Mary Elizabeth Inn and Verona Hotel are UMW-supported facilities that provide safe and permanent housing in San Francisco for women who were homeless or survivors of domestic violence. The Inn was built for a Methodist philanthropist in 1914 wanting to provide affordable housing for women coming to the city in search of schooling or employment. The deed is held by UMW, which provides property insurance and staff training. Counseling, case management, tutoring, yoga, computer classes, and meals are offered.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about expectations:  what God expects from us and what we can expect as a part of God’s community in the church.  In some ways, that concept of mutual expectations resonates with us.  We live in a culture that teaches us to have high expectations of ourselves and one another and it also teaches us that there are consequences for failing to perform up to those expectations.  The woman in our story this morning clearly felt that the pastor was violating her expectations of the church and unfairly changing the church’s expectations of her performance as a church member; perhaps she even believed that the church simply didn’t have the right to expect anything from her.  It’s not an uncommon reaction.  And it is a reaction that is grounded in a major assumption:  that our relationship with the church and with one another is a contract.  But is it?  Is our relationship with God a contract?  Is our relationship with one another as members of the church a contract?

We can easily begin to think it is.  After all, that’s the way our culture works.  It’s the way the culture tells us that all relationships work.  When we enter into a relationship with one another, I do certain things for you that you find beneficial and you do certain things for me that I find beneficial.  The relationship is maintained as long as each person continues to perceive a benefit, and when that’s no longer the case for one or both parties, we consider ourselves free – actually almost duty-bound – to move on to another relationship.  Relationships are a transaction for mutual benefit and when there is no longer a perceived benefit we move on down the road.  And for certain kinds of relationships, under particular kinds of circumstances, that contractual relationship is perfectly fitting and appropriate.  But the trouble comes when we start thinking of our relationship with God and the community of the church in that same way.  Friends, God does not call us to a contract relationship – God has something far more permanent in mind – God has established a covenant relationship with us and Jesus established the church as a community in which we live out that covenant.

We don’t live in a culture that talks about covenant, so if we’re going to talk about being a covenant community, we first need to understand what a covenant is.  A covenant is no mere contract in which either party can just walk away when things don’t go according to spelled out expectations.  A covenant is a deeply binding relationship, one that gives us our very identity, that forms who we are and how we live.  A covenant signifies a lasting relationship that weathers unmet expectations and even outright failure.  The best way to understand the concept of covenant is just to take a brief walk through God’s history with us.  The first thing to understand about this covenant is that God initiates it.  After all, God has created us out of nothing as a sheer gift.  God was not obligated to create us, God didn’t need us.  God created us out of sheer love and goodness, set us in relationship with him and came to walk with us every evening in the garden – we were created to be friends with God.  When our sin and rebelliousness broke that relationship, God didn’t abandon us, but rather continued to love and sustain us.  Later, God enters into a special covenant with the Hebrew people – they are called and blessed to be a light and a blessing to the world.  Even though they continually fail to live out that covenant, God rescues them from slavery in Egypt and gives them commandments intended to form them in a right relationship with God and with each other in this covenant community.  Of course, we know that the Israelites continued to rebel and to place themselves and other idols at the center of their lives in place of God, just as we do – that’s our story.  In other words, we definitely don’t hold up our end of the covenant.

But God is everlastingly faithful to that covenant, finally coming God’s own self in the person of the Son, Jesus, to keep our side of the covenant for us.  Jesus does for us what we cannot do for ourselves and even more he creates a new covenant through his death and resurrection.  Now, in the power of the resurrected Christ, we have the ongoing gift of the Holy Spirit, who actually lives within us and makes it possible for us to live in a covenant relationship with God and one another.  Can we pause for a minute and allow the magnitude of that gift to sink in?  You see, no matter how sinful we are, no matter how badly we behave, no matter how completely we fail to live up to who we are created to be as God’s covenant creatures – God just never gives up, God continues to love us and be gracious to us.  God now has enabled us to really live in covenant with God and each other because Jesus dwells in us and with us.  The power of Jesus, expressed through the Spirit, really does make it possible for us to live this way.  This is what Jesus is talking about when he tells his disciples that he is the vine and they are the branches; Jesus is the source of life, love, growth and service – and as long as we stay connected to that vine, we really share in his life – we abide.  Connected to Him, we have a new life that is richer, deeper, more joyful, more connected to God and to other people than we could have imagined possible.  And apart from that source of life in Jesus, outside of that covenant connection with God and one another, we just cannot really live – our lives, our ability to live deeply and truly, just wither and die.

The need for this covenant connection is actually wired into us – it is who we are created to be and how we are intended to live.  So we need to be clear — when we make a decision to follow Jesus and we enter into the community of His church – we are entering into a covenant relationship with Him and with one another.  It is not a contract.  It is a covenant. The church does not operate as a simply quid pro quo contractual arrangement where we stay as long as we feel like our expectations are being met and our needs are being served and where we are never uncomfortable or challenged.  This is the body of Christ.  We are in covenant with one other.

Now that we have a better understanding of this covenant to which we are called, we need to talk about how that challenges the culture’s view of relationships as contracts.  The church is not a place in which our commitments are contingent and are valid only as long as they serve us, in which we need only stay or participate to the extent that we are feeling good about things, that we feel we are getting something out of it and that the church is not making demands on us that we find difficult or challenging.  The covenant community Jesus established is not primarily intended to serve us or comfort us – it is intended to be the place where Jesus utterly transforms who we are and how we live in the world. James Bryan Smith puts it this way:  the true story – the biblical narrative – tells us that the church as a covenant community “exists to shape and guide” our souls.  Smith goes on, “The community has a right to expect certain behavior from me, and can provide the encouragement and accountability I need” to develop an ongoing and growing relationship with Jesus and other people.  “Transformation into Christlikeness has been the aim and responsibility of the church from its beginning.”²

God has not formed a contract with us – a contract is paltry thing in comparison to the relationship God has created with us.  God created and keeps a covenant relationship with us through Christ in which nothing – not the worst we are or the worst that we can do — not sin, not even death – can separate us from a relationship with the God who loves us everlasting to everlasting.  And Jesus has not placed us in a contractual relationship with His church – we are a covenant community, growing out of his steadfast and self-giving love for us as a branch grows out of a vine.  In the church, we have brothers and sisters in Christ who encourage and hold us accountable, who stick with us when we are at our worst and who celebrate with us when we are at our best, who pray with us and serve with us and share the stories of the way God is transforming them too.  And through that transformative covenant sharing, we are changed – we become disciples of Jesus Christ who share the light of his life and his love with the world.   That’s who we are – that’s the covenant life to which we are called.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

¹ As told in James Bryan Smith’s The Good and Beautiful Community: Following the Spirit, Extending Grace, Demonstrating Love (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2010). 128.

² Smith, The Good and Beautiful Community, 129.

Sunday, June 9: Sunday School at 10:30 a.m.

June 9, 16, 23, 30: Worship at 9:30 a.m. only

July 7- September 1: 8:00 a.m. and 9:30 a.m.