I Will Make with Them a Covenant of Peace

We are Each Other’s Bread and Wine
no. 11

Eichenberg's Lord's Supper (small)by Jane Roeschley
Associate Pastor of Worship and Lay Ministries
Mennonite Church of Normal, Normal, Illinois
World Communion Sunday, 2008

Genesis 12:1-2, 3b; Ezekiel 37:26-27; 2 Corinthians 3:4-6, 10-11

 

Hatred Converted by Love

When the drama, The Women of Lockerbie, was performed in Bloomington/Normal, I went to see it.  It was shortly after the Virginia Tech shootings, so that event was especially on my mind, not to mention the Nickel Mine tragedy and the ongoing losses of the Iraq war – all situations of immense hurt, and examples of the way our world is full of violence that begets more violence.

Based on true events, The Women of Lockerbie tells the story of women in the village of Lockerbie, Scotland, the place where the US Pan Am 103 jet was shot down in 1988, in retaliation for US military confrontations with Libya.  All 259 persons aboard the plane, as well as 11 persons in the village, were killed.

The play is set at a point about seven years after the plane went down.  As one can imagine, characters in the play, the loved ones of various victims, voice their hate for those responsible for this tragedy – for both the violent perpetrators as well as those less obviously at fault.  There is the hatred of the perpetrators of the explosion by the grieving parents of a college-age son who was on his way home with 22 of his classmates and teachers after a semester abroad in Britain.  There is the hatred voiced by one woman from the village who lost both a husband and a daughter in their home when a large portion of the plane crashed through the roof.  There is hate for the US government officials in Lockerbie who have quarantined all the personal effects of the victims in a large warehouse, refusing to release any of them to the families (instead, the officials plan to incinerate this “evidence of terrorism”).  There is the generalized hatred for the US by people in Lockerbie who lost loved ones as “collateral damage” in what they understand to have been an act of terrorism that took place in retaliation for US military actions, in which Scotland was not involved at all.

Listen to these excerpts, a composite of the women of Lockerbie:  “I’m full of hate….I hate the men who did this!…….I hate them too…….We all do!……..Well then, evil has triumphed here after all, hasn’t it?” (from The Women of Lockerbie by Deborah Brevoort).

Realizing however, that, as one of the women says, “Hatred is love that has been injured” (Brevoort, pg. 92), the women of Lockerbie determine not to let hatred triumph in their lives.  They proceed to engage in creative civil disobedience, and, by showing up en masse (two hundred strong) and blocking the gates of the warehouse when the fuel trucks for the incineration are set to arrive, they are able to stop the destruction of all the personal items.  Eventually they gain permission to claim the victims’ clothing.   With their resolve to convert what had been a gruesome act of hate with love, they set about thoroughly washing and ironing more than 11,000 items of victims’ clothing.  Then, meticulously packing the items, they ship the clothing to the victims’ families around the world.  In doing this, they honor both their own suffering and loss, as well as that of all the victims.  In washing, ironing and returning the heartrending parcels, they “do not let hate have the last word” (Brevoort, pg. 102).  Instead, they interrupt the perpetuation of violence, opening themselves to the healing of their own injured love, as well as offering healing for the injured love of others.

Today, as we prepare to take communion in solidarity with followers of Jesus around the world, I want to reflect on how we, like the women of Lockerbie, are called to be part of God’s healing of injury and hate right where we are.  As we partake of the bread of life and the cup of blessing, we receive the nourishment of God’s love to become agents of God’s transformation – so that injury and hatred do not have the last word.  Instead, God’s life-giving love does!

The New Covenant

A communion service brings to mind the many “Jesus-at-meals” stories in the Bible.  These stories reveal to us God’s priorities. How Jesus ate, where Jesus ate, what Jesus said and did while he ate, and especially with whom Jesus ate show us, time and again, the priority of God’s heart for sinners, outcasts, the rejects of the religious institutions, even enemies (Winter, pg 43).  We learn much about God’s agenda through Jesus’ words and conduct at his meals.

At the last meal Jesus had with his followers, Luke tells us about an especially powerful symbolic moment when, at the end of the meal, Jesus takes up a cup and says, “This cup is the new covenant…for you”  (Luke 22:20).   With these words Jesus is recalling Hebrew scriptures,   reaching far back into Israel’s ancient history in order to make an explicit connection between a key portion of Hebrew history and what is transpiring at that supper.  This event also foreshadows what will be transpiring in Jesus’ impending obedience to God’s ultimate way of peace through his innocent, self-giving death on the cross.   With his words over the wine, “This cup is a new covenant……for you,” Jesus recalls the original “covenant of blessing” God made with Abram 2500 years earlier (Genesis 12:3).  That first covenant of blessing is God’s promise to Abram that God would number Abram’s offspring like the stars and make them a people who will be a blessing to the whole world.  That original covenant reveals to us that from the very beginning of the biblical story, God’s intentions are that God’s people will be a blessing to the whole world. 

