OLD…AND NEW
Scriptures: Jeremiah 31:31-34
II Corinthians 3:4-6, 12-18
Ok, ‘c’mon now, it’s fess up time. How many of you have already broken your New Year’s resolutions? No, I don’t need to see a show of hands – we all know that resolutions are made to be broken. And we all do it, don’t we? Why do we make those resolutions in the first place? I guess there’s something about the start of a new year that makes us want to take stock – to look at who we are and where we’ve been…and what could be done to make our reality better. And so we look at what has been – actions, patterns of behavior, attitudes towards others – and decide what it would take to make us…new. That’s what resolutions are really all about, isn’t it? – what it would take to renew us in mind and body and spirit. And then when we don’t quite live up to them, we fall back onto the old, comfortable, traditional ways of living and being.
Now, you know, of course, that I’m not just talking about you and me as individuals but also about this church community. Today we are embarking on something new, because that’s always the case when a new pastor comes to town. At the same time there is the history – the traditions, the patterns of service and mission, the comfort of familiar hymns, the people of this community for whom strong relationships have been built up over the years. I loved it when Cathy said last week that the one thing you should not say to me is, “But we’ve never done it that way before,” or its cousin, “But we’ve always done it this way.” At the same time, I should not be caught saying to any of you (and I trust you’ll call me on it if I do), “Here’s a new way of doing things, and it’s my way or the highway!” It’s a bit like making New Year’s resolutions: we can decide together on the new ways we want to proceed, but the tug and strength of past traditions sometimes make it difficult to keep that resolve.
There is nothing strange about this dynamic tension between the old and the new, and we need not let it frighten us. It goes back to the very start of Christianity. When Christianity began it was something radically new – a wholly different way of envisioning God’s covenant with God’s people. In fact, it was so new and different that the early Christians didn’t expect it to last. This was the doctrine called the parousia, or the Second Coming – that the Kingdom of God would come into existence before the generation that knew Jesus had died off. When this didn’t happen the church started to dig in its heels – to become “established” – and TRADITION was born.
Yet, even as the church was becoming established and ways of doing things became set in stone, the thought that God has made a new covenant with the people was never far from the surface. Paul captures it at the start of the scripture passage we read today: “Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter, but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (2 Corinthians 3:4-6)
Couple of things to notice about this passage: we are all competent to be ministers of this new covenant. I love the fact that all of the members (and I would include friends and even guests) are listed in the bulletin as the “ministers” of this congregation, and that certainly fits well with the Protestant concept of “the priesthood of all believers”. Second: the thought that it is the “letter” that kills. It’s not a fight between “old” vs. “new” – “old” BAD and “new” GOOD. Rather, it is following slavishly the letter of the old, or the letter of the law, rather than seeking out the spirit that has given it vitality that kills growth – in an individual or in a congregation.
What is this new covenant that has been made by the coming of the Christ? Quite simply -- quite profoundly – it is that God knows each one of us, a knowledge based on forgiveness and love. The old covenant was a covenant of law; the new covenant is a covenant of love. James P. Hyatt puts it this way: “The promise of the new covenant is not of sinlessness, but rather of forgiveness of sins.” You’re going to be hearing a lot in my sermons about these twin themes of forgiveness and love, in part, at least, because our time seems to abound in judgmentalism and harshness and guilt – and I want people to say about us as a congregation, as the ancient Romans did with a kind of awe, “See those Christians, how they love one another!” The parts of the Bible that we call the Old Testament and the New Testament really mean “old covenant” and “new covenant”.
