March 16, 2025

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Luke 13:31-35

On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates….”

We hear about covenants frequently in the Bible, even though that word is not always used. Sometimes it is mentioned in terms of statutes and ordinances. Sometimes it is the commandments of God. Sometimes it is simply that we are supposed to do what God seeks from us. But underneath it all is the idea of a covenant—an agreement between the people and God.

In our passage from Genesis, there is an elaborate ritual being performed. God asks Abram, who has not yet received the name Abraham, to bring forth animals for a sacrifice:

Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon. He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other, but he did not cut the birds in two.

This sacrifice is different from those that would be performed in the Temple, one with a different purpose. Most sacrifices were to atone for sins or to ask for something from God. In this case, something was being created. An agreement was to be struck and the sacrifice was to mark the solemnity of the action. Abram does his work and then he protects the sacrifice from predators:

And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.

The reference to deep sleep is the same word used in the story of Adam when he fell into a deep sleep and God fashioned Eve from one of his ribs. I am guessing this language choice is intentionally significant as something critical is coming into being.

When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.

When an agreement was to be made between two ordinary people, a similar ritual could also be performed, with some poor animal cut in two. The parties to the agreement would then walk through the middle, between the separation of the halves of an animal. The meaning of this action was that if either party broke their promise, may something like this happen to them. May they be struck dead for failing to live up to their word (Cross my heart and hope to die…). In fact, one did not make a covenant in the language of Ancient Hebrew—you would cut a covenant, a word of obvious significance from this story.

Abram was being promised a great lineage, descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. He was being promised a great land, the Promised Land, though that promise would not be kept until the time of Moses centuries later. But in those intervening years, the descendants of Abram, later called Abraham, would grow quite numerous. His sons Ishmael and Isaac. Isaac’s sons Esau and Jacob. And Jacobs twelve sons, who would be the patriarchs of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Over the years, they would grow in numbers across the lands and end up in the land of Egypt, which is the story of the Exodus, the story of their captivity and deliverance. And the story of becoming a people of God following his commandments, following his prophet Moses and his priest Aaron.

It would take them 40 years to journey from being enslaved under in Egypt to becoming a new people. People who would forge a home in the Promised Land. Not one of the people from Egypt would live to see that day, not even Moses. Because it would take 40 years for them to stop being who they were to become who they needed to be. Forty years to change. Forty years to become someone worthy of a covenant with God.

The covenant with Abraham was the basis upon which the people of Israel was formed. It was the rule book, the given set of principles for their lives. That does not mean they always followed along, as the prophets repeatedly had to tell the people to repent their transgressions. But it was something you would point to, something that everyone would know even if they strayed from it. It was the foundation upon which they built their lives together, and it was the foundation which would crumble if and when they failed to live up to their sacred promises.

Christians follow some of those traditions, but our sense of covenant is not primarily from the Biblical commandments but from the sacrifice of Jesus. The covenant is based upon the forgiveness of sins and the restoration of our relationship with God. That perspective assumes that our Jewish predecessors were somehow not in fellowship with God, which on a certain level invalidates the concept of the covenant with Abraham.

That idea is also not consistent with the teachings of Jesus, mind you. Jesus generally did not seek to cast aside that existing covenant but to understand it in a different manner. Simply put, Jesus called for a reformation, a reformation within the religion of the Second Temple. A religion that bore little resemblance to the religion of Abraham or Moses, of David or Solomon. It was a religion of ritualistic focus and scrutiny of behavior. Jesus sought to step back from the minute details of it all and instead to return to the big ideas underlying his sense of covenant.

We see this in Leviticus, when the people are asked to love their neighbors. We see this in the teachings of ancient Jewish scholars like Rabbi Hillel whose earlier ideas we can be directly connected to Jesus’ thinking and teachings. I do not think it strange to say that Jesus never imagined that his followers would be Christians. Instead, they would be children of the same covenant, the covenant of Abraham, extended on through the generations.

But that was not to be the case. After Jesus died, his followers would clash with other Jews, for they were all Jews. This caused his followers to spread out from Jerusalem to other areas, such as Corinth and Ephesus and Thessalonica. Which is why Paul sent letters to new congregations of the Corinthians, the Ephesians, and the Thessalonians. When the Romans destroyed the Temple and then scattered the Judeans from around the city, those disagreements continued and became embittered.

