Beyond Promises – Third Sunday after Pentecost (Hebrews 8: 5-7)
Now, for one last time this summer, let us go beyond. This is the last sermon in this series based on materials provided for the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The assembly theme, based on Ephesians 3: 20-21, asks us to consider what it means to follow a God that can go beyond what we can ask or imagine. So, it calls us to consider, what might the future hold that we have not yet asked for, maybe we couldn’t even imagine asking for it. And, if we are going endeavor to move beyond where we find ourselves now, we will have to consider what it is that led us here and what leads us to want to stay. Part of what leads us to a place of understanding and expectation in our faith is the promises that the faith makes. The God of the Bible is a God of promises. God made promises to Noah that the world would not be destroyed by flood a second time. God promised Abraham he would be the father of a new and great nation. Through Moses God promised the Israelites they would not be abandoned, they would be free, they would be cared for, they would always be in relationship with God. And in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God promises new life. When God makes promises, people are called to respond and live in a way that glorifies God and honors the purposes of those promises. Namely to see to the well-being of God’s creation.
The occasion for the writing of the Book of Hebrews is a time of wrestling with God’s promises. The author of Hebrews is speaking to an audience of Jewish Christians, who follow and are familiar with Jewish customs. However, they are living in a difficult time, as well. This audience has faced persecution for their belief in Jesus as the Messiah. They have a belief that Jesus will come to free them from the oppression of the Roman Empire. This audience is now a generation removed from the first believers. The anticipated return of Christ has been delayed decades at this point. They are still relatively new to the faith, and some have begun to drift. They have fallen out of the new habits they had developed and are beginning to resort back to old ones. Or they are looking for new answers to difficult problems. When confronted with the hard realities of the world, our life of faith can seem precarious. So, the author is trying to bring the people’s attention back to Jesus. To remind them that what has been promised in and through Jesus goes beyond what they had in the past. Also, beyond what their expectations around what those promises meant, because obviously, what they thought the promise meant had not yet come to pass.
To do this, the author of Hebrews directly addresses the promises the community are wrestling with, one being the promises made in Christ, and the other the promises made in the Law as handed down by Moses. When the author of Hebrews is comparing the new covenant to the old covenant, we must be careful not to let it become a matter of Christian tradition versus Jewish tradition. This text is not saying to us that Christian faith came along and completed the work of the Jewish faith, or surpassed it. Even though the author of Hebrews uses the word better, as in Jesus provides us with the better covenant, as Christians, that is not what we take from scripture. After all, the preacher from Hebrews also goes on to quote the book of the Jewish prophet Jerimiah. What he recites from Jerimiah is itself an Old Testament critique of how the people have lived out the ways of that original covenant, made through Moses, and a call for a new one. This section of Jerimiah 31 is where the prophet describes the Law being written on the people’s hearts. As in they will carry it with them and live it out instinctually. So, even then, even by a Jewish prophet, the covenant was not considered “faultless.” We know that no such agreement can be faultless, not when humans are involved. So, the conversation and debate about promises and covenants has been on going. It did not start or end with the birth of Christianity. So, it is good from time to time to reevaluate the promises we make and the agreements we enter with others. The biggest of these being the covenant we have with our God. God enters covenants and remains faithful. Part of that faithfulness means continually making promises; again and again, as needed.
Making promises over and over, makes me think about working with young kids in a school, especially the ones that had behavior problems that stemmed from their learning and developmental issues. To get these students to stay on task, or to get them to choose actions that were in line with the desired behavior, bargains had to be struck, promises had to be made. “If you finish this worksheet then you get ten minutes on YouTube.” Or, “If you sit quietly during story times you get the toy truck when you get back to your desk.” If it worked, great, but if the promise was broken, even if just for a second because you forgot, you hear about it. “But you said…” “You promised!”
