Covenant and Cross- Wendy McCormick
“Covenant and Cross”
Rev Wendy McCormick
First Presbyterian Church – Granville
February 25, 2024
Human agency is a wonderful thing. Sitting back and waiting, hoping, praying for things to be different without doing anything rarely yields results. “God helps those who help themselves,” we like to say . . . and even though it’s not biblical, it’s good advice. Still, taking matters into our own hands, without very strong ties to God’s purposes and directions can lead us far astray.
Today offers the second of our Lenten readings about covenant and pulls us into the sometimes baffling, sometimes comical stories of Abraham and Sarah and God’s covenant to a “chosen” people. When we think of “covenant,” this is often the one we think about. God’s chosen people. And we Reformed or Presbyterian Christians have a particularly strong tie to this idea – our forebears understood themselves to be God’s chosen people much as the ancient Israelities did. Understood themselves – ourselves – to be people of the covenant.
But being chosen has always been complicated. The covenant we read about today began back in Genesis 12 when God spoke to the elderly and childless Abraham, promising that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars and that God would give him a bounteous promised land in a new place and there make of him a great nation. We sometimes forget – and the chosen people, ancient and modern, have often forgotten that God said the purpose for this chosen people was to be a blessing to the nations. It was never chosen-ness for its own sake or just to have land to enjoy – it was chosen-ness to share God’s love and blessing with all the world.
Let’s just say it hasn’t always worked out that way.
The passage we heard today picks up on the promise that began in chapter 12. Through these five chapters, the promise has been progressing – or not progressing – through various adventures and misadventures. Abraham and Sarah believe God’s promises BUT – or AND – they think they know better. Exercising their human agency, they have tried working around God’s promise that they will have children because it is so completely unbelievable --- They have decided to have Abraham father Ishmael with Sarah’s slave Hagar. Hagar has been badly mistreated by Sarah, and she and her child have gone into the wilderness to die. God remembers them and makes a promise to them. God will bless their descendants also. That’s a sermon for another day but an important and often-forgotten part of the story of Sarah and Abraham taking matters into their own hands.
In today’s reading God reiterates the promise and confirms it with a covenant. The sign of this covenant, from the verses we skipped over, will be the circumcision of Abraham and the men who come after him, and in the sign of their changed names. The name change for Sarai/Sarah and Abram/Abraham is very slight to our English-speaking ears, but the biblical tradition of naming carries down to us. In spite of everything, God says, I know what I’m doing. I said the heir would be yours and Sarah’s, and it will be. A reminder of their identity as God’s people. A reminder of who God is and that God can be trusted. Circumcision becomes the sign of those who trust the promise. Not unlike baptism is for us – circumcision doesn’t cause God to bless Abraham and his descendants – it shows that they are in covenant with God. It is the same for us with baptism. Baptism doesn’t cause God to favor or bless us but it shows that we know ourselves claimed and blessed by God. Sarah and Abraham are claimed by God and heirs to a promise the details of which they may not understand. Like the we explored last week, it’s pretty much a one-way covenant.
What God has in mind is not what Sarah and Abraham expected, and it’s not happening the way they thought it would or the way they think it should. But this same God who made a covenant with Noah and all peoples and creatures of the earth, here makes a covenant with a particular people, a chosen people so that they will carry God’s light and be a blessing to the world.
The dance of human agency with God’s promises has been shaped and reined in again. God’s purpose is to make a great nation for the purpose of blessing all families of the earth. Abraham and Sarah have tried to get descendants their own way, but God has straightened the path again. And this covenant confirms it.
Today’s reading from the gospel of Mark is different in many ways, but again we see how God’s ways are so far from what we think we know. This famous text from Mark this morning invites a very sober consideration of God’s promises and the identity we Christians choose to claim.
At this point in the story, the Jesus movement is riding pretty high, and those who got in on the ground floor have reason to be excited --- Jesus’ teaching and healing and working of miracles continues to draw a big crowd. Just a few verses back, he performed another healing – a blind man. And again he instructed his followers not to tell anyone. This theme of ‘don’t tell anyone’ is such an odd feature of Mark, but today we get an idea of why – people won’t understand, they won’t accept it, it’s not what they think – it’s not what they want -- maybe it’s not what we think and not what we want
“Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asked Peter, in the preceding section. John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets. “But who do you say that I am?” You are the Christ. You are the Messiah, Peter says. You are the real deal. You are the one we have been waiting for. Look at the crowds. It’s going to be everything we’ve hoped for. God’s ways will win out, the religious aristocracy will be put in their place, Rome will be pushed back, people at the bottom and people on the margins will finally see justice. Corruption, oppression, all of it will be gone. . . . black lives will matter and blue lives will matter and all lives will matter and no one will think we have to choose, LGBTQ people will be safe and welcome everywhere, people can keep their guns but gun violence won’t be a problem, Israel/Palestine will be resolved, milk and honey in the Promised Land again . . . harmony and happiness.
