I did a little reading about the miners that got trapped in Chile. I don't know all the details, but I'm sure someone is going to write the book, because it's really an amazing story.
It appears that they were without light or any sign that anyone knew they were there for some seventeen days. During that time, there was a very good chance that they would have despaired or turned against one another. It's what groups of people do oftentimes in crisis. Panicky people often struggle with one another for power, and while they're doing that, nothing productive is really getting done. It's the way of the world, I guess.
But not for the miners. They apparently made a decision that they would neither succumb to despair nor turn on one another. Instead they made--and lived out--a covenant.
Now, for those of you who haven't been with us for long, I'll say a few words about covenant. The Hebrew word we translate covenant most simply means contract. But the word eventually came to have a deeper connotation. A covenant is a free acceptance of a binding agreement between parties who love one another. A covenant most of us are aware of is a marriage. Certainly we would say that the binding promises people make to each other in marriage is more than a contract.
But the world covenant also bears the dimension of a contract that equalizes an unequal relationship, as with the covenant between God and Israel, and the covenantal social contract God required of Israel, in which the strong are obliged to care for the weak, the rich for the poor, the healthy for the sick, the righteous for the sinful, and so on. This is the peaceable kingdom that Isaiah paints a picture of in our first lesson: a society in which the predator peacefully coexists with its prey.
The miners established a covenant of hope, a promise they made to each other to believe that God had not abandoned them and that they would not give into despair. They got to know one another and probed one another for gifts and graces, just as they took stock of what meager supplies they had. They identified leadership, they appointed a chaplain to keep them in fellowship with God, they discovered who knew something about first aid and made that person the medic, someone who was a creative cook and put him in charge of the rations.
They made a covenant with each other to focus not on what they didn't have, but on what they did. They made a covenant to focus not on what danger they were in, but on what hope they had. They made a covenant to set aside their individual opinions and preferences to become one body, each one giving everything to the common good of all.
They became a church.
When they were finally rescued, the medical personnel on site were amazed at how little they had to do. A month later one of the miners ran a marathon.
What is the the good fruit that is worthy of repentance? The biblical word we translate repentance simply means a change of mind. But in the context of Jewish and Christian spiritual life, repentance has to do with covenant. It is a decision to enter covenant, to freely bind oneself to God and to God's people for the sake of the world God loves.
The Ten Commandments together comprise a covenant. They are not simply a law code. They are the way of life for a people in covenant with God. God says, I shall be your God and you shall be my people. By "you," God means Israel and the church. You shall not have any other gods, you shall remember and keep sabbath, you shall not misuse God's name, you shall honor your parents, you shall not murder, steal, commit adultery, or bear false witness, and you shall not covet your neighbor's possessions or relationships. If you are a Christian, you have accepted these commandments as your way of life.
But as subjects of Christ and children of God, you have also accepted the New Covenant, which Jesus mentioned on the night in which he was betrayed. Jesus described the blood he was to spill the next day as the new blood of the covenant. He was referring to the practice of sacrifice as a way of sealing a covenant between God and God's people. Jesus' blood sealed a new covenant, a way of life now defined by Jesus. This is the reign of God Jesus spent his entire ministry teaching about, and that John was announcing before him. When we repent, we are repenting of our way of life, we are letting go of our learned ways of thinking and seeing and doing, in order to bear the good fruit of covenant faithfulness, of working for the purposes Christ has defined
The Pharisees come to John the Baptist to be baptized. John has some choice words for them.
John proclaims to them that repentance is a real change of heart and mind. He suggests to them that their ethnicity is not an entitlement but a responsibility. To be Jewish no longer means to be privileged. In the coming kingdom, it means to be responsible. It means to be bound to God and to God's people. It means to be committed to the peaceable kingdom of which Isaiah dreamed, where predators give up their predatory ways and become friends to the prey, and where the prey risk relationship with the predator, trusting that on God's holy mountain, none will hurt or destroy.
There are so many things we say we can't do. So many situations and challenges we evaluate as hopeless, both in our personal and in our world wide ministry. And yet it never ceases to amaze me how easily we find solutions and how quickly we can organize and how powerfully we can act, both as individuals and a congregation, when we have simply agreed to do so. And the reign of God, the covenantal life Jesus wants to bring to all of us, is pretty simple. It's the faith that God is still with us and that God can do what we can't. God who makes the sun burn, God who swings the planets in their orbits, God who whispered over the seas and life came into being, God can do what we cannot, God can make of us what we are not, God can accomplish what the most powerful and wise and rich cannot, God can do in us and through us things we could never do without God.
I was a part of a church-based organization in Boston over the years I was serving churches there. One year, six of our churches located in the poorest neighborhood in the city got their youth together, who then covenanted to work for the common good. The youth decided that they wanted to have a safe and wholesome place to go to have fun. They found out about an old skating rink that had been closed for some years. They got to work in the community raising money to get the rink going again. When they had over half of the money they needed, they arranged a public meeting with the city council members responsible for their neighborhood to ask the city to fund the rest of the project. They planned the meeting and set the agenda and ran the meeting entirely on their own. Not one adult did a thing except advise them in the process.
The meeting went smoothly, and the council was prepared to say yes. It was after all a political coup for them. After this part of the meeting, one of the council members got up and approached a microphone and started to say something.
The chairwoman, a seventeen year old girl, had been trained to stick to the agenda agreed upon. She told the council member that he'd already had his chance to speak and to please sit down. And he sat down.
Many of us in the aftermath of the event talked about that moment, when someone who had formerly been powerless and unknown told a powerful and influential politician what to do, and he did it. That young lady would never have risen to such heights without the covenant of the organization behind her. Good fruit indeed.
As we await the coming of Jesus, we are invited to open ourselves to God's Spirit. Essential to that opening is a decision to bind ourselves to God and to God's people, which for us is the church. This decision means nothing if we don't really intend to carry it out. If what we really mean when we repent is that we're a little bit sorry about being bad actors sometimes and would like a free pass so we can keep on doing what we've always done, then old John the Baptist is telling us not to bother repenting at all. He's suggesting we step away from the water if we don't really want to get clean.
But if we are willing to commit ourselves to God and to one another, if we are willing to set aside our private agendas, to let go of our old ideas, and commit ourselves together to the hope of the Messiah, Jesus, we might just find out way out of the darkness and the depths, and up to that magnificent and holy mountain.
Amen.
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