In the Ezekiel passage, we hear God elaborate and expand on that original blessing promise, calling it a “covenant of peace” (Ezekiel 37:26a).  Preaching during the Babylonian exile, 1500 years after Abram and 600 years before Jesus, Ezekiel is describing a time still in the future, when, like a shepherd, God will securely lead the chosen people into total well-being.  Into that vision of shalom, Ezekiel re-conveys God’s covenantal promise of blessing to his listeners, saying, “I will make with them a covenant of peace.”  Bringing together the original covenant of blessing to Abram with the covenant of peace communicated by Ezekiel, we see that God’s intention to bless the whole world through the chosen people will be — and will bring about — peace.  Peace is basic to God’s covenant with the chosen people.  Peace is basic to God’s people being a blessing to the world.  Making peace is basic to being the people of God, who are called to be a blessing to the world.

At the last supper with his friends, Jesus intentionally brings to mind that historic first covenant of blessing when he is about to experience death rather than using his powers in a violent or abusive way.  Instead, he connects the meaning of his death with that original covenant of blessing, a covenant Ezekiel says is “of peace”.  Furthermore, taking up the cup, Jesus declares to his disciples, “This is a new covenant…for you” (Luke 22:20).   Jesus’ cup is a symbolic reminder of the peace that comes about — as Ezekiel foretold — through complete reliance upon God, and not kings and armies. Moreover, Ezekiel’s vision of a time when God will dwell in the very midst of the chosen people is moving toward fulfillment at that final meal of Jesus with his friends.  Jesus inaugurates this new covenant at his last meal.

Years later, Paul looks back on the meaning of that last meal, through the death and resurrection of Jesus that followed it, when he writes to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 11:23-26)  that he  sees Jesus’ power to make peace carried forward by the church’s remembrance of him in communion.  Whenever the church takes the bread of life and cup of blessing in memory of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, the whole way of Jesus is proclaimed.  God’s covenant, begun long, long ago with Abram, renewed and expanded in Ezekiel, is fulfilled in Jesus.

With Jesus, something new is transpiring.  With Jesus’ life, teaching, self-given death and resurrection, something new in God’s shalom endeavor is revealed.  In the midst of the political, cultural, religious and personal violence of his day, of which he is also a victim, Jesus does not offer hollow policies or self-serving recommendations based on polls, statistics, political analysis, the balance of power, homeland security, the exportation of democracy, or first strike capability (Nouwen, pg 107).  Jesus offers a relationship, just like his relationship with God, so that no matter how grim the hurt and harm of the world might be, it is possible to be truly secure, to live fruitfully and to be a blessing to the world in God’s resurrection power (2 Corinthians 3:4).  The new covenant Jesus speaks about is not based on the written law of Moses’ time, a law that ultimately destroys; instead, it is a new covenant that is constituted in Jesus and communicated by the Spirit (Shillington, pg 70).  It is a covenant that gives life!  (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Being Cultures of Peace

How then is this new covenant that Jesus inaugurates, first established for the world’s blessing with Abram, later envisioned as a covenant of peace by Ezekiel, and made new in Jesus, lived out in the church? How do we, the living Body of Christ on earth today, actively work to heal the injuries of  love of all kinds – injuries that regularly produce systems of hate, hurt, destruction, and living hells?  How are we to live so that God’s blessings and new covenant peace come through us to the world?   How do we “create cultures of peace” in our homes, congregations and neighborhoods for blessing the world (Kreider, pg 95-118)?   Today I offer 3 thoughts:  interrupt violence, practice forgiveness and worship gratefully.

Interrupt violence.   First, we learn to interrupt violence at all levels.  Violence to individuals and communities comes in many forms, some of which are not physically evident.  Any time power is used over others, instead of with or for others, violence of some sort takes place.  The biblical writers clearly picture God’s response:  God’s people are to interrupt violence in all forms – physical, social, spiritual, relational – interrupt it and build shalom (Leiter, pg 70).

In the early church, one example of this kind of shalom-building was the intentional care given to those without access to resources:  widows, orphans, prisoners, the sick, foreigners and refugees (Swartley, pg. 185).  We continue that new covenant shalom-making tradition in our worship today on World Communion Sunday as we collect offerings for our Mutual Aid fund, a fund our deacons use for the special care of persons in need. Mutual Aid care helps interrupt the kind of violence that happens in families from economic injustices or calamity.  As a helping hand in dollars is given, a small measure of peace is shared.

Another way in which our congregation participates in the interruption of violence was in sending people to Israel/Palestine this past summer with Christian Peacemakers Teams (http://www.cpt.org).  Four individuals from our congregation went to witness interactions between Palestinians and Israelis who are struggling to find ways to live peaceably together in their mutual homeland.  Their stories of people who devote the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking as armies devote to war have blessed us.

