Sermon for Covenanting Service

The Scripture for this sermon was Genesis 9:8-17

A few weeks ago I was sitting in my dining room, and I got a phone call.  It was one of the women in my congregation.  “Tim?  You need to go outside right now, and look up at the sky!”

This was the call I had been waiting for.  I have experienced a lot of new things since I moved out to Manitoba a couple of years ago, but this was it.  For some time I had been announcing at church, “I have never seen the Northern Lights, if you are outside, and you see them, give me a call.  I don’t care what time it is.”

I’d received a call here and a call there, and seen a bar or two in the sky for each of those, but this night it was unbelievable.  Did anyone else see them?  Reds, yellows, and greens, shimmering and waving in a dome covering the whole sky, north south east and west.  This was the night that they could see them all the way down in Texas.

When Rachel told me that one of the themes for this covenanting service would be rainbows, all I could think about was the utter sense of awe and humility that was created within me as I sat out there that night looking up at the sky and seeing the lights.  I know, they’re not rainbows, but that was the image that kept flashing to my mind.

Today we’re gathered here to celebrate a covenant.  But I have to admit while I was writing this sermon I really struggled with a lot of terms and ideas, the whole notion of a covenant confounded me.  Who is the covenant between?  What does it mean to have a ministry?  Whose ministry is it?  What goes on whenever a new minister joins with an established faith community?

I spent a long time pondering over this scripture passage, trying to flush out some ideas on what happens, on what exactly we’re celebrating here today.  Because it has to be more than simply, “Hey, great.  Hamiota got a new minister, that’s awesome.  Rachel got a new job, fantastic.”  What exactly are we marking here?

In our scripture reading for today, all but a remnant has been destroyed by the chaotic flood waters.  That remnant has arrived and touched the earth again.  It is then that God makes a covenant. It’s not just a covenant between God and Noah, its not just a covenant between God and humanity, it’s a covenant between God and the remnant of creation that survived the flood.

This covenant does something.  It transforms this rag-tag bunch of drifters into something new, something wondrous.  It unites them into something that is more than simply the sum of their parts, but rather transforms the rag-tag remnant into the new creation. 

Today we are covenanting with each other.  And when we say that, I don’t think we mean that we’re all making a covenant to each other.  Noah didn’t make a covenant with the animals and the birds.  Instead we are all being bound together as one, while God makes a covenant with us.  God is uniting us into something that is more than just the sum of us.

This is why I like the image of the rainbow as a sign of a covenant.  When we look at a rainbow, do we say to ourselves, “Well, I’ve seen all those colours on their own before, nothing too spectacular about it.” Or is there something more to it? 

When I went outside however many weeks ago, I didn’t just look up and say, “Yeah, yellow, green, red.  I’ve seen them all before on there own.  I’ve seen a few scattered bars and waves in the sky.  This is essentially the same, just bigger.”  Big Whoop.  No, it was something new entirely.

This is the basis of covenant.  It is about creation.  When these three groups come together, Hamiota and Kenton as the local faith communities, Rachel as the minister, Assiniboine Presbytery on behalf of the wider church, something new is created.  Something that has never been seen before, and will never be seen again.  It is marvelous and it is holy.  This is the essence of covenant.  We three groups are no longer a band of rag-tag drifters, but suddenly we are a new creation, we are all part of a new ministry, and it is far more awesome than the sum of the three parts.

Something new and exciting has already happened here.  A new ministry began on November 1.  Today we’re celebrating the covenant that God made with all of us.  I don’t know what to expect, I don’t know what to anticipate, but any time a new ministry is formed we should celebrate the wonder of a new creation, and I for one, am excited by the prospect.  Thanks be to God.