Isn’t this the kind of glory that Peter and his pals were expecting from the Messiah? Our values – our deepest desires for holiness, for justice, for setting the world right are going to be realized.
And today’s lesson is Jesus saying to them – to us – I’m afraid you don’t understand. And it makes Peter mad. He “rebukes” Jesus. Peter can see how it needs to go --- just like Abraham and Sarah did when they used and abused Hagar – acting as if we know better than God.
And so Jesus speaks those words we’ve heard so often: deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me. Surely there is another way. Can’t Jesus do this without us?
Ours is a very individualistic society, and we assume that “deny yourself” is meant very personally and individualistically. Deny yourself personally – like giving up alcohol or chocolate in Lent. “Take up your cross” or “the cross you have to bear” refers to your individual, personal challenges.
But in the ancient world, the pre-Enlightenment, pre-modern world, “yourself” was more corporate. It was understood in relation to others and the wider community. “Yourself” refers to who you are in relation to your family, your ethnicity, your community, your trade. A new identity is being offered for those who dare to follow. A new identity just as radical as Abraham’s made with a physical marking. Your identity is no longer American, banker, teacher, Buckeye, white, millennial, baby boomer, church-goer. Your identity doesn’t come from your last name, your address, or the demographics Gallup is measuring and Google is tracking.
Deny yourself means step away from all those recognizable corporate identities. Abraham and Sarah got name changes to signal their new identity as people of God’s covenant. And Peter and his friends got a new identity associated with following Jesus. Disciple. Follower. It was also an identity associated with troublemakers, even criminals, an identity associated with shame. The cross has been around so long that we don’t hear the scandal and the horror in Jesus’ words to Peter. For us a cross is a piece of jewelry. For us it’s a decoration in the church. Theologically, we talk about it as the symbol of Jesus taking away our sins so that we can get right with God. But the cross was the most torturous and the most shameful of punishment for the most disdained and shameful of criminals. It’s the lynch. It’s the electric chair. It’s the machete of the fanatics who behead people.
Deny yourself. Deny your most familiar and comfortable identities, from grounding yourself in what makes you who you are in your family and your community. And take up your cross. Meaning: Align yourself with a movement that willingly brings disdain and disapproval and even shame upon itself for the sake of what is right, for the sake of what God is really about.
What would it mean for you and me as 21st century American followers of Jesus to realign ourselves in this way? What would it look like for us to do what’s right, say what’s right, stand up for what’s right, even if it meant being unpopular, being called out as troublemakers, as extremists, as being aligned with those respectable people look down on?
We’d probably say some version of what Peter said. He said no. He said don’t be ridiculous. No, it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s another way to do this, Jesus. We could be a popular movement, we could give people what they want.
All these years later, what does it mean for you and me to be people of God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah, people marked in the waters of baptism as chosen? What does it mean for us to follow this Jesus who says it’s about subordinating – even denying – every identity we have except Jesus-follower and then being willing to go the distance on behalf of that oldest of callings – chosen to be a blessing to others – baptized to bring good news to people whose lives are bad news?
How do we exercise our human agency? Do we connect ever more deeply and closely to the God of the covenant, to Jesus of the cross, so that our every action may be shaped by covenant and cross? We wait and watch for promises still unrealized like Abraham and Sarah had to, like every disciple of every generation has had to . . . . And as we watch and wait and seek to align our agency with God’s purposes, do we allow ourselves to be ever more shaped by our comfortable and respectable identities? Or do we lean into our baptized identity and seek to live as disciples? Living and acting in light of the uncomfortable and painful realities of a world that never has and never will give glory and honor, recognition and accolades to standing up for what is right or criticizing and calling out unjust powers? Will we re-commit to follow the God who chooses and blesses us so that we might be a blessing, especially to the marginalized and the broken, with the forgotten and the voiceless. Of course we want an easier way, a way that makes sense in the world we live in. A God who behaves the way we’re used to. A God who makes sense in the ways of human power and authority.
It’s no wonder people come up with their own ways – like Abraham and Sarah did – like so many believers have done. God as military leader. Christianity as political ideology. God’s blessing reduced to blessing us doing what we want.
But the only way human agency works in concert with being people of the covenant is to lean into our God-given identity afresh every day, praying that we may be a blessing to others, that we may follow Jesus even to the cross to do what’s right, say what’s right, stand for and with those who have no one, bring good news to people whose lives are bad news, no matter the cost.
Here’s the thing: we can’t do it alone. Our identity is communal and collective. And so we keep coming back here to connect with others who are trying to do it also – to reground ourselves in our identity as covenant people marked in baptism, members of the body of Christ -- to hold each other up, to pray together, to tell the stories, to break the bread. And from here claim not just our human agency but our covenant agency. Amen.
