The Gift of Covenant

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Genesis 9:8-17
Galatians 3:27-29

In the early church the Season of Lent was embraced as a journey of spiritual fortitude for candidates preparing for baptism into the covenant community of Christ. It was a journey that culminated in a powerful ritual of initiation through the dark hours of Holy Saturday and into the dawn of Easter morning. It was a communal affair of celebration and hope designed to discipline its candidates through a series of spiritual practices that would quite literally transform them into a community of equals: a covenant community in Christ living in radical resurrection resistance to the powers of domination and exploitation and crucifixion swirling all around them, where Greek surely overpowered Jew, where free surely overpowered slave, where male surely overpowered female. But not for them, because they were “one in Christ Jesus.”

Adults who wanted to join this covenant community of Christ presented themselves to church leaders for a process that was, according to theologians Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, “akin to applying for, attending, and graduating from college while also training for an Olympic team sport and undergoing group therapy” (Saving Paradise, 117.)  Everything from the occupation of the baptismal candidates to their knowledge of Scripture to their generosity in almsgiving was subject to intense scrutiny. And throughout the Season of Lent they were counseled to practice the spiritual disciplines of study, prayer, fasting, abstinence, voluntary poverty, and non-violence. Practices that we are today invited to continue in our own Season of Lent, even if we are among the “already baptized.”

We who are Protestant might dismiss this kind of preparation for baptism in the Season of Lent as overly legalistic or dependent on “works-righteousness.” We baptize infants, after all, who have no knowledge of what we are doing. All time is God’s time, we would say. And salvation is by God’s grace alone through faith alone. And I do believe those things are the right things to do and to proclaim.

But imagine what this ritual of spiritual endurance in preparation for baptism in the season of Lent meant for a first or second or third century Jew living as a crushed religious and ethnic minority under Greco-Roman culture. Or imagine that you have lived your days as a Gentile citizen of the Roman Empire imbibing the superiority of the Greco-Roman world in your mother’s milk without ever having to notice the heavy price that is paid by those who do not share the supremacy of your culture. Are you really going to believe “there is no longer Jew or Greek it? Are you really going to live it? How?

Or imagine what this ritual of spiritual endurance meant for first or second or third century slaves subject to the whim of their masters, with no ownership of their very bodies (which biblical scholars are beginning to concede were subject to the systematic rape and abuse and torture of those who enslaved them). Imagine what it means for the enslaver himself to give up his ownership of other human beings—an ownership he has been cultivated to expect as an entitlement—and learn to live with them as equals. Are you really going to believe “there is no longer slave or free”? Are you really going to live it? How?

Or imagine what this ritual of spiritual endurance meant for first or second or third century women, whose voices were not welcome as legitimate testimony in a court of law, whose names are barely mentioned or flat-out erased from religious history. And then imagine what this ritual meant for first or second or third century men, who have been taught from the time they were born to crush anything vulnerable within themselves. And then imagine what this ritual might mean for us in our senseless and irresponsible and flat-out Self-Inflicted-Nonsense over sexual orientation and gender identity. Are we really going to believe “there is no longer male and female”? Are we really going to live it? How?

The truth is it takes a disciplined, dedicated spiritual endurance to live as a covenant community in Christ. That is why the preparation for baptism in the Season of Lent was so rigorous in the early church. They knew that living as the covenant community of Christ required more than intellectual assent to a good idea. It required a practiced dedication to study, prayer, fasting, abstinence, voluntary poverty, nonviolence. An examination of conscience. An exorcism of anger and fear and greed. They could not “think” their way into this covenant. They had to “practice” their way into it.

By the time baptismal candidates in the first and second and third centuries who truly wanted to join this covenant community gathered in the dead of night on Holy Saturday, they really were prepared to become a new creation Christ where there was no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female. Where they really were “one” with all of creation the way God had intended it all along. They shed their old clothes before entering the baptismal pool, symbolically leaving their old life behind. They presented their naked bodies for anointing with oil, the same way we presented our foreheads for anointing on Ash Wednesday. They stepped into the pool and confessed their faith as the bishop immersed them in the cleansing, healing, renewing waters. And they rose again to new life as Easter morning dawned.

The deacons of the community wrapped the newly baptized in a white linen robe, “clothing them with Christ,” and leading them into the mysteries of the Eucharist. And that ancient baptismal formula from Galatians 3:28 was very likely spoken in the early hours of Easter Sunday—every Easter Sunday—as each newly baptized member emerged, naked, from the ritual waters of baptism and claimed a new life as a member of this covenant community . . .

Why am I sharing this with you today?

