A Reflection from the Rev. David Hoster
Dear People of St. James’,
God made covenants with people in scripture that teach us about our bonds with one another in church community today.
God led the people of Israel to Mount Sinai immediately after saving them from Pharaoh at the Red Sea. Still flush with the miracle of surviving enslavement and assault by the most powerful army of charioteers on earth, Israelites bonded themselves in covenant with the God who had saved them. In exchange for continuing to protect and nurture the people of Israel, God accepted their moral commitment spelled out on Sinai by the Decalogue and the religious prescriptions of the rest of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
So long as Israel remained faithful to their moral and ritual commitments, the miraculous preservation of their nation under God would continue. That is the heart of covenant with God. God asks the best and most deeply humane behavior of the people of covenant and, in return, God ensures that their moral valuing of one another will enable them to prosper with a community morale so powerful that their endurance can only be described as miraculous.
Jesus extends the Old Testament covenant into the New Testament. The miraculous deliverance of Israel from slavery is mirrored by the miraculous deliverance of Jesus’ disciples from sin itself. “This is my blood of the New Covenant,” Jesus tells his disciples (and all who follow them, including you and me), “poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sin.” This forgiveness is not so much about remitting our individual sins as it is about breaking the power of sin itself.
So long as we wholeheartedly take the body and blood of Jesus himself into our own bodies, we will live free of Chief Priests, Roman governors or any other form of oppression that would deprive us of not only of our lives but of our very souls. Covenanted people, in Jesus, trust the formation of our identities as human beings to the gift of God expressed in love for one another, rather than to the tangible fear defined by trenchant earthly powers hostile to our independent existence. Given such faith from us—and like Israel’s covenant with God—Jesus binds himself to sustain us in a condition of life that is every bit as miraculous as Jesus’ own Resurrection.
The Last Supper, the Cross and the Resurrection are the sinews of our covenant with one another in Christian community. We are meant, in covenant, to give up the self-oriented choices we make based on our fear of all that our troubled passage through life on earth can inflict on us. We are called to bring our best, most free, most moral selves into relationship with one another. Giving up our fear may feel like a sacrifice, but living a life of love unbounded by fear is miraculous—as miraculous as the deliverance at the Red Sea or the Resurrection after death on Calvary.
Miraculous life covenanted to one another and to Jesus is a life well understood by people who cling together in the face of slavery followed by Jim Crow depredation, followed by ghettoes and racial policing…or victimized by homophobia…or abused by a more powerful gender…or oppressed in any other way. Powerlessness in the face of oppression opens up the possibility of embracing Jesus in his powerlessness on the cross and embracing one another whose afflicted souls cry out to be loved in an unloving world. Our very powerlessness turns peoples’ backs toward the oppression that assaults and turns them to one another and to God. Life even under the worst, most crucified circumstances of the world, can become miraculous in the hands of God, evidenced by our singing and dancing and worshipping together in the transcendent music and sacrament of Church.
Such is the heritage of our covenanted community at St. James’. Such, too, should be the covenanted community of any Church worthy of the name of Jesus. We give up our fear—and all the evil choices fear inflicts on us—in the name of bonds with one another, anointed and lifted to miraculous value by Jesus.
As we face a new round of fear-inducing choices inflicted on us by escalating pandemic conditions, by the willful failures of our government, by our yearning for all that is lost, including our common, in-person worship together, and our fear of what might lie ahead, let us remember the bonds by which we have drawn together in covenant, and trust the miraculous life of Resurrection that is ours, right here, right now, no matter what might come, so long as we are faithful to the love that created us.
The Rev. David Hoster
