Text: Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
Marriage is a covenant. Not a contract, usually, even though we speak casually of a marriage contract. If people have a pre-nuptial agreement, that agreement is a contract, but it does not make marriage itself a contract. A contract requires an offer, and acceptance, and a consideration.
A covenant, though, is a promise. A covenant is sometimes described as an agreement. Two or more people or parties agree to do something relating to each other. In that case, as in marriage, there are two promises, dual promises. In a marriage, the bride and the groom both make vows, which are promises. Strictly speaking, there is no acceptance. In practice, the promises themselves act like an acceptance. If, for example, the groom refused to make his vows after the bride made hers, then probably there would be no covenant.
Covenant—the word—seems religious. That’s because it has become so. A covenant does not have to be religious. But religious people have seized on the word as a good way to describe things about God. God makes covenants, not contracts. God makes promises, not conditions.
Covenant with a capital “C” refers to a promise God made with Israel. “I will be your God and you will be my people,” promised God. This is not a contract. Israel cannot void it, and neither can God. There is no escape clause. There are certain things that Israel, as God’s people, is expected to do. When they don’t, God gets discouraged, occasionally annoyed, sometimes crabby. But God does not go back on God’s promise. God is faithful.
Nonetheless, Israel from time to time loses faith in God’s faithfulness. We read in the Bible that Israel sometimes feels that God has abandoned them. Israel wonders whether it did something so bad that God just walked away from the whole deal. The story of the good times and bad of this covenant, which extends right through Jesus to us here and now, is the story of the Bible. From Genesis to Revelation.
A scholar named Phyllis Trible once described Genesis as a “love story gone awry.” There seems not to be a happy ending to the story of the Garden of Eden, a garden of perfection from which people are exiled. The Bible in its various chapters plays out that love story between God and humans. A friend of mine once said on her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary: “Ah, our twenty-fifth anniversary! Seventeen wonderful years of marriage.” The story of the Bible is like that. A few thousand years of being God’s people. Most of them wonderful, some of them not.
It is in the not-so-wonderful years that the people feel God has abandoned them.
Feeling abandoned by God is the same as feeling abandoned by anybody you love, trust, rely on, and want to be with. The feeling of being abandoned is horrible. It is more than loneliness. Israel, abandoned, lived on, as we all do. But poorly. Not because God was their protector and shield and fortress and things like that, but because people have an intense, deep longing for God.
It is a basic hunger. Being starved for God’s presence generates at best a vague disquiet-ness or anxiety. Being alone in the universe without God for company is tiring. We are so tiny, the universe is so big out there. We do not always admit, or some never admit, that we long for God. Even though as Christians we proclaim to. We call it other things. Ennui. General dissatisfaction with things. Listlessness. Hopelessness lurking in the wings.
A colleague says that in the church, where people talk about relying on God and grace and forgiveness, they are instead just as likely to act as if everything depends on them. “What the heck is that?” he asks. What it is, is a denial of our dependance on God and need for God’s presence. We can deny all sorts of needs, but that does not mean we don’t need them.
It turns out that people whose faith helps them express their longing for God, compared to those whose faith down-plays that longing, are happier, less pessimistic, less likely to be discouraged. This is just one study, and they didn’t really use the phrase “longing for God,” but that’s what they meant. And they didn’t say which was cause and which was effect. Maybe happier people long for God more. I don’t know.
Genesis and the book of Revelation are the beginning and the end of the Bible. In one sense, the plot line of Revelation reverses the plot line of Genesis, and it takes apart all that Genesis builds up. But in another sense, a more important sense, Revelation reaffirms God’s covenant with humanity. In the book of Revelation, God is close to us. God is extremely present in the book. And in the end, there is a resurrected Jerusalem, the historic home of God. And God lives there with all the people. I am your God, you are my people—the promise is fulfilled totally. We heard about that in the readings over the past few weeks.
But in today’s reading we come to the end of the story, and we just heard the final verses of the Bible. In those verses humanity’s longing for God is dramatically exposed. The whole world calls for Jesus. Come, cries the spirit, the bride, and everyone within earshot. And Jesus responds. I am coming! And so the people, hearing this, call to him again. Come, Lord Jesus! These are the shouts of people and God too long separated from one another. Like people in a long distant relationship, or people waiting, waiting for the return home of a friend or companion or a soldier or migrant. Thirsty for it, as it says. The waiting is over. The longing is requited.
The final sentence of the story in the Bible is “the grace of the Lord Jesus be with all.” God, who is unconditionally in love with us and true to the covenant, is with us. We turn the last page. We close the book. The love story in the Bible has a happy ending after all.
But the story in these pages is a reflection of the story of humanity and of the lives of individual people. You and me. The story repeats and continues in each of us. When Isaac was baptized this morning, he became part of the story. The covenant becomes part of him and he of it. He will come to know as we do the story of being with God, of feeling abandoned by God, of longing for God, of finding God.
If this all sounds like a lot of personal piety, it’s because it is. The story of Revelation is the reunion of the human and the divine. That union is what piety is: the longing to be joined as humans with God. Whether you see that union in a voice speaking to you, or in a vision as in Revelation, or whether you see it in service to others as in Faith Kitchen. Or whether you see it in Sunday worship and song, or in your own quiet morning prayers, or an unexplained feeling of wellbeing in the scariest moments. Or whether you see it in amazement at the structure of the universe and the quarks and forces that hold things together in simplicity and complexity, or even in the energy of an argument on the street. Or whether you see it in the eyes of your child or lover. In all those things and thousands more, divine God meets human us.
We have no contract with God. But we do have a promise. We are not alone in human time and place. God is with us.
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