I think sometimes, we can be like those children in our conception of our relationship with God. We get focused on what we were promised, and the fairness involved in that. God promised new life, resurrection, freedom. So, why did the Roman Empire continue to dominate the believers. In our life, maybe it looks something like this. “God, you promised if I lived my life a certain way I could be happy, I could get what I pray for, I go to heaven when I pass on.” Yet here we are, going to church every Sunday, saying our prayers, living righteously, and yet bad things still happen. In our life and in the world around us. We look at the world and think this can’t be what was promised, can it?
Just like the people who were hearing the sermon in the book of Hebrews for the first time, we are also feeling stressed by the circumstances of our lives and the times we live in. So, we ask ourselves, how does our faith help us in these situations? How do we deal with the cognitive dissonance of a faith that believes in a God of salvation and new life, and the world we live in where that feels far away? How do we trust in promises of well-being in times of such trouble? Well, some people might take a moment to throw a tantrum, like a child might. Some people set their focus on the afterlife, on the next world where God promises things will be better. And some people return to the terms of the promise that was made. They do the things, the rituals, that God asked them to do. The things they promised to God. Prayer, going to church every Sunday, tithing the appropriate amount. The expectation being that at some point, God will take notice and reward the good behavior. This is what the Jewish Christians in the book of Hebrews were doing that inspired this part of the book. They were getting frustrated and hopeless waiting for Jesus’ return during a time of struggle and persecution. So, they returned to the rituals and traditions of the Jewish faith, observing what was in the Law. And so, the author of Hebrews tries to turn their focus back to Christ and encourages them to find hope in Him.
As was mentioned before, this is not a competition between the two covenants. So, there was noting wrong with those believers returning to the faith tradition of their ancestors. There was nothing wrong with observing the Law. Just as there is nothing wrong if when during times of stress and trouble, we become more observant of our own religious traditions and find comfort in them. The problem comes when we do those things as if our relationship with God was like one between a teacher and a poorly behaved student and if we just do what was asked then we will get what was promised as a reward. Then, our covenant relationship becomes just a process of checking boxes on a to-do list until the promise is fulfilled to our understanding and expectation.
What the book of Hebrews is trying to tell us is that going beyond promises means not abandoning our hope, or faith, in the face of a seemingly broken promise. It reminds us that God’s promises are fulfilled, but they are also ongoing. After all God is adaptable. So, we must be too. That is what a covenant relationship with God looks like. We cannot just sit back and wait for the afterlife, comfortable in the knowledge that Jesus died for us. After all, Jesus also lived for us. Jesus showed us what it meant to have God’s law inscribed on your heart, so that we come to understand that living for God as Jesus did is not just a matter of checking boxes or marking accomplishments, it is a way of living. A promise, even a fulfilled promise, is not the end. Jesus’ initial work may be done, but ours is not, because the biggest promises we make in our lives do not just settle an agreement, they change the way we live. Marriage being a big example of a promise made between two people that changes the way those people will live going forward. Finding a way to build a life together, to begin to put the other person’s needs ahead of your own, being steadfast through life’s difficulties – these are complicated things. It may require making new and different promises to each other in the years after the initial “I do.” It takes the couple beyond wanting to be together and toward growing and changing together.
Going beyond promises means making more promises. That’s the case in marriage and its also the case when dealing with children with behavioral issues, because it takes repetition. New promises are made to try and coax out new behaviors. The hope is that eventually this new behavior will become ingrained, it will be habit forming. That it will lead to change. Being open to change is an important part of covenant relationships, like the ones based on God’s promises. It means God’s promises to us are important and we can trust them, but we also have to live into them and live up to them and be open to changing because of them. God has fulfilled a promise to us through the death and resurrection of Christ. If we are to go beyond promises it means that when we accept Jesus as the human-divine fulfilment of God’s promises, we are moving beyond either-or thinking about the Earth and heaven. It means moving away from either-or thinking about the Law and Jesus. We are coming to understand that God’s promises are fulfilled in the both-and. It means living in a way that reveals the hope God provides us is a part of us in the here and now.
Amen.