Hilton Head Island, SC – October 13, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 105:1-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – He is mindful of his covenant forever; of the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations, the covenant he made with Abraham. – Psalm 105:8-9a
The first time I visited Israel was in 1976. I was amazed by many things: how modern it seemed, how ancient it seemed, how small it is, how much of its small land area is desert, how little flat land or arable land there is, how incredibly well the Israelis have utilized every arable acre to produce enough food to feed themselves and to have much left over to export.
Another of the things which struck me, and I had come to this conclusion within three or four days of arriving, is how much Israelis recall of their part. And by that I mean everything going back to Abraham, and everything of recent history: The United Nations Resolution which established the state of Israel in 1948, the Six-Day War in 1967, the establishment of the so-called Green Line, Black September in 1972 when Arab terrorists killed some of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and so on.
Americans are a polyglot people. We don’t all come from the same place, and our ethnic history from way back there is unique to our ancestors, whose identity we may not know. Only after our forebears got to the USA do we pay much attention to American history, and even then, we don’t know what happened “back there” because we’re so concerned with what’s going on “right here.” Even though we all were taught American history in school, it doesn’t necessarily interest us all that much.
Jews are not like that. Jews have always been a small ethnic group. Even today there are only fifteen million Jews or so in the entire world, and less than half of them are in Israel. There are almost as many Jews in the USA as there are in Israel.
Ethnic groups that have small numbers of people tend to recall their history much more readily than those of us who live in large countries and have lost our original ethnicity in the international Mulligan stew that is illustrated by over three hundred million Americans. Armenians can tell you incidents from their past going back three or four thousand years, as can the Kosovars or Croats of the Balkans, or the Uighurs of western China, or the Tibetans, or the Navajos or the Cherokees of the USA.
People who have long felt threatened have extraordinarily active memories. The Bible is the primary source for understanding how threatened the Jews were during their first two thousand years of history. From the time of Abraham about 1800 BCE to the time of the writer of the Book of Revelation about 120 CE, the Hebrews or Israelites or Jews were under great pressure from foreign powers on a periodic basis. For a relatively short time they were an independent nation, but for most of those two millennia, they were under somebody else’s thumb.
We don’t know who wrote Psalm 105, or when it was written. It might have been composed anywhere from 1000 to 500 BCE. Whoever wrote it did so with a particular purpose in mind. He wanted to remind Israel how it was that they, as such a small nationality, managed to survive through all those centuries. It happened, the writer insisted, because of what God had done to sustain them through all their crises and calamities, by means of His covenant with them.
This claim about God is summarized in Psalm 105: vs. 7 through 11. “He is the Lord our God; his judgments are in all the earth. He is mindful of the covenant forever, of the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations, the covenant which he made with Abraham, his sworn promise to Isaac, which he confirmed to Jacob as a statute, to Israel as an everlasting covenant, saying, ‘To you I will give the land of Canaan as your portion for an inheritance.’”
The language in those five verses of scripture has the ring of legal language. It almost sounds like something that would be written in what we call a “last will and testament.” “I, John Donald Doe, being of sound mind, do hereby bequeath my entire estate to my beloved wife Jane if she should be living at the time of my death. If not, I bequeath half of my estate to my son, John Donald Doe, Jr., who loyally served me in the family business; 49% of my estate to my daughter Jill, who also worked in the Doe Company, but who one day in 1973 took a two-hour lunch break; and 1% to my son, Donald Dexter Doe, who married a woman of whom I never approved, went off to Bora Bora and lived what they said was happily ever after with their nine children, none of whom I have ever seen or expect to see.”
The word “testament” in “last will and testament” is a legal term. “Testament” in English comes from the word testamentum in Latin, and testamentum in Latin corresponds to berith in Hebrew. You may have heard of Bnai Brith. It is an organization for Jewish men and boys, and it means “Sons of the Covenant.” Linguistically what I am trying to establish in your minds, if it is not already permanently lodged there, is that testament and covenant mean the same thing.
So what, exactly, is either a covenant or a testament? In a single word, it is a promise. A will is a promise that the testator will give his or her estate to whoever is named in the will. Around here we have many different real estate developments, most of which have “covenants” which govern what owners may or may not do on or with their property.
The word covenant is one of the most important words in the Bible. The Christian Bible has two parts. One we call the Old Testament (the Old Covenant) and the other we call the New Testament (the New Covenant.) In each of these covenants it is believed that God made promises to His people, first to Israel, and then to what some Christians grandiloquently call the new Israel, or in other words, the Church. It is crucial to note that in both the Old and New Covenants, it was God who initiated the promise; it was not any person or people who did it. Our God is a God of covenant, of promise.
That is the essential message of Psalm 105. The psalmist reminds Israel that when they were few in number, God led them from place to place. Ultimately they ended up in Egypt, where they became a populous if also an enslaved people. Under Moses and Aaron, the psalmist declared, God led Israel out of their bondage in Egypt, and they went through the Sinai Desert on their way to Canaan, the land that God had promised (covenanted) to them. If God makes a promise to us, says Psalm 105, He will definitely keep it, because it is God’s nature always to keep covenant.