We know this because of how the language of the New Testament changes over time, acting like an archeological dig with many different historical moments reflected over time. The earlier works show tensions, but it is not until the Gospel of John that we see Jews being blamed for everything. Before that, it was the priests and the scribes, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, religious leaders who were being called out for the persecution of Jesus’ followers and for the death of Jesus.

And so, the covenant of one unified people falls by the wayside as they cannot reconcile their differences. Differences about how to live their lives and differences about how the world should be. That understanding of a new covenant was built upon the premise that the old covenant was no longer valid or even possible.

I cannot guess as to the truth of that observation. I can only say that it would have been a surprise for Jesus. He probably could not have imagined the new ways his followers would have travelled. And he certainly could not have imagined the ways that the people of that original covenant would have fallen away from one another. That covenant was the foundation upon which they had built their lives together, and it was the foundation which would crumble as they respectively failed to live up to their sacred promises.

Where does that leave us now?

Do we have a covenant upon which we build our lives? Does that covenant inform our behavior, our plans for the future, our ways of navigating this life? And do we sometimes fail to live up to that covenant? In the terms of the Bible, do we sometimes sin? How do we acknowledge those sins, those mistakes, those failures? How do we repent from what we have done and what we have failed to do? How do we seek forgiveness? From one another and from God?

The purpose of the new covenant for most Christians, as described in the New Testament, is to offer forgiveness of sins and to restore fellowship with God through Jesus Christ. And then there is the less commonly agreed upon idea that it was a new agreement to establish a new relationship, one based on faith and grace rather than adherence to the law.

I would argue that that is an interpretation of the Christian tradition that sought to distance Protestantism from both Catholicism and Judaism. Catholics might say similar things, but adherence to the laws and traditions of the Church remains. Faith alone in God and the grace of God in return for such faith, those are the terms of this even newer covenant.

And, to be perfectly honest with you, I do not believe in that premise. I do not believe that our relationship to God is solely and completely a question of faith. Faith alone, sola fide in the Latin. I do not believe that our only obligation to God is to have faith in God and that in return God will forgive everything that we do. It makes absolutely no sense to me.

Why don’t I believe in that? Because Jesus said otherwise. He told us specifically and repeatedly to love one another. Yes, he also said we are supposed to love God, which is not the same as having faith in God. He said these are the most important ideas and yet they are nowhere to be found in this supposed new covenant. Over time, the notion of faith being the only requirement of the covenant with God has swamped everything else.

It has been condensed into a single question: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior? That particular question is probably no more than a century old. It does not appear in the Bible and it cannot be readily traced back to it. And again, it has nothing to do with what Jesus taught.

One theory is that it arose from a simple prayer, one written by the Southern Baptist preacher Billy Graham. Here it is, the so-called Sinner’s Prayer:

Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior.

I have no problem with prayer, other than I cannot claim authorship to it. It is simple and sincere. It offers repentance for sins committed, seeks forgiveness of those sins, and welcomes Jesus into one’s heart. It is a fine sentiment and decent theology.

Instead, the problem I have is with the subsequent idea that all you have to do is to accept Jesus and then the work stops. The religious effort grinds to a halt. One and done, you are saved, grab the pina coladas. Some evangelical Protestants will then switch into missionary mode. They will seek to save other souls. And again, I have no problem with that mission except when they are banging on my door trying to save my soul early on Saturday morning.

My problem is that there is no substance to this revised covenant with God, no connection to the teachings of Jesus. When some suggest that they are leaving the law behind, it further suggests to me that they are leaving ethics and morals behind. That you do not have to be a good person, to love your neighbor, to care about the poor. All of which Jesus clearly and repeatedly said but which has been edited out of later stage Protestant theology.

Why? Because during the Middle Ages, the Pope used to sell indulgences. He used to sell get out of jail free cards into heaven, which was a mistake. And Martin Luther and John Calvin wanted to build religious traditions as far away from that monumental mistake as possible. But in the process, I believe, they made equally profound if different mistakes—the mistake of religious indifference in the name of Jesus.

