity of human beings for violence and evil towards each other. To take up our cross is to stand against the evil that is done to helpless people just as Jesus stood against the oppressive religious rulers of his day.

If we are to understand the meaning of communion, we remember that it was on the night on which Jesus was betrayed, the night before he died on a cross, that he took bread and wine and said. ‘this is my body, this is my blood. Do this to remember me’. The communion is the symbol of Christian community; confession and the cross are its substance.

Let us hold these precious symbols and practices of faith with gratitude and recognition of the limitless grace of God they represent.