Mutual Aid and CPT are but two ways we have been interrupting violence and building shalom as God’s people here at Mennonite Church of Normal.  I believe the Spirit desires to empower us in countless more ways, as Paul writes, “to serve under a new covenant” (2 Corinthians 3:6) and to be used by God to bring God’s peace to our world.

Practice forgiveness.  Secondly, in building cultures of peace we practice forgiveness.   Forgiving is at the core of the interruption of violence (Nouwen, pg. 103).  It is at the core of being people of peace.  In seeing Jesus forgive, we also see God’s forgiving character.  As the innocent victim of sanctioned capital punishment, Jesus’ prayer of forgiveness as he hangs on the cross shows us that God’s nature is forgiveness (McCarthy).  That same forgiveness is also evident after the resurrection in the greetings Jesus brings his followers, almost all of whom abandoned him, when he says, “Peace be with you”  (John 20:36).   Forgiveness is at the center of God’s response to hurt, betrayal, and violence.  It is not a shallow forgiveness – failing to collaborate with the hard work of deep repentance.  Rather it is a genuinely restorative forgiveness that sets aside retribution in order to heal and make whole.  It is a forgiveness that ultimately leads to well-being and shalom (Leiter, pg 91).

Worship gratefully.  And we build cultures of peace through worship that encounters God with thanksgiving. In the early church of the 2nd – 4th centuries, the worship celebration of communion, called the Eucharist, was considered an act of great thanksgiving (Nouwen, pg. 118).  That’s what the Greek word Eucharist means: great thanksgiving. Communion expresses our great thanksgiving for the immeasurable gift of unconditional peacemaking God has granted us in Jesus Christ.  Eucharist connects us to God’s peace through Jesus and also to peacemaking with one another.

Instructions for communion as part of the worship in the early church and in the time of our forbears, the Anabaptists, included attention to peacemaking in the life of the community of the believers:  confessing faults, reconciling quarrels and exchanging a sign of peace (often with a kiss).  Communion, a rite of grateful worship, is a powerful, transformative act with equally powerful ethical implications for how we live with one another (Grimsrud).  Through communion with God in grateful worship, we open ourselves over and over to God’s healing of our injured love, to the injured love of our neighbor, and to the injured love of our world.  We are shaped into people of the new covenant of peace — people who strive to live it as a blessing to the world.

An Ancient-Future Call

Images of “new” are especially powerful and enlivening throughout the Bible.  Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah write about the “new” thing God is doing (Ezekiel 37, Isaiah 43, Jeremiah 31).  Jesus tells a midnight visitor that a relationship with him will be like a “new” birth (John 3:3).   Jesus inaugurates a “new” covenant of peace at a last meal with his followers (Luke 22:20).  With John of Patmos, the writer of Revelation, we imagine the healing of the nations from the Tree of Life (Rev 22:2) in the “new” creation where God declares, “See, I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5).

Though ancient, the invitation to us is to live that future fulfillment of God’s new covenant peace now, in our lives today.  We are called, like the women of Lockerbie, to “not let hate have the last word”; to not let “violence triumph after all”.  We are called to be a people whose intimate connection to God, through the spiritually nourishing rite of communion, empowers us to minister to injuries of all kinds and to work for wholeness and well-being in all places, so that God’s compassionate, life-giving love — God-with-us, in Jesus —  dwells in our world today.

As we come to the church’s meal now, to the Lord’s Table, let us hear God’s ancient-future word to us, refracted through the scriptures, “I will make you a covenant…..a covenant of peace……..a new covenant……that gives life…….and will last forever!”  Amen.

 

Resources Consulted
  • Brevoort,  Deborah,  The Women of Lockerbie.   (Dramatists Play Service, Inc.  2005).
  • Goudey, June Christine, The Feast of Our Lives:  Re-Imaging Communion.  (Pilgrim Press: 2000).
  • Green, Joel B and Baker, Mark D., Recovering the Scandal of the Cross:  Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts.  (Intervarsity Press:  2000).
  • Grimsrud, Ted, “Theology of the Sacraments”, at Peace and Theology blog, http://peacetheology.net/doctrine/10%E2%80%94theology-of-the-sacraments.
  • Kredier, Alan, Eleanor Kreider and Paulus Widjaja, A Culture of Peace: God’s Vision for the Church. (Good Books: 2005).
  • Leiter, David A., Neglected Voices:  Peace in the Old Testament.  (Herald Press: 2007).
  • McCarthy, Rev. Emmanuel Charles, “The Nonviolent Eucharist,” downloaded from lewrockwell.com at http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/mccarthy1.html.
  • Nouwen, Henri, Peacework:  Prayer, Resistance and Community.  (Orbis Books: 2005).
  • Shillington, V. George, Believers Church Bible Commentary:  2 Corinthians.  (Herald Press, 1997).
  • Swartley, Willard M.,  Covenant of Peace:  The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology and Ethics. (Eerdmans: 2006).
  • Winter, Miriam Therese, Eucharist with a Small “E”.  (Orbis, 2005).