Sunday, August 23, 2015 | 8:00 a.m.

Marking Promises

Matt Helms
Associate Pastor for Children and Family Ministry, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 84
1 Kings 8:22–30
Joshua 24:14–18, 25–27

“Some people don’t understand the promises
that they’re making when they make them,” I said.
“Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway.
That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

John Green
The Fault in Our Stars

It may just be the time of year, but as I read and reread this passage about Joshua and the people making and renewing their covenant with God, I found myself reflecting a lot on weddings. We are decidedly in the midst of wedding season here at Fourth Church, and by the end of a typical year we, as a church, have the privilege of seeing more than sixty couples be married within our walls. These couples have a wide variety of backgrounds: some members and others not; some native to Chicago and others travel in only for the wedding weekend; some dating for years before their engagement while others less than a year.

But for all of the different backgrounds that these couples bring to their respective weddings, I’ve always found it fascinating how similar the core components of the wedding service are. In some ways this shouldn’t be surprising—after all, it is a worship service in which we are praising and thanking God for the gift of a particular couple—but virtually every wedding that I’ve attended elsewhere, whether it be overtly religious or not, has the same simple practice at its core. In the ceremony, each member in the couple makes a promise to the other, a vow in which he or she covenants to be with this person through the good and bad times in life. In the “better or worse” language that is traditionally used, they will be with the other “in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health” as long as they both shall live.

There are obviously innumerable vows that people have spoken to one another over the years, but in the traditional vows that our Book of Common Worship provides, there are only forty-five words that each member of the couple speaks to the another. Following these short vows, many couples often exchange rings as a symbol of the promise that they’ve just made, or they light a shared unity candle that represents the joining of two families into one. After a prayer of blessing or after well wishes for the couple, they are legally married and bound together in covenant with one another. Even in the longest of services—the ones that have people glancing at their watches and grumbling quietly afterwards—it is surreal to think that through saying simple set of vows and an hour or less of worship, there has been a covenant created that is meant to last a lifetime and beyond.

How can something so simple—under 100 words and a service less than hour long—dictate the choices, decisions, and directions of two people’s lives well after the ceremony itself has come and gone? I’m obviously oversimplifying things a bit, because those words and that service are almost always the culmination of months of planning and careful thought, but it is still remarkable to think about the ways that that promise will shape the couple’s lives in both known and unknown ways as they move forward together.

It is that same sense of promise and latent possibility that Joshua and the Israelites were facing in our second lesson from today. God has been with them, Joshua argues, from the moment they left Egypt and even before. Their presence in the land is in many ways an extension of the covenant that God made with Abraham. But now, Joshua poses, they are facing a choice about whom they will serve: the other gods or the Lord. It is a dramatic scene, and, as the conclusion to the book of Joshua, it is a climactic one that will set the stage for the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings that are to follow.

There are many theological problems that we as modern readers bring to the text of Joshua concerning the forcible removal of peoples from Canaan and Joshua’s understanding that God is involved with warfare, but for the moment I’d like to leave those aside and focus on the choice that Joshua is asking the people to make. The twenty-fourth chapter of Joshua is a covenant creation ceremony in which the people are being asked to make their vows to God to join together and to be in covenant with one another. As a ceremony, the role that the people have to play is simple: as the entirety of the chapter states, the people need to make the decision to follow God, forsake false idols, and to hold themselves accountable to the Lord, all sealed by the words, “The Lord our God we will serve, and him we will obey.” The parallels to a marriage ceremony are striking, particularly when Joshua sets up a stone as a symbol of the peoples’ promise, just as many wedding couples place rings onto each other’s fingers as a similar way of marking their promise. Although simple in nature, we have the sense in this scene that the lives of these Israelite families have now been forever transformed, that that promise will shape their lives in both known and unknown ways as they move forward together into the future that God has for them.

This idea of promise and covenant is recalled in our first lesson today from the book of 1 Kings as well, in which Solomon dedicates the temple in front of the people. The building of the temple was a key moment in Israel’s history, particularly given the relatively nomadic nature of the tabernacle, but for Solomon it was another extension of the covenant that God had made with the people. Ultimately God is not tied to this particular building, Solomon proclaims, but God’s faithfulness and steadfast love are represented within it. The temple marked a promise that God had made to his people long ago, and its presence would serve as a reminder that all of their choices, decisions, and directions should come from their covenant to love and serve the Lord. One’s whole life was dictated by one’s covenant with God, and through routine worship at the temple, each worshiper was reminded and inspired to live out their vow to love and serve the Lord just as those who once pledged with Joshua did.

