New Year, new relationship

If you’ve ever been in a classroom where a teacher has apparent control of the children, and they leave the room and a riot breaks out, you will know that imposing good behaviour on people from the outside only works to a certain extent.

If you’ve followed the saga of parties at Downing Street, or been following the more worrying story about President Putin amassing troops on the borders of Ukraine in the news, you will have worked out the same thing.

No amount of penalties and incentives will stop people breaking the rules if they’re just determined to serve themselves. They will just find a new way round them.

If you only do what is right because you think you ought to, or because you worry about what will happen if you’re found out, it not only leads to disobeying the law but it leads to hypocrisy.

 The thing that works best to encourage people to live in the way that is best for them and that God intends is not rules and regulations imposed from outside, or even incentives; not sticks and carrots; but a motivation that comes from inside.  

God’s covenant with the people of Israel was a bit of an experiment in some ways; and after several hundred years of the people of Israel continually being disobedient to God and going wrong, a new way was promised, expressed in a passage from the book of Jeremiah: “The time is coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new agreement with the people of Israel:

….I will put my teachings in their minds, and write them on their hearts.

I will be their God, and they will be my people.

People will no longer have to teach their neighbours and their relatives

to know the Lord, because all people will know me,

from the least to the most important.

I will forgive them for the wicked things they did,

and I will not remember their sins any more.”

We have inherited that promise. No amount of external sticks and carrots are a substitute for the desire to do what is right, and to live in God’s ways. And the desire to do what is right comes from teaching, from upbringing, from the surrounding culture and the influence of people around us, it is true, but ultimately the foundation for it in the church is our gratitude for what God, especially God in Jesus, has done for us. That is the start of a new relationship – a new covenant.

Covenant Sunday in the Methodist Church is a day when we renew our desire to be in that relationship, to benefit from God’s forgiveness and to keep close to him so that we can know his love and show it to the world.

I love these verses – the simple beauty of the words ‘I will be their God, and they will be my people’; the idea that every last person, from the least to the greatest, is equally able to have a relationship with God, directly themselves, not relying on someone else; we belong to Jesus, it is as simple as that. We are his, and he belongs to us.

And that beautiful promise that God’s law will be written on our hearts:

Queen Mary of England, during whose reign the city of Calais was besieged and finally lost to the English, famously said ‘When I am dead, and my body is opened, ye shall find Calais written on my heart’

I wonder what would be found written on your heart?

The people you love I am sure, maybe a place, maybe a cause that is dear to you. if it’s written on your heart it is deeply ingrained. Built into who you are as a person.

It may be that love for God, and the knowledge of his love for you, appreciation and gratitude for what Jesus has done and the way he has showed us to live, will be found written there too. To say God’s law is written on our hearts means that our desire to do what is right won’t come from the outside, but from the inside: it is so deeply ingrained it is part of who we are.

 It’s worth saying here that Law in the Bible is actually better translated as teaching – the law of God, unlike human laws, is not something like a wall, that you are either on the right or the wrong side of, that determines who is in and who is out; it is more like an arrow, pointing to what is good, helping us live in the right direction.

Jesus told us how we should do this: keep strong in faith, in gratitude for his death for us….

We make the decision individually to follow Jesus , and each year in the Covenant service Methodists renew our commitment to Jesus as an individual.

But the picture of the communion meal is also one that shows that we are all joined together.

We need each other to keep our vibrancy and our motivation. The picture of the single coal rolling out of the fire and dying is a picture which reminds us that we shouldn’t try to go it alone – we need to keep encouraging each other, praising God together, learning together, supporting each other, working out how to explain our faith to others, together.

And the promises we make in our covenant are promises we make together, promises that we are able to make not just because we know God will be there to strengthen us, but because the church family is also there to strengthen us. We strengthen each other in many ways but the core of it is love – and we are able to love because we know how Jesus loved us so much that he died for us.

When we make our covenant promises we are once again preparing ourselves to take our place as a guest at the table where we share together the reminder of Jesus’ death and resurrection……………….a table where all are welcome.