Sermon: “In Covenant”

She chewed a chunk of char-broiled armadillo.  I choked down a bowl of squirrel stew.  He swallowed a slimy pod of boiled okra.  What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever eaten in the name of love?  Sharing food – in every culture and in every time – has always been a sign of the connection between people.  When we set aside our differences to feast at the same table, we make a covenant of peace.  We remember we are brothers and sisters in one human family, that we are all children of one God.  That’s why Christians will compromise and sacrifice personal preferences – it’s all for the sake of love.

It was my pastor friend Penny who ate that armadillo on a medical mission trip to Venezuela.  The indigenous people they were serving gave them their very best game, and in return her United Methodists from Alabama brought them the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And that squirrel stew was served to me by the men’s fellowship of the tiny North Carolina church I was serving as music director.  They were good friendly country folk, but they did like to tease me for my big city ways.  They couldn’t wait to tell me later that stew was actually made with pork – they just wanted to see if I loved them enough to eat squirrel!

Food has always spoken loudly the language of love.  My dear husband was born into a Southwestern Hispanic and Italian ranch family that grew its own hot chili peppers and garlic, so he suffered serious culture shock when we were dating and he ate with my kin in North Carolina for the first time.  Southern cooking is like British cuisine – you know, boiled meat and potatoes, and spice-free vegetables.  He didn’t even recognize the green beans – which back home we simmer all day on the stove with a big slab of pork fatback.  I’ll never forget the desperate look he shot me as he slipped that slimy pod of okra down the back of his throat – and I knew then, that it had to be true love. 

In the same way, we in the church expand our covenant of love each time we receive new members, as we do today.  Each of us has followed a unique path of faith – from different branches of Christianity, different ethnic backgrounds, different regions of the country – but they all converge here, in this meetinghouse.  As many of you know, our national denomination, the United Church of Christ, brought together two different smaller churches in 1957 – one Germanic and the other Anglo – just a dozen years after the end of World War II, when our fatherlands had been killing each other.  When our Southern Conference of the UCC was formed back in the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, black and white churches were coming together in ways that were unheard of in my home state.  I went to a church camp – like our Silver Lake – that was integrated even before my public school.  My parents hosted an interracial Bible study in our home, and I remember how they made sure to inform all the neighbors – since they were worried there might be trouble if people of color were seen coming to our front door.  I laughed at my parents’ fear – it seemed so ridiculous to me – but later I heard they did get a threatening phone call.  I couldn’t imagine what could rile people up about a bunch of boring grownups with Bibles and covered dishes.  But a simple church potluck was a prophetic shout in those days, preaching the language of Christian love.

Purists and traditionalists have always resisted the breaking of cultural norms, especially food regulations and class divisions.  You remember how Jesus got the Pharisees worked up by dining with people they considered “unclean” – tax collectors and women, foreigners and eunuchs, the blind and the lame?  And our dear friend Paul – he started the church there in Corinth, that busy seaport town that was a real mixing pot for all the cultures of the known world – Paul had plenty of challenges in bringing together that city’s motley crew of new Christians.  Most Corinthians, of course, had been Gentiles and pagan idol-worshippers before their conversion.  The common people hardly ate meat at all, but on special occasions – like when they honored a dead ancestor – the animal for the family feast would first be sacrificed to the gods at the nearest shrine.  So the question for the Corinthians, which Paul was asked to settle in his letter, was whether a pagan BBQ was a harmless local custom or a real spiritual danger for new believers.  Which was best:  to consent to eat meat sacrificed to idols at the home of heathens – in hopes of converting them – or to abstain, to keep new converts from backsliding to old superstitions?

What I appreciate about Paul’s answer is that he fails to take a definite side in the controversy – he refuses to make a one-size-fits-all policy for all situations.  Instead he suggests we need to take the course that serves best to strengthen the faith of weaker believers – instead of holding rigidly to what we believe to be “right.”  Compromise!  Of course, we’re all for it.  The spirit of love should trump the rules, right?  We all say that when it comes time for OTHER people to compromise, but when it means WE have to change, we’re not so sure.  I used to think I was pretty easy-going and flexible until I sat down to plan my own wedding.  When two very different families are trying to enter into a marriage covenant, the devil is in the details.

You remember I grew up a Congregationalist and I once worked as a church musician.  So when I went to pick the hymns for our wedding, you can imagine my surprise when my Catholic fiancé said, “Oh, no hymns.  No hymns, please!  The whole bride’s side will be singing, and my family will just stand there holding the book and looking stupid!”  And so it began, the series of compromises that knit the Smallwood and Garcia families together in a covenant of love.  For my Southern Baptist relatives, I vetoed the open bar with mixed drinks, but for the sake of his family, our friends, and the local economy, we served some San Francisco beer and Napa Valley wine.  You get the idea.

In churches like ours – where many denominations and cultures and traditions meet – we face these kinds of challenges all the time.  Think about it: the Corinthian meat controversy makes no sense any more for us, of course, but any symbol has the power to mean one thing for one person and another (entirely different) thing to another.  In Worship Committee recently we’ve had heated discussions about any number of things that may seem trivial to one person but are vitally important to others – things like the meaning of robes, crosses, flowers, candles, acolytes, music, the Bible – even the merits of standing or sitting, or how to control the thermostat.  You can laugh, but there’s historical precedent for Congregationalists to want to “go green” and conserve energy!

Our former church historian Gene Farrell tells the story of what a controversy was sparked when New England meetinghouses started to install heat!  He tells of a Litchfield church where one day, seven pro-heat young men got into the meetinghouse and installed a stove one November Saturday.  The next day at church, the anti-heat side was so steamed up, the congregation literally split down the middle with the pro-stovers on one side and the anti-stovites on the other.  The Deacons argued about it all during the “intermission” they would take at lunchtime.  Finally, one anti-stovite lady actually fainted from the heat and halted afternoon worship.  When she came around, the young pro-stovers invited the whole congregation to approach the new contraption and touch it.  Turns out the stove was stone cold – they hadn’t yet connected the flue so that it could run!

You know, it takes a lot of faith to believe a raggedy band of sinners like us can come together – with all our different preferences and peccadilloes.  It’s a real miracle we can form one congregation, one family of faith, who can live and worship together in peace.  But we do that here all the time – whether in weekday meetings or in Sunday worship.  We can do that because we put love for others above our own need to be right, or to do things exactly “right.”  We are so blessed that the Holy Spirit is moving in this place and is still drawing us together in covenant, through the sacrificial love of Jesus.  We serve one another with humility and grace – even those people we KNOW to be wrong! – because we are so grateful that Christ first loved us, and loves us still.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.