But there’s an irony here – maybe even a paradox (by the way, as a sidebar, you’re going to find that I’m really big on paradox as a way of understanding a Christian worldview; after all, any religion that claims that this person Jesus was BOTH wholly man AND wholly God is chock-full of paradoxes). The irony is that right there in the midst of those Hebrew scriptures we Christians tend to call (a bit too derogatorily, I’m afraid) the “Old Testament” is Jeremiah’s declaration: “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah….. this is the covenant that I will make…..I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Sounds a lot like Paul, doesn’t it? And the remarkable thing about the new covenant Jeremiah foresees is that while it is based in the law, it results in forgiveness: “for they shall all know me…says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” There is perhaps no more poignant line, no words more filled with promise in the whole of the Hebrew scriptures than that insight of Jeremiah’s: “for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
And the further irony is that this insight came from a man who became known as the “weeping prophet”, and it came at a time when Israel was being carried off into the Babylonian Captivity – a time of national disorder, unrest, and despair – perhaps not altogether a time unlike our own.
What Paul and Jeremiah are telling us is that while the new and the old may sometimes be in dynamic tension, they are not in conflict. The new covenant is not a new law, not the old made new, but the Spirit of God written on our hearts. And the Spirit of God leads to freedom.
You know, religion (and especially the more fundamentalistic forms of Christianity) is often seen as trying to hold back progress, of holding on to thought patterns out of the past at all costs – especially in the so-called clash between religion and science. I don’t know how many of you saw the column this past week in the Review-Journal by the scientist Alan Cutler. He started out by citing “the march of science against the unholy trinity of ignorance, superstition, and dogma” and, in particular the early 17th century drama of Galileo’s persecution by the Roman Catholic Church. But he goes on to tell the story of Danish geologist Nicolaus Steno, who proposed that the fossils and rock layers of the Earth could give us a chronicle of the age of the earth – thereby debunking Archbishop Ussher’s theory that creation made the earth only 6000 years old. How did the church of the late 17th century react to Steno? Not only was he not condemned, but (according to Alan Cutler) he was put on a fast track to priesthood and a bishopric, and in 1988 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II. Cutler concludes, “The historical relationship between science and religion has been as complex as any human relationship.” Religion need not be portrayed as overly dogmatic and reactionary. Science need not be portrayed as hostile to the average person’s spiritual needs.
What Cutler, along with others, is pointing to is that there is really a close, cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between religion and science. Just so, is there such a mutually beneficial relationship between the old and the new. Theologian Paul Tillich had the important insight that the new is not created out of the old, but rather both are transcended by the Eternal. We live, he says, in the Eternal Now, for, after all, in our transitory life the new constantly becomes the old. But what we have to proclaim is forever Good News – Christ crucified and risen. The forms we use for that proclamation – forms of worship, of service to the world, of mission and ministry – ultimately don’t matter if they are “old” or “new” as long as they participate in that sense of the Eternal – that knowledge of Emmanuel – “God with us”.
King Arthur, in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, says as he is dying, “The old order changeth, yielding place to the new; And God fulfills himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” There are many ways to worship and serve God, even as God fulfills Godself in many ways. My pledge to you as we move forward is that whether the forms of worship or service or mission that we use are labeled “new” or “old” I will try to help all of us remember that the point of it all is to use those forms to point to the Good News of the Eternal.
It is, therefore, appropriate as we begin this time together to do so with an act of communion – an act as old as the church itself, yet an act which always seeks to lead to renewal. Jesus knew what he was doing in instituting it during that Passover meal, for communion is the sign and symbol of God’s new covenant with God’s people – a covenant that leads to community. I haven’t had a chance to check whether this has been a practice in this church, but in the church that Ann and I came from we like for everyone to eat the bread just as soon as they get it, as a sign that each of us, individually, is in covenant with the God who loves and forgives us; but then we all hold the cup and drink it together, as a sign that we are one – a community of the people in covenant with our God. In such a manner are we renewed as individuals and as a community.
Our task together in these coming weeks and months is to proclaim the Gospel – to proclaim it through new forms; to proclaim it through old traditions; but always to pro-claim in order to acknowledge the claim we have on our lives – a claim from Jesus Christ, who came to us as the bondsman of the new covenant between God and we, the people.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
January 15, 2006