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!