Why do I think that was a mistake? Because this new covenant requires you to ignore Jesus as a teacher while lifting him up as an object of worship. And I cannot reconcile inviting Jesus into my heart while at the same time ignoring everything he had to say. About caring for one another. About working with one another. And about building a covenant with God based upon the simple commandment to love God and to love one another. All lessons directly from Jesus, but nowhere to be found in this version of a covenant.

 

 

 

As I have said before, if I could only save one idea from the Bible, one sentence from the entirely of the scriptures, it would be Jesus telling us that love is all that matters. Because that is enough. That idea is enough to build a true covenant with God. It is enough to build a society of mutuality and respect. It is enough to build an entire world of growing peace and abiding concern for others. That would be enough.

Recently someone, someone whose name does not deserve to be repeated, opined that the greatest weakness of Western civilization was the notion of empathy. Empathy meaning the ability to understand and to share the feelings of another. And I must confess that this is probably the worst thing I have heard in this year already jam packed with terrible things.

Empathy is the basis of Christian love, the call to love one another. Empathy is the basis of the Golden Rule, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. It does not get more obviously empathetic than that.

To back away from empathy is to back away from Christianity. It is an outright and complete rejection of Christianity. It is a sharp turn toward ruthlessness, which means without regrets. Without regrets for all the terrible things you do, or plan to do, because you are strong enough or rich enough or brutal enough to do so.

That means you will reject the commandments of Jesus, to reject everything Jesus stood for. It is utterly unacceptable as it seeks to  undermine the covenant Jesus forged between us and God.

There is a word from the Bible that I have never used. To my knowledge, I have never once mentioned it from the pulpit, but memories fail so if I have, let me know if I am wrong over coffee. Anyway, the word I have never used is “antichrist.” Antichrist is commonly used as a reference to someone who will come in the future to bring about the end of the world, someone sent by or related to the devil. That is how it has come to be understood even if that is not how it was used when it was coined in the Bible in the Letters of John.

Conversely, the word “antichrist” does not appear in the Book of Revelation, but it is often incorporated into it. It is equated with the Beast, a larger than life spiritual source of evil said to be lurking on the horizon. In my estimation, however, the events of the Book of Revelation already occurred and were completed during the Roman Empire. And so, it is ancient history. I have never wanted to write a sermon about the idea of “antichrist” because it is commonly a story told in modern times to make people anxious, to lead them to obey, and frankly to make them donate money.

The reason I mention “antichrist” this morning is because it has a far simpler and more straightforward meaning. It means someone who is against Christ. Someone who opposes what Christ taught and what Christ wanted from us.

There can be, and there often has been, more than one. And when I think about that possibility, of someone standing in the way of Jesus Christ, it seems far more common than a onetime bogeyman in an end of the world scenario meant to scare us. Because people oppose Christ all the time.

And some of them do so in the very name of Christianity. They strip away everything that Jesus wanted, everything that he sought to teach us. They slice and dice the scriptures to suit their personal preferences and cultural biases. They shape the Bible to fit into their prejudices and to accommodate their selfish desires. They take Christian love and torture it into Christian hate.

What could be more suitable for the name “antichrist?” What could be more appropriate than someone that seeks to reject everything that Jesus stood for and everything that he has taught us.

It is my firmly held belief that the covenant that followers of Jesus undertake is to love God and to love one another. Full stop. And I would be willing to place aside the rest of the Bible, the rest of Christian traditions, if we were only to follow those two simple rules.

I am willing to say that and to do that because that is also literally what Jesus said. He said that the Law and the prophets hang from those two commandments, meaning that they a dependent upon and subservient to that overriding message. And I would add to that limitation the traditions of the last two thousand years. None of them matter in the face of the central teachings of Jesus.

And so, I am willing to let everything else go to protect the covenant that Jesus established. Everything except what Jesus asked to do to the exclusion of all else: To love God and to love one another.

The rest is detail. The rest is at best informative but never superior. Not one word that Paul said nor any commentary by the disciples. Not one word that a Pope has ever uttered, nor a single sentence written by Luther or Calvin. Not one word of any of that can override the simple teachings of Jesus.

Love God and love one other.

And if anyone seeks to stand in the way of those two rules, those two simple rules, they stand directly in the way of Christ. And there is a word for that.

Amen.