A Reflection from the Rev. David Hoster
Dear People of St. James’,
Last week I visited with you about the critical importance of covenant for our intimate, parochial life. This week, I want to write to you about how covenant speaks to our national life.
The covenant created by God with Israel at Mount Sinai promised a miraculous national life if the people of Israel—individually and corporately—would live as their best, most moral selves in union with one another and with God. The heart of Israel’s moral covenant was summarized in the Ten Commandments and spelled out in much greater detail in the rest of the Pentateuch. So long as Israel was faithful to its covenant with God, God would sustain Israel as a unique, indeed miraculously Chosen People in their Promised Land.
Much of the rest of the Old Testament talks about Israel’s complex struggle to be faithful to this covenant, sometimes succeeding in the splendid voices of the great prophets, often failing in the stories detailed by the headshaking histories of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. All too often, the enfranchised and entitled leadership of Israel chose the power of national, racial and religious exclusivism over the inclusive, moral power of love and mutual honor in the Decalogue. Prophets called Israel to the values of Sinai—care for the poor, welcome for the foreigner, trust in the power of God—while government and social elites chose, instead, military power and class oppression, resulting in degeneration of national morale and the conquest of Israel by Babylon. Yet, though Israel seemed defeated, the voices of their better nature prevailed in the long slow journey back into faithfulness through the later prophets and the long tradition of the rabbis that continue to define the continued existence Judaism, miraculously, to this day.
Jesus offered his Church a similar covenant. Disciples would take his body and blood into their own bodies, embracing his crucifixion, denying the prodigious capacity of governmental power to control his—and their—souls. So long as Christian disciples embrace Jesus’ commandment to “love one another as I [Jesus] have loved you,” God would give them the miraculous life of Resurrection no matter what depredations that systems of oppression inflicted on them. Such was the covenant at the heart of the Church.
Like Israel, Christianity has struggled with faithfulness to its covenant. Christian leadership and those who follow them have often hardened their hearts and turned to the power of exclusion. Sinners and heretics have been excised from the communion of the faithful and condemned to Hell. The threat of Hell was used by the medieval church to build up the material power of church hierarchies, while excluding its members even from Eucharist and access to Scripture. The instruments of the church have been put up for sale by medieval popes and modern televangelists to those who want to buy their way to salvation. Failure to embrace the gospel of selfless love has compromised the mission and ministry of the Church and exposed modern Christianity to a Babylonian Captivity in wealth, prestige and power not unlike the destruction and exile of ancient Israel.
The United States made a similar covenant with God in 1776. The self-evident truth that “all men are created equal,” endowed by God with the inalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was intended to liberate ordinary people from eons of subjugation to the wealthy, self-ennobled power of monarchy. The covenant was sealed with a pledge of the “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” of those who covenanted with one another and signed the Declaration. The very existence of the United States in the years immediately after 1776 was nothing short of miraculous.
Like ancient Israel, the ongoing miracle of our free nation, democratically governed by its own citizens, depended on its faithfulness to its original covenant. Yet, slavery would quickly be enshrined in our Constitution, with genocidal assaults on Native Americans to follow [and precede]. When the founders wrote that “all men are created equal,” they really did mean men. All too often, leaders of government and business in our country have taken God for granted and considered ours to be a blessed exceptional nation fulfilling its manifest destiny on the backs of the vulnerable—African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants of color and minorities as well as those ground down into poverty by the heartless, merciless machinery of capitalism and the so-called free market. The result is a compromised national morale that, like ancient Israel, leaves the nation’s many miracles weakened, evidenced by the appalling inadequacy of our response to Covid pandemic conditions.
Like Israel, like Christendom, America struggles with its ruling classes’ exclusionary reliance on power and domination. Our prophets, too, call us back to the moral, humane, inclusionary commitment that made our nation miraculous in the beginning. When we look at the political collisions of our day, we would do well to remember our American covenant. In very immediate and concrete ways, the health of our nation—as Israel and Christianity itself have learned—lies with the inclusion of love and shared concern rather than the exclusion of dominance.
Apply that yardstick to the daily news and the mission of Americans faithful to our covenant becomes clear.
The Rev. David Hoster