Of the six things the Madison Square mission statement proclaims you want to be and do, the very first of them is this: “to be a community that is open and welcoming to all people, without regard for nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or socio-economic status.” Sound familiar? To me, it is an awful lot like Galatians 3:28, updated for 21^st century American Christianity: there is no longer American or un-American; there is no longer white or black or Hispanic or middle-eastern; there is no longer straight or gay; there is no longer rich and poor; for all of us are one in Christ Jesus. And we are supposed to live like it!

This is the covenant community of equals we claim in our baptism. It sounds an awful lot like the covenant with creation we claim in the rainbow from the book of Genesis. And I have to say, as someone who is still relatively new in your midst, I think you do it remarkably well.

But Lent is about self-examination and penitence and turning from the ways in which we fail to live up to the covenant. And my word of caution in meditating on this part of our mission is to be clear that we really are rooted in the covenant community we are called to be in Christ. The one we claim in our baptism. The one that goes back to the beginning of creation and is sealed by that rainbow as God’s promise for all creation. It is not about being “politically correct.” Or . . . even as much as I love you for it . . . about being “the little church that leans a little to the left.” It is about the covenant we proclaim for the kingdom of God. Period.

And my word of caution today is that it really does take a disciplined, dedicated spiritual endurance to live as a covenant community in Christ. As well as we do this at Madison Square, the truth is that we aren’t there yet, either. If we pat ourselves on the back thinking we have figured it out and others have not . . . well . . . we have entirely missed the point. Because the truth is that we need the community to come around us and walk beside us and challenge us when we fail our part in the Covenant.

That is why we have the Season of Lent. Not to beat ourselves up for how bad we are. But to join in a disciplined, dedicated, spirit-filled reminder of how good God has created us to be. In study, prayer, fasting, abstaining. Asking God to transform us into the community of equals we say we want to be, and trusting God to make it so . . . on that Easter Sunday morning . . . when the sun rises . . . and the resurrection dawns . . . and in Christ we really are a new creation.

This is our Lenten mission. It is our Madison Square mission. It is our Christian mission.

I pray it may it be so.

Amen.

Joy Comes in the Morning

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Staff Appreciation Sunday

 

 

Psalm 30:1-5; Mark 1:40-45

It was a Holy Communion last Sunday, was it not? Through Mark’s Gospel lesson last week, we found ourselves at the home of Simon Peter. And we found, in Simon’s mother-in-law, a resurrected minister of grace ready to serve as our mentor in the movement to “welcome home” the people of God. And we came to the table of sustenance in celebration of the joyful feast of the people of God . . .

. . . and then we left the building . . . and then we went to work.

Whether it is a paying job or a non-paying job, we get out of bed on a Monday morning—after a Sunday morning—and we get to work.

And so the question is this: is our Sunday morning communion strong enough to wake us up singing “joy comes in the morning,” in the words of Psalm 30, on the Monday after the Sunday when we are refreshed at the table of sustenance and reborn into the world as a new creation for justice and peace? Or is Monday morning more like a blaring alarm clock demanding our allegiance long before we are really ready to get out of bed? Or is it, more likely, a little of both?

Because today is the first annual “Staff Appreciation Sunday” here at Madison Square, I have been thinking a lot this week about what it means as a person of faith to get up in the morning and go to work—joyfully or begrudgingly—whether our work is explicitly for the church, or if we live out our calling in the so-called “secular sphere.” And of course I would argue that there is no separation between the secular and the sacred in the end. That all work is God’s work. That all places are God’s places. That the gifts and talents God has given us to use in God’s good creation are to the glory of God, no matter where or how we use them.

It was, after all, Jesus, himself, with his work of healing, who left the building with us at the end of our gospel lesson last week. He is on the move this Monday morning in our text this week. Moving from healing in the religious space of the synagogue, to healing in the private space of Simon’s home, to healing in the very public space of the plains of Galilee where people are going about the daily business of their lives. And where the outcast of the outcasts wanders morning after morning in search of a redemption that seems like it will never come.

This outcast of outcasts is a leper. Which in the New Testament means someone with any number of diseases that are highly contagious. Or highly disfiguring. Or just plain scary to the folks who don’t want to be sick. The leper’s disease is so scary that no one will touch him. And no one will give him a job. And no one will welcome him home. Because their tables will be contaminated, and their beds will be contaminated, and their pews will be contaminated. And so the leper wanders. Outcast. Begging. In a kind of open-air solitary confinement.

And having tried everything else, the leper hopes against hope that this man Jesus can help him. And he does. Because that is the job God has given Jesus to do.

2000 years after this 1^st century Monday morning workday for Jesus we can almost hear the healed man singing Psalm 30 to everyone he meets from here on out: God has drawn me up . . . we can hear him croon . . . as if out of the waters of baptism. I cried to God for help, and God healed me, he sings. Weeping may linger for the night. But joy comes in the morning.

