Scripture: Jeremiah 31:31-34 and Romans 12:1-2.
“Do not be conformed…”
In the mountains of Guatemala, small groups of indigenous people live in remote villages, sheltered by the forest, and separate from the mainstream of Guatemalan society. They are there partly as a matter of self-defense.
In the early 1980’s the Guatemalan military made several large and lethal sweeps through the territories occupied by the indigenous Mayan people, carrying out a scorched earth policy, setting fire to villages, and killing only God knows how many people. The stated intent was to wipe out Communism. The result was to wipe out a good part of the indigenous culture and to leave a legacy of suffering and of memories and stories that will haunt the people who lived through them as long as they live.
Among those who escaped, some people fled to Mexico. Some people fled to the cities and tried to find a way to survive and blend in to urban society in Guatemala. Others simply tried to find more remote areas of Guatemala to live in where they would be safer and better protected and where they could try to re-establish a community. These last groups of people came to be known as communities of population in resistance.
That term signifies that there is more involved here than safety and self-defense. These were communities, to be sure, that banded together in a quest for survival. But they were also communities that saw themselves not just as resisting the efforts of the military to destroy them, but as resisting the social system of Guatemala as a whole, a social system based on entrenched power and privilege and race. “Do not be conformed.”
Many of the people who formed these communities had already been involved in efforts to build grass roots, cooperative communities informed by the Christian faith, communities which by their nature stood in opposition to the larger society. The communities of population in resistance offered a different vision of how people could and should live together. That vision was, and is, rooted in the Bible.
What I am describing here is what has sometimes been referred to as Christian base communities, and the understanding of Christianity that I am talking about is what many have referred to as liberation theology. Many people have identified base communities and liberation theology with vast movements for social change and a view of the church as a revolutionary force. But I think that kind of talk can tend to be misleading.
I have not visited a community of resistance. I have visited two different communities of people who were returned from their exile in Mexico and who were trying to do very much the same thing. They returned from Mexico not as individuals or separate families but as communities, trying to build a kind of community life that otherwise did not exist in Guatemala. But on the basis of my very limited experience, I have to say that seen from the ground level, liberation theology is not what some people imagine it to be.
It is not people sitting around and plotting revolutions. Nor is it people bravely building utopias. It is neither revolutionary nor romantic. It is ordinary people who are engaged in the process of Christian formation in very much the same way we are here. It is about as utopian or romantic or revolutionary as a Sunday morning at Sojourners, which brings me to why I’m talking about all this.
I wanted to talk about covenant today. I want to talk about covenant because I am thinking of “covenant” as a kind of connecting thread that will run through most or all of our worship services this fall, beginning with last week’s symbolic gathering of waters and regathering of this community, and ending with a service toward the end of November when we renew our covenant with each other in the form of offering our pledges but also in some other ways, yet to be determined. In between those two services I am hoping that we will reflect on and pray about the nature of our covenant, what a covenant is, what our covenant is, what commitments it involves and what hopes we share.
I want to talk about covenant today, and in various ways in the weeks ahead, because I see this congregation as being and becoming over time increasingly a community of population in resistance. That language is mine. I don’t know whether it is helpful or suggestive to you. Maybe it doesn’t suit you at all. But I believe some such notion has been and continues to be very important to what we are about here at Sojourners, at least as I understand our past and present. We are, or at least we aspire to be, a community that stands for a different way of life than the social system we are a part of. We reach out for some more just, more human way of people living together, and we try in our admittedly flawed and modest way, to put that different way into practice among us.
Most churches do not have such an idea. Most churches in our society are not communities of covenant. Most churches, I think it is safe to say, would not see themselves as communities of population in resistance. Of course, I can’t really say how they see themselves. We would have to go ask. But I can say how I would describe the general tendency of religious life in the United States.
We live in a consumer culture, and I believe churches in the United States have to a large degree become part of that consumer culture. In my view, churches have become by and large not communities of faith but collections of individuals who come to a church looking to have certain social or spiritual needs met. And churches, very often, see themselves as being providers of those services that people are looking for, whether it’s a Sunday school for the kids, a Christian dieters group, or answers for life’s questions.
The phenomenon of church life that has attracted the most attention in recent years has been what is often referred to as the mega-church. It is the very image of success, with thousands of people pouring through the doors of the church every weekend, and with all kinds of people, trying to analyze “how they do it”, “what their secret is”, so that maybe other churches that are struggling might apply the lesson and grow at least a little bit. This is, I regret to say, a mindset that is alive in many places in the United Church of Christ—the attitude that if we could not copy all of the mega-church but just some of it, then maybe we could see some of their growth, and that would be good enough. (You can tell that I don’t think much of this approach.)
