Repent: Change Your Heart

On this day that we make a covenant with our new members, we hear the story of the first covenant made by God.  In the story of Noah, God repents about again destroying the earth and all of its inhabitants.  After the flood, God promises that God will never again destroy all flesh.  God marks this promise with the sign and seal of a rainbow.

And in our Gospel story from Mark, we hear the story of Jesus being baptized in the very same waters that had flooded the earth, only this time, the waters baptize Jesus, and the sky opens up to reveal the Holy Spirit instead of unending rain.  And then, Jesus teaches us God’s current covenant with the church, which we know as the Good News.

Will you pray with me?  “Gracious God of holy water, we thank you for your covenant not to destroy the earth again.  And we thank you that the waters of creation, the waters of the flood and the waters of the womb all become the waters of our baptism in your New Covenant of unconditional love with the church.  Open our hearts in Lent, so that we might also repent, becoming the children that you dream us to be.  Amen.”

This last fall, our Monday afternoon Bible study carefully looked at the story of the flood.  Over 25 of us spent the fall studying the marvelous stories in Genesis.  We discovered the delightful complexity of the stories.  For instance, we learned that the story of the flood is actually three ancient stories that have been woven together.  Our passage today comes from one of those ancient threads, from a tradition that was concerned with covenant and promise and natural phenomena.  This, the first covenant in the Hebrew scriptures, was given to all flesh—did you notice?  And it goes on to list all flesh in verse 10 as being “every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you.”  Again in verse 15 God says, “I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”  If you ponder this a moment, you will realize that this is an unconditional covenant from God—it required no action on the part of humans or animals.  Every human and every animal on earth was included unconditionally—and the rainbow was God’s gift as a sign of God’s covenant to the diversity of all creation, humans and animal alike.

Later on in Genesis, God makes another covenant with Abram, in the process renaming him Abraham.  Do you remember what the Abrahamic Covenant was?  In Genesis chapter 12 and then again in chapter 15, God makes an unconditional covenant to give Abraham the land of Israel and many descendants.  These two stories in chapter 12 and 15 are again from different traditions of the Jewish faith and differ in their detail, but they both confirm that the Promised Land and many descendants are given to Abraham.  Later Jewish tradition added a third statement of the Abrahamic covenant with a condition or stipulation in Genesis chapter 17.  The new condition was that Jewish men were to be circumcised as a sign of their participation in God’s covenant to Abraham.

Many other covenants are given by God in the Hebrew Scriptures.  God’s unconditional Covenant to Isaac in Genesis 27 reaffirmed Abraham’s covenant.  Jacob’s unconditional Covenant in Genesis 28 gave his heirs the land on which he was dying.  The Mosaic conditional Covenant in Exodus 19-24 established a set of rules or commandments in which the Jewish people were named the special people of God as a holy nation, and the Sabbath was given as a signal and sign of that covenant.  Finally, the unconditional Davidic Covenant in 2 Samuel 7 established the house of David to be the royal line of Israel forever.

I have talked about the history of covenants today to help us all understand the importance of our tradition of covenants.  We will be covenanting together with our new members in a few minutes.  We will promise to walk with one another on this journey in the ways that we all discern together with one another.  Our covenant together is a response to God’s Good News Covenant given by Jesus in our Gospel message today, so let’s look at our Mark closely passage again.

We studied this passage just a few weeks ago, so it is familiar, I hope.  Then we talked about how Jesus foretold his entire ministry in Mark chapter 1, verse 15.  Let’s review it again, because this is the new covenant from God through Jesus, the Good News Covenant.  And if we look at it carefully, we come to realize that through Jesus’ ministry, God offers humanity a new unconditional covenant of unconditional love for all of us.

In Mark 1:15, Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”  Now that we have reviewed the major Biblical covenants, we realize that the time that Jesus says is fulfilled is the time of fulfillment of the Hebrew covenants. 

Then, Jesus says the Kingdom of God is near—right here.  Rather than waiting for many generations for the Kingdom to be fulfilled, the Kingdom is right now.  As the church, we are the Body of Christ, we are the Kingdom.  Then Jesus says, Repent.  The Greek word for repent is meta-no-e-o, to take notice and change one’s heart based on overpowering evidence.  Mark develops the entire Gospel as living evidence of God’s unconditional love for all flesh.  Jesus says, whatever you think about God, change your mind and heart to this: God loves us unconditionally, so the very reason we exist is to love God back with all of our heart and mind and soul, and our neighbor as ourselves—this is our response to the Good News Covenant of God’s love.

Let us look at the similarities in God’s first unconditional covenant with Noah and God’s unconditional Good News Covenant through Jesus.  First, God marked both of these covenants with a special gift.  God marked the first covenant with the sign and seal of the rainbow.  God marks the Good News Covenant proclaimed by Jesus with the sign and seal of the Holy Spirit establishing the church.  Second, these covenants are both unconditional covenants.  We do not have to become circumcised or live by a particular set of laws or rules to be completely and deeply loved by God.  God promises to spare us all from destruction, and loves all of us unconditionally.  Third, both of these covenants belong to all of humanity.  We do not have be a special Jewish tribe or be a certain gender or belong to a certain nation to be unconditionally spared by God and loved by God. 

Covenants remain important to the church, even today.  To us here at Spring Glen Church, we follow one of the two main traditions of the Christian Church.  We gather together in covenant with each other, as our forbearers the Congregationalists did.  When we join together as a church, we covenant to walk with one another on our journey of faith, placing our primary emphasis on loving one another rather than agreeing with each other.  Other types of Christian communities gather around a creed, and focus on agreeing on the same doctrines or creeds. In the UCC, we are a  covenantal church when we say that God is still speaking to us, which means each generation of the church is challenged to respond to the living God in new and changing ways based on God’s current revelation.  With God continuing to speak to us, the church continues to grow and change in response to God’s calling in every generation.  Creedal churches are static, but we believe that God is still speaking.  We also believe that God’s words and our words have incredible and profound power, just as the words of our tradition have profound power. Our words are our bond, our truth, and our very being, especially our words said before God and the church in a covenant.  This is why we here at Spring Glen are people of the covenant, people of the ongoing promise, and that is why our covenant to walk with each other in faith before God is our solemn and profound promise.  We are all sealed together by the life-work of Christ as he revealed and lived the Good News Covenant.  When I am installed as your pastor on March 11th, I will make another covenant with you before God.  But today, we will make a covenant together and with God to be members together of this church.  We will covenant or promise each other that we will accompany one other on our journey with God.  So simple; yet so very profound.

So Jesus asks us to repent, to change from the ways of the world. Jesus says, change our hearts, and live into the Good News Covenant of God’s unconditional love.  Thanks be to God for the covenant that we will say together today.  And thanks be to God for Spring Glen Church, where we live out Jesus’ Good News Covenant in our loving lives together.  Amen.