And the man who was once a leper is now a preacher. And he spreads the word everywhere he goes about the healing ministry of Jesus, to the point that Jesus can no longer go into town openly but stays out in the country, where the people come to him from everywhere for the same kind of healing the leper found today and Simon’s mother found last week and every one of us found at this table of grace last Sunday, the moment we admitted we needed whatever healing Jesus could offer. The moment we said, “If you choose, you can make me well.” And God said, “I choose.” And we were made well.

Jesus, for his part, is angry. “Snorting with indignation” is how one translator describes him. Furious that the social order has devolved to the point that the walking wounded are left to suffer in silence. Cut off from human contact. Cut off from any means of providing for themselves and their families. Cut off from the work God gave them to do. Cut off in the end, even from God. Furious that his own ministry may now be at risk because he has touched this man who used to be a leper. Because it is all fine and good to raise up a hard-working woman in bed with a fever, but it is something quite different to put your hands on a leper.

Jesus has been contaminated, too, by touching this leper. Now his job is at risk. Who will want to come to him for healing now? Answer? Everyone. “People come to him from every quarter,” the gospel writer says. As soon as they hear there’s a place they can be healed, they come. From everywhere. And Jesus heals them. Because that is the job of Jesus.

It doesn’t seem to matter where Jesus goes or what he says or how he says it. The people are desperate for healing, and they will go wherever they have to go in order to find it. And it is as true for us today as it was for them back then. We want to sing with joy in the morning wherever we are: at church, at home, at work. We just do. And we should!

According to the Presbyterian tradition, the number one job of humankind—the whole point of our existence, really—is simply “to glorify God and enjoy God forever,” no matter what we do to earn a living. Glorify God. Enjoy God. Forever. Period. Now this may sound like a no-brainer, but don’t forget this job description for the human race comes from the same tradition that is linked with the myth of the “Protestant work ethic”! (As if somehow God wants us to suffer through day after day of drudgery on the job in order to garner the keys to the kingdom.)

The truth is, the bottom line is, God wants us to live in joy! God wants us to delight in the good gifts God has created within us. And God wants us to be healed from any illness or injustice that would keep us from offering those gifts to the world. God wants us to delight in our work of creation the same way God delights in the work of God’s creation. For 6 days, God works in joy. And on the 7^th day, God rests. And delights. And starts all over again the next day.

And so do we. If we are faithful.

That is, in the end, why Jesus heals the leper. That is why Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law. That is why Jesus heals you and me on these Sundays at the table when our communion binds us to God and one another. Because what we do here on Sunday morning is not really, in the end, about Sunday morning at all. It’s about Monday morning. With the alarm blaring. And the children screaming. And the bones creaking. And the dog barking. And the schoolbus honking. Because even then the sound of psalm 30 can rise from our lips: that God has lifted me up. God has healed me. God has restored me to life. And joy really does come with this morning.

I pray it may be so. Amen.

Proclaiming the Mission

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Isaiah 40:21-31 

Mark 1:29-39

What is it that ails us this Super Bowl Sunday morning? What fever grips us to the point of desperation for Christ’s healing touch? Is it “Patriot Fever”? Or a desperate determination to drive Eli Manning into the endzone for a go-ahead touchdown?

Or is it a somewhat more refined fire for soaring sopranos to lift our spirits on wings like eagles, as the prophet Isaiah says, higher and higher over the exhaustion of the daily grind or the anxiety of just not ever seeming to be able to make those ends meet or the true reality of our ever-present mortality, so we can remember the whole purpose of human existence. Which is, in the end, “to glorify God and enjoy God forever.” Which is what we re-member when we come here to this table of grace.

All these things and more raise us up out of our beds on a perfectly good sleep-in Sunday, and drive us from the comfort of our own homes to the greater comfort of this home, where the waters of baptismal grace flow unbounded, and the joyful feast of the people of God feeds the deepest hunger of our souls, and the Word of hope carries us forward as a new creation for justice and peace.

All these things and more have also propelled Jesus and Simon and Andrew and James and John to their first century synagogue in Capernaum in Mark’s Gospel reading for this morning. But something is not quite right on this particular Sabbath day. Someone is missing: Simon’s mother-in-law, who is bedridden, burning with “demonic force,” as her community would have interpreted her illness. “Homebound,” as we would say in the church today. She has missed out on the healing and the wholeness and the hope of that morning with Jesus in the gathering of the people. And they miss her. And she misses them.

And so “immediately” after leaving the spiritual home of the synagogue, Simon brings Jesus to the actual home of his mother-in-law and begs Jesus to help her.

Now we could get cynical here. I know the first time I read this story as a budding feminist, I thought, “Sure.” They heal the woman so she can serve them! What a victory for humankind! (A woman’s work is never done.)

