For most of my teaching career
I have worked within a negotiated contract; my duties and salary are spelled
out in great detail. Over the years, I have learned that employment agreements
are subject to ongoing interpretations, renegotiations, legal actions, and that
sometimes they are partially voided by employers.
I'm amazed at how many other
contracts many of us have; agreements regarding mortgages, other loans, and
credit cards. We may belong to cultural, political or social associations
requiring dues and participation. As citizens, we have obligations to conduct
our lives according to local, state and national laws. Many of these laws
involve personal compacts with others, such as marriage and wills. Moreover,
consider the many understandings emerging in human relationships; the multitude
of unwritten promises made to family and friends, vows functioning as unwritten
contracts.
We might be tempted to
conclude that we prefer considerable red tape governing our lives. Not so!
Contracts are necessary. Imagine going to work without an understanding of
one's responsibilities, what one will be held accountable for, or what one's
wages will be! Employees in such settings work at the whim of the employer, a
management model often leading to exploitation. Imagine the confusions in our
financial dealings, civilized living, and personal relationships, were it not
for written and unwritten promises, agreements, and laws! Contracts inform us
about the extent of our responsibilities and commitments.
During Lent we have an
opportunity to sort out and reflect upon our various contracts. Are our
commitments to our families and friends deep and active enough? Are we too
involved in our work - perhaps to the neglect of our own well-being? Have we
become addicted to success or to particular activities, such that they have
become toxic? Have we a neglected or an exaggerated sense of responsibility for
the well-being of others? Are we willingly incorporating evil qualities within
our personal and vocational lives? What are our priorities at this time? With
whom or with what is our most basic contract?
The best contract around is
none that I've mentioned; not one of them is permanent or totally trustworthy.
Whatever their merits, each may eventually prove unworkable or temporary at
best. I'm convinced that the most significant and fundamental contract with
which you and I are involved is the Covenant provided by God to Abram and made
new and final in Jesus Christ.
It's rather remarkable, isn't
it? The Creator could have designed and jump-started the universe, thereafter
taking a well-deserved early retirement. Instead, for reasons of pure love, God
began the search for a personal relationship with humanity by initiating a
contract, a Covenant, with Abram and his descendants. Please open your Prayer
Books to page 846; within the section "The Old Covenant" I'll read the
questions; please respond aloud with the answers.
Q. What is meant by a covenant with God?
A. A covenant is
a relationship initiated by God, to which a body of people responds in
faith.
Q. What is the Old Covenant?
A. The Old Covenant is the
one given by God to the Hebrew people.
Q. What did God promise them?
A. God promised that they
would be his people to bring all the nations of the world to him.
Q. What response did God require from the chosen people?
A. God required the chosen people to be faithful; to love justice, to do
mercy, and to walk humbly with their God.
Q. Where is this Old Covenant to be found?
A. The
covenant with the Hebrew people is to be found in the books which we call the
Old Testament.
Q. Where in the Old Testament is God's will for us shown most
clearly?
A. God's will for us is shown most clearly in the Ten
Commandments.
And, now to page 850, the section "The New Covenant."
Q. What is the New Covenant?
A. The New Covenant is the
new relationship with God given by Jesus Christ, the Messiah, to the apostles;
and, through them, to all who believe in him.
Q. What did the Messiah promise in the New Covenant?
A.
Christ promised to bring us into the kingdom of God and give us life in all its
fullness.
Q. What response did Christ require?
A. Christ commanded
us to believe in him and to keep his commandments.
Q. What are the commandments taught by Christ?
A. Christ
taught us the Summary of the Law and gave us the New Commandment.
Q. What is the Summary of the Law?
A. You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall
love your neighbor as yourself.
Q. What is the New Commandment?
A. The New Commandment is
that we love one another as Christ loved us.
God's chief desire is to gather
all people as a community of grace and good-will, in order to provide meaning
and direction for our lives. We benefit from this pledge by being saved from
lesser, faulty, even evil agreements that diminish and sometimes wound us.
God's pledge is the master contract to which all others should conform, if they
are to serve well.
However, non-conforming, often
loveless and harmful bonds compete with God's Covenant. Sometimes, as
Christians we face our own Jerusalems as we confront individuals and
organizations committed to opposing covenants that willingly accommodate
ignorance, contempt for others, greed, envy, hatred, malice, injustice,
laziness, fraud, hypocrisy, bigotry, cowardice, winning at any cost,
indifference, and ruthlessness. Whenever you and I take a stand based on God's
covenant, we can expect resistance, hostility, or even severe persecution.
Indeed, God's Covenant provides not only the benefits of life in all its
fullness, but also the responsibilities to challenge both unintentional
imperfections and willful evil. Individually and as the covenant community (the
Church), you and I are called to discern carefully the times, the places, and
effective strategies for such confrontations.
Lent is a time for you and for
me to reflect and even squirm a bit. It is a season to ponder things done and
left undone, an opportunity to sort out our covenants, an occasion to choose
again the best one around: the one contract that both promises faithfully and
delivers gracefully, the only reliable Covenant that reveals profoundly both
what to do and who we are!