THE CHURCH IN FLUX
Chapter 9
We all are ‘Covenanters’.
Strong claim! You a covenanter? I a covenanter? Yes, everyone who is alive is bound by the covenant God made with the human race. Of course most of us don’t even know this, just as billions in the world have no clue that the sign of the rainbow means that God will never again be the cause of a global disaster that played havoc with all that was alive, as he did with the flood in Noah’s time. So what is that covenant claim all about?
Let’s retrace our steps a few thousand years, paraphrasing in many aspects Frederick Buechner’s book: Telling the Truth. The scene is the area of present-day Israel, or, as it was called in those days, Canaan. Picture a woman, pushing 91. She is laughing. She is laughing because she has just been told by an angel that she is going to have a baby, she who never had had a child before, was barren, could not get children ever according to the best medical information.
Today you may have heard about that woman in Romania who had a child at age 61 thanks to the products of modern technology. But here it’s the natural way: through husband- wife intercourse. That’s the miracle, and to her it sounds unbelievable. Even though it was God’s angel who told her, she can’t control herself and her husband can’t control himself either. He keeps a straight face a few seconds longer, but he ends up cracking up, too. They are laughing at the idea that their baby will be born in a nursing home: yes, a really appropriate name this time, nursing a baby there. They are laughing because the angel not only seems to believe it but seems to expect them to believe it too. They are laughing because laughter is better than crying and may not be all that much different. They are laughing because if by some crazy chance it might just happen to be true, then they really would have something to laugh about.
Abraham, so goes one account, laughed until he fell on his face. And Sarah? She hid behind the door of the tent. Actually it was her laughter that got them all going.
According to Genesis, the Bible book which records this story, God then interrupted and asked about Sarah’s laughter. Sarah was scared stiff and denied the whole thing. But God insisted, “No, but you did laugh,” and, of course, he was right.
The most interesting part of it all was that God, far from getting angry at them for laughing, told them that when the baby was born, he wanted them to name him Isaac, which in Hebrew means ‘laughter.’ So you can say that God not only tolerated their laughter, but blessed it, and, in a sense, joined in, which makes it a very special laughter indeed: God and humanity laughing together, sharing a glorious joke in which we all are involved.
What is all this laughter about? The laughter is about the Covenant. Some 25 years earlier, when Abraham was 75 years old and Sarah, his wife, a mature 65, barren and thus childless, they were both living in Mesopotamia, the present Iraq.
God, out of the blue, called Abraham and said, “Abraham, I have something special in store for you. You see the world around you? People are doing well. They are growing rich and comfortable and somehow this causes them to forget me and go their own way. I want you to be different and treasure my way and I want you to leave your family and friends and cozy position and go to a country where I will make a great nation out of you, even though you have no son as yet. I will make your name great and will bless those who bless you and all people on earth will be blessed through you.” All people! That includes you and me!
God, in other words, made a contract with Abraham, a Covenant. Remember, he then was 75 years old, Sarah 65, and incapable of having children. Even for those days, when people did live long, this was a pretty advanced age for child bearing. And, I’m sure, Abraham figured that, once he had settled in Canaan, the present day Israel, matters would soon fall into place and his heir would come along.
But God’s time-scale is different to ours. As a matter of fact God has no time-scale: he is beyond time. So the years rolled by until finally, when Abraham was 100 years old and Sarah 90, 25 long years after God called them, the angel arrived with his amazing announcement. Then they laughed. They were going to have a baby after all. The stranger who appeared at the door turned out to be not a man who sold angel food-cake mixes, but a genuine angel. Who could have possibly expected such news from a man who talked and moved like a mere mortal, and yet they knew him to be a personal messenger from Him in heaven? It all happened so handily, even hilariously. What could they do but laugh at the craziness of it all. So they laughed until tears ran down their cheeks.
And thus the child born under the Covenant God made with Abraham is called laughter. And because we are all part of that covenant, we too are children of laughter. I think the joke is on us.
God chose us, the human race. He even made us in His image. Yes, that means we look like God. No wonder we often act like God too, but that’s another matter. I don’t know about you, but I do know that God made a pretty foolish choice to include me as a child of the Covenant, because more often than not I break that covenant.
What happens when one party breaks the covenant? Marriage, of course, is a covenant. Many know the heart sore resulting from divorce, and the suffering of children when parents separate. What happens when we split with God? The result is environmental chaos, seas depleted, forests devastated, mountain mined, prairies ploughed under, species disappearing. Yet through this all, through all this evil, God speeds up his coming, and the arrival of the Kingdom.
In Abraham God chose the Jewish people. Why them? Why not the sophisticated Greeks, or the clever Egyptians, or the dominating Romans? I think he chose the Israelites because, as somebody has said, they are just like everybody else, except more so – more religious than anybody religious, and when they are secular, being secular as if they invented the concept. What applies to the Israelites then, and the Jewish people now, certainly applies to contemporary church people as well, I am sure, and actually to the entire human race, where foolishness, so evident in the squandering of our resources, is the ultimate hallmark of humanity.
Actually, a closer look at the Christian Religion it self, reveals it also to be a ridiculous affair. The Bible tells is about a king who tramps around the country side with a bunch of uneducated fishermen as his bodyguards. The Prince of Peace, as he calls himself, looks more like a Prince of Fools, who, in spite of his miraculous powers, is not taken seriously at all, and ends up being hanged as a common criminal.
Today it’s no wonder that people find Christianity a laughing matter. I can well see their point. Just listen to these lines taken from Luke 6: “Blessed are you when you are poor.” Tell me, do you want to be poor? “Blessed are you when you weep.” Who wants to be unhappy for Pete’s sake? “Blessed are you when people hate you.” Well, don’t we all want to be liked and respected?
Yet, there is comedy in all this. Comedy is being different. We laugh not at the usual. What is common place is not funny. Says one text book for aspiring reporters: “If a dog bites a person, that’s not news: if a person bites a dog that must be reported because such an event provokes laughter.”
God makes those people part of the Covenant who are not afraid to stand for justice, justice in creation, justice in the nation, who place communal interests above personal desires, all for the coming of the Kingdom. There we have that Kingdom idea again, the dominating factor in history. God does not want people who, in the eyes of the establishment, do the commonly accepted thing. God wants atypical people, people like Abraham who went out on a limb, leaving friends and relatives, on a promise to become a father of a great nation. And He wants people like us, those who too often squander his creation, who too often act selfishly in too many ways, who too often live as if there is no God, but who yet struggle to do the right thing, even though too often it amounts to little.
So what really is the significance of this Covenant?
More about that in the next chapter.