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Covenant, Conflict, and the Common Good

When I meet with parents who want their children to receive baptism, I frame the ritual in terms of covenant. God calls us. We respond. The congregation witnesses, affirms, and supports the vows that are made. As we prepare, I ask parents to tell me what they think the word “covenant” means. Answers range from confused shrugs to “a place where nuns live.” Some will state that a covenant is like a legal contract. Most do not think about a set of mutual promises that call us to faithful accountability while being sustained by God’s grace. The metaphor of covenant can also provide a framework and vocabulary for spiritual activists to understand what it means to be faithful to God through active contemplation and contemplative action.

The Protestant Reformed tradition reminds us that God’s covenant with Israel expressed God’s love and offered an invitation to serve and love God in faithfulness.12 Hebrew Scripture scholar Walter Eichrodt claimed that covenant provided Israel’s life with a goal and its history with a meaning. In covenant, God created an atmosphere of trust and security in which called people could find the strength to willingly surrender to the aims of God. When God summoned Israel into a covenant relationship, the notion of an arbitrary and capricious God changed. People would now know exactly where they stood with the God of Israel. From that came the joyful courage to grapple with the problems of life.13

When it comes to spiritual activism, we also remember that covenant has a political dimension. Liberation Theology reminds us that God takes sides in the struggle for justice. As Gustavo Gutierrez says,

The God of the Exodus is the God of history and of political liberation more than he is the God of nature … Yahweh is the Liberator … The covenant gives full meaning to the liberation from Egypt; one makes no sense without the other.14

Covenant is a response to grace. God chooses a people so that the people might choose God. Even when the people fail to follow their side of the covenant, they are never without the promise of reestablishment and renewal. God gives identity to the people. God defends and establishes them, and invites them to grow in their ability to hear and obey.15 Some of us get tense when we hear the word “obedience.” Maybe it is because we tend to associate obedience with perfection, punishment, following rules, and even words like “shame” and “belittling.” While an element of compliance and threat certainly exists in Levitical law, covenant invites people to obey God’s prophetic call to compassionate justice, even imperfectly, as a way to claim that we belong to God and want God’s love to be known in the ways we relate to one another.

Covenant can also bring unity. The covenant spoken by the God of Israel to Moses had formative power in that it unified disparate and loosely associated tribes around faithfulness to the will of God. Admission to the covenant was not based on kinship but the readiness to submit and vow oneself to the God of Israel.16 Covenant secures a state of shalom. Through faithfulness to God, people experience a state of intactness that brings vitality in matters affecting the life of God’s people.

The metaphor of covenant points beyond itself to the liberation and re-creation of new people. Covenant expresses the best we can be. God calls us into covenant community. God personally interacts with us as a community. God’s aims for the community are expressed in norms like righteousness, devotion, and love. A community that learns the art of covenanting makes room for the diversity of God’s many gifts and graces. Spiritual activists begin the work of reconciliation through talking, cajoling, praying, forgiving, crying, and laughing together in covenant community.17

Living in covenant community does not preclude conflict. Healthy conflict, defined as exploring our differences responsibly, brings creativity, energy and new alternatives to faith communities where once there might have been one triumphalistic rule of faith and practice. Healthy conflict offers an opportunity for growth only if the differences of the participants are valued and if people learn to practice civil and patient boundaries with one another.18 Being human means that we will face times when we are angry, confused, or blind. Faithfulness to God can lead us into a narrative of gratitude — an ability to focus on the good things God does in our midst and not just on the ways we pull away from one another. As the Apostle Paul writes,

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.19

We tell plenty of stories that blame others for our problems. Paul calls us to another conversation. Narratives of covenant and community can lift us out of our ruts by allowing us to participate with God and one another in bearing our living traditions into the future.

The New Testament expresses the Church’s understanding of covenant. Through Jesus Christ, God covenants with the Church. Christians acclaim God does not reject an old covenant in favor of a new one, but engrafts the Church onto the olive tree of Israel so that all may also be part of the covenant people of faith.20 God’s initiative calls us into community. God’s expresses divine aims for the community in norms like righteousness, devotion, and love.21

But here is the thing about covenants; the promises are often so intense that it can feel impossible to consistently live up to them. We will fall short of our promises. What happens when we break covenant? Breaking a covenant is different than violating a contract. In a contract, if one party breaks the agreement it can be voided. Sometimes the offending party is penalized, but both sides may be released from obligations. Think of the early termination clause on your mobile phone contract. You can get out of it. You are going to pay big bucks, but once you shell out some money, the contract terms are over. A covenant is different. Covenants go on even when we fail to meet the terms. With each failure, the parties may renter the agreement with hope. Covenants are re-established with the intent of living up to them again.