Currently the United States of America is in the midst of a major political crisis. It is a dilemma in which Congressional Democrats, Republicans, and the President are almost equally at fault, according to the polls. And the issue is this: will the US government keep covenant with the millions of individuals and individual nations who have invested in US financial securities, especially our government bonds? Will we continue to pay the interest on those debts, or will we default? Obviously this is no small matter, as even a brief glance at any of the news media will attest. Shall America keep its promises, and its promissory notes, or not?
If covenants are not observed by the two parties in the promises which are made, human life unravels. The basic biblical covenant is this: God says to us, “I will be your God, and you will be my people.” God does His part, always; that is the declaration made by Psalm 105 and by many other passages in the Bible. But do we do our part? Do we keep covenant with God? Do we fulfill our promises to God?
The Old Testament prophets and Jesus and Paul and others say that sometimes we fail to keep our half of the bargain. When we take advantage of the powerless, we don’t keep covenant. When we turn religion into a false display of piety, we don’t keep covenant. When we cheat the innocent or naive, when we give deference to the wealthy and ignore the poor, when we do not tell the truth, we break our promise to God. Covenants are not made to be broken. They are made to be permanently observed.
Sadly, even though God always holds up His part of the bargain, we don’t always hold up our part. None of us follows all the commandments God gives us as the covenantal agreements; none. Nevertheless, God never gives up on us, as often as we may give up on Him. As we learned last week from Psalm 103, God is “slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.” Because it is God who initiates His promises to us, it is God who will always stand by His promises, even though we fail to keep our promises to Him.
Psalm 105 continues in praise of God, “He led forth Israel with silver and gold, and there was none among his tribes who stumbled. Egypt was glad when they departed, for dread of them had fallen upon it. He spread a cloud for a covering, and fire to give light by night. They asked, and he brought quails, and gave them bread from heaven in abundance. He opened the rock, and water gushed forth; it flowed through the desert like a river. For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham his servant” (Ps. 105:37-42).
I have just read How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. This lovely, delightfully opinionated Irish-American has a series of seven historical surveys called The Hinges of History, of which his book on the Irish is the first. Since he is Irish in background, and since he was educated by Jesuits and studied Greek and Latin extensively, it is perhaps both fitting and inevitable that he started with the Irish, even though he might have started elsewhere.
Reading some of the Irish epic poems from which he quotes extensively, Thomas Cahill reminded me of the expansive and exaggerated nature of Hebrew poetry, such as is found in Psalm 105. It is like watching Pardon the Interruption on ESPN; almost every day Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon tell us about the greatest catch or the most spectacular pass or the wisest coaching decision in the history of baseball or football. And who is to dispute them? It may not be literally true, but it is poetically true, literarily true, reportorially true.
Can anyone authenticate for everyone else that by means of His covenant God always keeps His promises, so that everyone will believe that for all time? Sadly, no. But for those who do believe it, for those who trust that proclamation, life runs ever so much more smoothly, and with less heartache and hardship, even in the midst of overwhelming heartache and hardship.
We who are not blood relatives of the tribe of Israel believe that God made a second covenant, this one with the entire human race beyond Israel. The second covenant was made manifest in the person of a Jewish carpenter from an insignificant village in northern Israel called Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth came from nowhere to be everywhere. He beckoned to the lost sheep of the house of Israel as well as to the great unwashed race of the Gentiles, and he said, “Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” He opened a previously closed door to the kingdom of God to people who did not know God, telling us that God has a promise for us as well. God keeps covenant with all His sons and daughters, and the promise is to all who are far off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. And that is everyone.
Shall everyone respond? Only God knows. Certainly not all respond in the same way. Some find the promise is discovered in prayers written in ancient Sanskrit, and some are drawn to one they call the Buddha, the Enlightened One. Some chant together, “La illaha illa Allah” – There is no God but God. Many of these people, including many Christians, believe that only those of their particular theological tribe are in covenant with God, and not even all of them, because some do not keep covenant as properly defined by the self-appointed covenant definers.
Nonetheless, the proclamation stands: God is a God of promise. He cannot be God unless He covenants with all the people He has created. He will not allow us to wander aimlessly through our spiritual deserts on our own. He reaches out, He re-directs us, He grasps us.
Our half of the covenant God makes with us is to live as God commands us, to do what He wants of us, to live with Him as the center of our lives. Because all of us are merely human, we shall not always succeed in fulfilling our part of the equation. But because God is God, He will always maintain His half of the contract or promise or agreement.
“He is mindful of his covenant forever, of the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations, the covenant he made with Abraham, his sworn promise to Isaac, which he confirmed to Jacob as a statute, to Israel as an everlasting covenant” (Ps. 105:8-10).
How do we know that God is a God of covenant? Look back, and look around. The covenant is everywhere, and in everything. But only to the eyes of faith is it visible.