The original model of the mega-church is a place called Willow Creek Community Church in a suburb of Chicago. Willow Creek makes no apology for building on a model of consumerism. The huge parking area is like a parking lot for a mall, and as you enter the building you find yourself very much in a mall type atmosphere complete with a food court, a gym, a movie theater, book store, barber shop, teen center, and I don’t remember exactly what all. At the far end of the building is an enormous auditorium with movie theater style seating, which is where worship takes place. The idea, someone explained to me, is that you could spend your whole weekend in the place, go to church, be entertained, get your shopping done, and be ready for work on Monday morning.
In all of this Willow Creek and other mega-churches are no better or worse than the vast majority of North American churches. Willow Creek has done extremely well what many churches would like to do. And it has put on a large screen what might otherwise not be so noticeable, the notion that the church exists to serve the needs of individuals.
To be in covenant means something else. It means that when we gather, whether in worship on Sunday mornings or in small groups or in various other settings, we are not involved primarily in responding to interests or meeting needs but in building community. This does not mean of course that every church gathering needs to be intensely serious. It does not mean that personal needs are unimportant or that they will not be met. It does say that as a whole community and over time we are about the business, not of being a spiritual department store where people come to find things they need or that please them, but that we are involved in creating a community of resistance to many of the values around us.
I wanted to talk about covenant today because I have this feeling that we live in a culture where individualism is a deeply ingrained part of the way we think and live, and that this is one of the things we as a community of faith need to stand in resistance to and that we can do that simply by being a community of faith, not a church so much, but a community of faith that is built on covenant.
I have this picture in my head that in our way of life we have become like atoms, moving separately around, doing our own thing, occasionally bumping into each other, and occasionally deciding to help each other out—or not, depending…The Biblical notion of covenant, as I understand it, is not the idea that all these atoms ought to try to be nice to each other, nor that we ought to try to help each other out from time to time. That’s all well and good if we are operating from within a system of individualism.
The Biblical notion of covenant is something else, and Jeremiah points us toward it. Jeremiah talks about a covenant where God’s law is written on human hearts, so that we don’t have to teach or encourage each other to know the Lord, because God is already there. It is not so much something we ought to do as a way of seeing the world. Jeremiah speaks of the covenant between God and God’s people, but his way of seeing the world could apply to our covenant with each other as God’s people.
Jeremiah’s way of seeing things suggests that you and I are not in covenant with each other because we each happen to have made a decision to join Sojourners church and agree to do whatever we can for the good of the church and so forth. It is not any formal agreement we have entered into, or any informal agreement that we will be nice to each other or agree to work together when we are called to do so. All those things may be involved. But at root our covenant is rooted in a view of things that says that we are in covenant because your life is written on my heart, and my life is written on your heart.
Ultimately, that is true of each of us with regard to every other child of God on the face of the earth. But in the church, we can at least start with the church, start trying to build a community based on the vision, the faith that our lives are written on each other’s hearts. I’m not sure what this means concretely, and I’m not ready to start talking about that today, and I admit that this way of seeing things may raise more questions than it does provide answers. But then at Sojourners, what else is new. But for me, it is where we start any thinking, praying, talking about covenant.
I need to return for just a moment to our covenant with God for that too is rooted in this certain way of seeing things. I don’t think I need to elaborate on Jeremiah’s vision with regard to God very much. He sees, I believe, not only God’s law but God being written on the hearts of human beings. That too is a covenantal way of seeing the world. It is not so much our job as Christians, as a church, to go around trying to convince people to believe in God, telling people they ought to believe in God, that it would be good for them if they believed in God. It is more a matter of putting forward and living a vision where God is imprinted on every heart, where we see, as the Quakers say, that there is something of God in every person.
And then there is the other part of that, which Jeremiah doesn’t say here but does say in other places: that we are written on the heart of God. I know that this is human language, that we cannot really speak of God as a person with the same kind of anatomy as we have. But human words are all we have and even our meager human words can sometimes say things that are true. So let me use those words to say again: Your life, my life, the life of a Mayan Indian in the mountains of Guatemala, and the life of a person eating chicken teriyaki with a plastic fork in the food court at Willow Creek community Church—these lives, all lives are written on the heart of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 17, 2000