But something much more profound is going on here, if we pay close attention to the story. Simon’s mother-in-law is, as far as we can tell, quite poor. Very likely a widow, living with her daughter’s family. Meaning we can assume her sons are either non-existent or no longer living. And Simon, himself—her current provider—is among the class of fishermen that does not even own a boat. He and his brother, Andrew, wade waist deep every day into the water of the Sea of Galilee to cast their nets, gathering whatever fish are swarming in the shoals along the shoreline.

It is a subsistence living. And the way things are going with the Roman commercialization of the Sea of Galilee, even this subsistence living is literally and metaphorically “drying up.” Not only that, but Simon and Andrew have just thrown it all away to join this Jesus guy from Nazareth in proclaiming the coming kingdom of God! Leaving the women of the house truly panicked about what will happen next.

Simon’s mother-in-law may, in fact, be ill. Or she may be flat-out exhausted by the weight of it all. Whatever it is, she could use those wings like eagles right about now. She has been “waiting on God” for an awfully long time. So here comes Jesus. And he could, if he wanted, just patch her up with an ice-pack and a pat on the shoulder and send her running back down the field with two minutes to go in the game. No pain, no gain. All for the good of the team.

Instead he raises her! He raises her.

And by that, I mean that the Gospel writer uses the same word here to describe the raising of Simon’s mother-in-law that is used fifteen chapters later to describe the raising of Jesus. Meaning that the raising of Simon’s mother-in-law is the first resurrection to occur in the gospels! Meaning that in “serving” Jesus and Simon and Andrew and James and John on that Sabbath day—in response to her resurrected life—Simon’s mother-in-law becomes the first “Deacon,” which is the word used here to describe her ministry with her new human family. Meaning that in breaking the bread and pouring the wine that was likely her very simple meal for the disciples of Christ on that Sabbath day, she presides over a truly “holy communion”—in grateful response to her resurrected life—making her the first “minister of Word and Sacrament.”

Simon and Andrew may have left everything to follow Jesus. But it is Simon’s mother-in-law who really “gets it” about what Jesus is trying to do. She who has served so very many for so very long—perhaps out of love, perhaps out of economic necessity—can go no further without the touch of Christ. And it is the same for us. In order to keep serving—out of love or out of necessity—we must be healed, we must be restored, we must be refreshed for new life. And so we come to the table of sustenance and find a new life of our own.

But our healing, our salvation, our resurrected lives gift us with the power of Christ to heal others in the same way. Simon’s mother-in-law, the minister, knows it. We, I hope, know it. Simon, God bless him, does not. He thinks it all depends on Jesus, himself. “Where have you been?” you can almost hear Simon demanding when Jesus has gone off by himself to pray. “We need you!” But Jesus has already ordained the minister of the first “house church” of the Jesus movement. She can keep the ministry of healing going on just fine without him.

Jesus has been called to proclaim the mission throughout the rest of Galilee. And in the preaching and the teaching and the pastoral care of Jesus throughout the neighboring towns, the home of Simon’s resurrected mother-in-law becomes the prototype for all of the house churches in which the earliest Christians would gather for over two hundred years as a new human family to claim that same resurrecting power for themselves: by serving one another, by feeding at the table of sustenance, by claiming the waters of baptism for themselves.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the house church of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is the model for how we do ministry here at Madison Square today. Because healing is, right here, right now, for all who would join in this Sabbath grace welcome home. With the mother-in-law of Simon soaring on wings like eagles, inviting us to join Jesus here at the table for a resurrection feast.

But it doesn’t end here. Because healing is—right here, right now—for all who cannot seem to find their way to this particular home in this particular place on this particular day. And our job as the resurrected people of God is to proclaim that mission as far and as wide as we can.

It just so happens that the Mission Committee of Madison Square Presbyterian Church is ready to do just that. We will meet after worship today to focus our attention on two major areas of mission outreach in the coming year: working for peace in particular by advocating for a Department of Peace at the national level; and responding to the homelessness that surrounds us as a downtown church. And of course, there are many other ways Madison Square is involved in mission, including the support of small farmers through the Presbyterian Coffee Project and our ongoing support of Haven for Hope, SAMMinistries, Christian Assistance Ministries, the SouperBowl of Caring, Habitat for Humanity, and the “Ready, Willing, and Enable” program.

If you have not yet made a commitment to one of the many missions of Madison Square, now is the time to do so. Talk to Rebecca Baker about your desire to serve . . . or talk to me, and I’ll put you in touch with her or whomever the right person may be.

In the meantime, we bring to the table of grace everything that truly does ail us on this Super Bowl Sunday morning, with a prayer for healing and a trust in the resurrecting power of God and a hand of hope held out in love, that leads us all to abundant life, so that we may proclaim the same for all we meet.

May we soar on wings like eagles.

Amen.