The Covenant Relationship

In the busyness of the holidays, I neglected to post my Christmas Eve sermon, as well as the sermon for 12/28. Here is my sermon from Sunday, 1/4/09. It was part of our congregation's annual ritual of having a Covenant Renewal Service on the first Sunday of the calendar year. We use Wesley's Covenant Renewal Service, found in the United Methodist Book of Worship (UMBOW). I've never led or participated in a covenant renewal service, so it was a learning experience for me. However, I enjoyed leading it, and so far the feedback suggests that it was meaningful for many of our congregants. Here is my sermon, based on 2 Kings 23:1-3.

While visiting with Lisa’s sister and brother-in-law this week, we somehow ended up helping them clean out some junk in their basement. In the process of sorting through their dusty, cluttered basement, Lisa’s sister Laura found a couple things she didn’t even know they had. In the recesses of their basement, she found pom poms. She also found a stuffed animal. I’m pretty sure if you had asked her last week if she had a stuffed mouse and a pair of pom poms in her basement, she would’ve said no. But in the process of cleaning out the basement, she found some things she didn’t even know she had. She didn’t know where they came from, or why they had them. Sometimes, when we clean out our cluttered houses, we find stuff we don’t even know we have.

Here in 2 Kings, the house of the Lord, the temple, is getting cleaned out for a big-time renovation. And the workers cleaning out the temple clutter find a book called Deuteronomy. It’s the book of the law. Somehow, over the years, a once-cherished book has been shoved into a dusty corner, with all sorts of stuff piled on top of it. And as time went on, the people who shoved it into the corner died, and less and less people knew it was there. Eventually, this book of God’s law became completely forgotten in the clutter of the temple – they forgot it was there, they forgot why they had it, they forgot where it came from, and they forgot what was in it.

This book of law was the book of guidelines for the Israelites to follow in a keeping of the covenant their ancestors made with God. But they had so cluttered their lives, so cluttered the house of the Lord, that their covenant relationship with God had been shoved into a dark, dusty corner. In losing the book, they took the first step toward breaking God’s covenant – forgetting about the covenant and its guidelines altogether.

This was surely not intentional. These people didn’t set out one day to stop loving God and keeping his commandments. It’s just that over time, they “lost that lovin’ feeling, and now it’s gone, gone gone…”

But now, they’ve started cleaning up. They’ve started to examine the state of affairs, and the king, Josiah, realizes that they have not been doing so hot in this covenant relationship with God. So he determines that they will renew this covenant. They’ll continue cleaning out all the unnecessary junk in the temple and in their lives, and renew their promise to God to love him and follow his commandments.

Sometimes cleaning out clutter in our lives reveals that we’ve buried things that were once important to us. We’ve lost things, and forgotten that we even had them in the first place. It’s like that in our covenant relationship with God. We promise to love God with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength, but then over time, God’s commandments become less important to us. Carrying out our end of the relationship fades away, and becomes lost in the recesses of our chaotic, cluttered lives. That clutter in our lives comes with many names: cooking, cleaning, doing chores, decorating our houses more than necessary, getting so addicted to TV programs that we can’t bear to miss a single episode, making sure the kids get to practice, keeping on top of things at work, getting to all our meetings on time, impressing the people around us with our words and our possessions, and on it goes. We clutter our lives with seemingly harmless things, but then these things lead to anger, greed, jealousy, selfishness, destructive habits, and so on. The clutter we accumulate leads to two things: FIRST, our covenant with God gets pushed into a dusty corner, and SECOND, sin creeps in and takes control over us. Without our covenant with God being in the center, sin becomes the center of our cluttered mess. As time goes on, sin increases in power and influence over us, and our covenant with God gets pushed further and further into the corner, further and further into obscurity.

And so it is with all of us, and with all relationships. We become so busy that our relationships often suffer. Perhaps the most well-known statistic in this country is that half of all marriage covenants end in divorce. None of them start out expecting to divorce. However, what happens is the covenant made to each gets lost in the midst of the clutter of our lives, and that covenant is pushed into a dusty corner and forgotten over time.

Whether it’s our covenant with God, our marriage covenant, or our relationships with others, we all push relationships into the corner from time to time. We forget to love, respect, and trust the people with whom we’ve promised to do so. We lose sight of what’s important, we lose sight of our books of law, and sometimes they’re so buried it takes a major renovation to find them.

You see, I’ve always felt that all relationships are like driving on the interstate. You know you started out on the right road, but it’s nice to have the road signs every once in awhile. If I’m driving on an unfamiliar interstate, I like to see those road signs that tell me I’m still on the right path. It’s nice to be reassured every once in awhile that I haven’t gotten off course. Occasionally, I find that I accidentally ended up on the wrong path – I went the wrong way when the road split, or I got off the interstate and got back on going the wrong direction. And while that’s frustrating, without the road signs it may take me longer to realize that.

Our covenant relationship with God is like driving on the interstate. When we started out, we knew it was the highway to heaven, but maybe we haven’t seen a sign in awhile. Maybe we’re not sure if we’re still following the right path. And then, finally, we see a sign. It tells us what’s going on. We’ve found the lost book of law, we’ve found out what route we’re taking. Maybe it’s the right way, or maybe we somehow made a wrong turn and ended up on the highway to hell instead. But we need those road signs. We need to have times of self-reflection, times where all the clutter goes away and the truth stares us in the face like a big highway sign. And in these moments of self-reflection, we discover where exactly our covenant with God lives – whether it still lives in the center of our lives, or whether it’s been pushed into a dusty corner and forgotten about. We discover what it is we need to do moving forward – dust off the book and read it again, turn around and get back on the right highway, or maybe even just be reassured that we’re on the right path, even if we haven’t quite gotten to where we want to be.

As we renew our covenants with God this morning, I hope and pray that this may be a time of self-reflection for all of us. Treat this service as a renovation project, or as a road sign on the highways of life. This is a perfect time to stop and think about how our relationships to God once were, how they currently are, and how we want them to be moving forward. Renew your covenant to God; read over the book of law once more, get back onto the highway of righteousness. Seal it with the sacrament of Holy Communion, the reminder of God’s promise in the covenant relationship. Let us renew our covenant with the Lord our God in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.