But while both of these passages, and indeed much of the Bible, can be read through the lens of covenant, this idea of covenants and marking promises with objects is somewhat foreign to our world today outside of the context of weddings, I think. Although covenants were common in the Old Testament world, and even in that of the New Testament, the idea of entering into a contract based on mutual promise is not something that we experience much in our everyday lives. There are legal contracts, housing paperwork, or work orders. There are both written and verbal agreements. But while covenants in the world of the Old Testament certainly had a legal component to them, at their core they were understood as a mutual promise between two parties made in the presence of God. In the case of the covenants like the ones Abram, Noah, and Joshua made, they were a mutual promise made with God specifically.

These promises were understood as standing for eternity, and, in the language that we would hear from a wedding, they were made with the understanding that each would be there for one another through the good and bad, “joy and sorrow,” “sickness and in health.”

Today, a breach of contract would be an opportunity for one party to render that contract null and void, but in the concept of a covenant, the two parties had previously committed to hold onto their promises to one another even in the midst of stumbles and mistakes.

We don’t see these type of agreements much outside of weddings these days. Many things that could potentially be covenants, such as the need to care for family, are just an understood cultural norm rather than any sort of verbalized covenant. And even though I’m lifting up weddings as an example, it’s honestly the very rare wedding couple that actually spends time during the buildup to their wedding thinking about how they’ll respond during the difficult moments of their marriage. Most couples generally acknowledge that there will be fights down the road or tough times in the future, but those are bridges to be crossed later when the time comes, long after their vows have been said.

However, I think it’s those dark moments, perhaps more than any other, that really capture the understanding of what it means to be in covenant with one another. In John Green’s book The Fault in Our Stars, Green captures the sentiment beautifully in a conversation between Hazel and Augustus, the two terminally ill protagonists who are in the midst of a conversation on the nature of promises that people make with one another during good times, only to waver when they fall upon bad ones. “Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” Hazel says, implying those people shouldn’t be held to a promise when circumstances change. “Right, of course,” Augustus replies, “But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

I think it’s safe to say that the Israelites had no idea what would be next for them when they agreed to be in covenant with God. It’s safe to say that no married couple knows exactly what lies in front of them when they make their vows to each other. But the love and mutual promise behind the covenant mean that they hold onto those promises even during those times that they couldn’t have imagined ever agreeing to them.

One of the most powerful examples of this comes from the great theologian Karl Barth in the years leading up to World War II. Barth was teaching at the University of Bonn when Hitler ascended to power. Barth became disturbed by the way in which his colleagues acquiesced their Christian beliefs to the new regime’s ideology. In 1934, Barth and a few others composed the Barmen Declaration—which is a part of our Presbyterian Book of Confessions—which stated that because of the covenant that Christ has with the church, the church could never follow any leader other than Christ and Christ’s teachings.

It was a bold declaration for what would become known as the Confessing Church, and it would lead to many of the Confessing Church’s leadership, like Dietrich Bonheoffer, being imprisoned. But even in the midst of these dark times, Barth and Bonheoffer and many others believed that the promises that they had made to God in the covenant of baptism and in their ordination vows ultimately had to supersede their fear of Hitler’s rise. They, too, likely didn’t understand the gravity of what would be asked of them when they said their vows, but they held to them anyway. Those simple words that they recited years earlier became their guiding principle as they tried to live out God’s hope.

It is a challenge then that was extended to each one of us through our own baptism and will be once again in a few minutes as we share together in the Communion meal. Listen to the simplicity in the words that accompany our baptism: “Child of the covenant, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in your baptism, and you are marked as Christ’s own forever.” So too in the words that accompany Communion: “Take, and eat. This is my body given for you. This cup is the new covenant sealed in my blood for the forgiveness of sins.” We may not fully understand the covenant promises that we are making in those simple sacramental moments, but we are indeed making a promise to follow God to the best of our ability just as Joshua’s people and Solomon’s people did many, many years ago. But although it sounds intimidating—and perhaps it should be—we know too that our covenant with God is not upheld through us, but rather through God’s love and grace. God holds to the covenant, even in those times when we stumble or fall, and it is that promise that gives us hope. So, friends, thanks to be to God for that covenant promise, and may it shape us each and every day of our lives. Amen.