My faith tradition, the United Church of Christ, can be described as a covenantal polity. While we are non-creedal and non-catechetical, we do establish boundaries around our common practice of faith by creating local covenants. When someone joins our church, there is not a standard set of beliefs one must profess. There is not a statement of faith one must obey. To be part of our church means to agree to a covenant. We do not care so much about what one believes, but rather how we relate to one another with norms like righteousness, devotion, and love. The most important question is not, “Do you believe what we believe?” but rather, “How do we treat our neighbor, that is, how do we show God’s love to others?” We make enduring, deeply held promises about how we want to treat each other and work together. Our covenants come from the hearts, hands, and minds of our people.

The congregation I serve has a covenant as part of its constitution. It explains how we agree to walk in the ways of God’s abiding love. Every Sunday morning, we open worship by reminding each other of our covenant. I say, “Here, we honor and celebrate people of all races, cultures, ages, abilities, sexual orientations, and gender identities.” These words give shape to our identity and guide our behavior. It is one of my favorite parts of our worship service. One day, a member of our church who is gay pulled me aside and said, “I cannot express how much it means to me to hear those words every Sunday. I am constantly reminded that God loves me, and I belong.” The faithful expression of our covenant becomes a form of reconciliation, inviting people into right relationship with God and one another.

My congregation also has three covenants that direct our spiritual activism. Our “Just Peace Covenant” reminds us of the mutual promises we have made to work for peace by seeking justice for all peoples. Our “Open and Affirming Covenant” speaks to our promise to welcome and affirm gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons to participate fully in the life of our congregation. Our “Anti-Racism Covenant” acknowledges our ongoing journey to develop and implement strategies to dismantle racism through our adult and children’s education, our worship services, our mission giving, our business practices, and our community social action. Each of these covenants can be found in the appendices.

Just like any covenant, our social action covenants represent our ideals. The reality is we do not always do a great job at living out our mutual promises. Sometimes we allow ourselves to get offended by someone’s behavior and we stop looking for the image of the Divine in the one with whom we disagree. Sometimes we fail to support peace. Sometimes we forget that a covenant is not a policy statement, but a promise about loving relationships. Sometimes we are afraid to face our biases and privileges, so we do not meet the challenges of our anti-racism covenant. But failure does not mean we give up. God is not done with us. We reevaluate. We ask forgiveness, when necessary. We reconcile with each other.

Covenant reorients spiritual activists in the direction of love. When we falter, we ask God to give us a new heart. We recommit ourselves to sharing a common human journey and we covenant to value what is similar among us over what separates us. We recommit ourselves to appreciating our unique dignity and gifts and we covenant to recognize and celebrate the variety of gifts among us. We recommit ourselves to creating a better world and we covenant to support and encourage our individual and common efforts towards its fulfillment. We recommit ourselves to remember that our lives are worthy of love and we covenant to help each other engage our communities’ compassion. We covenant to value our human journey, to achieve a better world, to praise the mystery, and to engage in the practices of a faith.

For Conversation

Covenant building begins with defining community norms. Think of a time when your faith community combined individual talents in ways that enhanced your mission. What talents did others bring to the table? What did you achieve, as a faith community, that would not have happened if people were working as individuals?

Covenants have power when all who are affected and all who have insight lend their voices in forming a faith community’s common identity. Imagine you hold the power to make inclusive decision-making the norm within your faith community. What would you need to do more of? What would you need to change? What first steps would you take to move your faith community in that direction?

For Active Contemplation

What words are used to begin your worship experience in your faith community? Is it more than, “Good morning”? Are there any expressions of your community values – anything that reorients you in the direction of love? Craft some brief statements that express the norms of your community’s faith and action. Consider using them in your own personal devotional practices, perhaps as a breath prayer or mantra.

For Contemplative Action

If your faith community does not have a social action covenant, consider going through the process of formulating your mutual commitments in writing. A simple process of covenant construction is in Appendix A. Sample covenants from the congregation at which I serve can be found in Appendices B, C, and D.

12 “The Confession of 1967” in The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA) Part I: The Book of Confessions (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 2003), 9.18.

13 Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), 38.

14 Quoted by Charles H. Bayer, A Guide to Liberation Theology for Middle Class Congregations (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1986), 93.

15 John Bright, The Kingdom of God (New York: Abingdon, 1953), 28-29. Obey literally means “to hear.” The English words “obey” and “obedience” come from two Latin words that mean “to hear thoroughly.”

16 Eichrodt, 39.

17 See Mark Lau Branson, “Forming God’s People,” http://www.alban.org/conversation.aspx?id=2456.

18 Gil Rendle, Behavioral Covenants in Congregations (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 1999), 47-48.

19 Philippians 4:8.

20 See Romans 11:17-21.

21 William L. Holladay, Long Ago God Spoke: How Christians May Hear the Old Testament Today (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1995), 37-38.