Bible reading: Hebrews 10:19-25.

Message.

Scrooby is a small village in the north of Nottinghamshire, about 10 miles south of Doncaster. At one time it was on the Great North Road; Cardinal Wolsey and Queen Elizabeth I both spent the night at the Manor House. It also sits next to the main railway line to Edinburgh. But the village was bypassed in 1766 and the station closed in 1931, leaving an unassuming place of around 300 people with no school, Post Office or shop. It does, however, have a pub called “The Pilgrim Fathers” and that gives us a clue to its historical importance.

For, in the early 1600s, this part of England was a hotbed of religious dissent. The law of the land compelled everyone to attend their parish church; moreover every clergyman had to use the latest version of the Prayer Book. Some folk, however, felt that people should be free to choose their religion rather than be forced by the State; equally some members of the clergy refused to use the Prayer Book and were removed from their livings. Small independent groups of Christians known as Separatists began to meet and worship outside the Church of England; this was a risky business because, if they got caught, they could be accused of treason or sedition, for which the punishment was death.

Joining such a group was therefore a serious commitment; and in 1606 the Scrooby separatists made a solemn covenant to “be joined by the Lord into a church … to walk in all his ways, made known, or to be made known to them … whatsoever it should cost them”. As life in England grew ever more dangerous, the group fled to Holland from where, in 1620, some of its members and others sailed to America on the “Mayflower”. That Scrooby Covenant became the basis of the “Mayflower Compact”, drawn up to govern life in the new Plymouth Colony. Three centuries later President Calvin Coolidge declared that this was “an event of the greatest importance, the foundation of liberty based on law and order, the first real constitution of modern times”. (The present occupant of the White House seems to largely ignore it).

The theme of “compact” or “covenant” is a bit like the word “Blackpool” in a stick of seaside rock: it runs through the entire Bible. It pops up in the creation stories, when Adam is given the command to till the ground, be fruitful and multiply, with the promise that he will then receive the earth’s produce. It continues in the story of Noah where, after the floodwaters have gone down, God gives the rainbow as a sign that he will never again send such devastation on the world. And, as we move from myth to early history, the idea of covenant is crucial in the story of Abraham; God gives him what we might term the charter of the Jewish nation, that they will multiply and become a major player on the world scene. All Abraham has to do is have faith and obey: not easy for an old man with an elderly wife who had never born a child!

This notion of covenant has always been central to Jewish thinking and it still has repercussions today. It informed not only later leaders such as Moses, David and Solomon but also prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah who recognised that, while God would never break his side of the covenant, it was all too easy for the nation to rupture theirs and lose its benefits. It’s no wonder that the prophets described apostasy as spiritual prostitution, “a-whoring after other gods”. For, as far as God was concerned, the relationship was about love as much as law.

As I’ve said, the covenant between God and Abraham can be thought of as the charter for the Jewish nation: “I will be your God and you will be my people”. But in the New Testament we see this being expanded to shatter national and ethnic boundaries and to include all people of faith. This wasn’t a completely new idea: there are hints in Isaiah, for instance, of Gentiles, non-Jews, ultimately becoming part of God’s kingdom. But it wasn’t a view that an ordinary man or woman on the Jerusalem omnibus would have held. He or she would have clung on to the idea of the Jews as the chosen nation and would have been shocked to think that God might even consider reaching out further or transferring his allegiance elsewhere. Covenant was (and still is) built into the national consciousness.

It is of course Jesus – who, we mustn’t forget, was himself Jewish – who brought this new covenant into existence. For at the Last Supper, hours before his arrest, trial and death, he spoke words which are repeated at every Communion service: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you”. Those words are so familiar that we hardly notice them, but in fact they dramatically reshaped the whole way that God deals with us humans; as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews put it, “By speaking of a new covenant, God has made the first one old; and anything that becomes old and worn out will soon disappear”. Peter too writes this to his (Christian) readers: “You [not Israel] are the chosen race, the King’s priests, the holy nation, God’s own people, chosen to proclaim the wonderful acts of God, who called you”. Jesus has changed everything.

We’ve thought about some fairly dense theology this morning; I hope that you haven’t “lost the thread” or been bored out of your mind! But you might well be asking, “This is all very theoretical, so where is it taking us?” I’m going to suggest three answers to that question.

The first answer is simply that this idea of covenant means that our commitment or loyalty to God is (or should be) a deeply serious matter. I reminded you last week of Jesus’s invitation for us to “take up our crosses” on a daily basis – something that most of us singularly fail to do! For Jesus is asking for a commitment which goes far beyond coming to church regularly, far beyond mentally affirming a set of beliefs or a Creed – although those are all good things to do! No; he is asking for an unselfish lifestyle in which we place serving him and other people before serving ourselves, an attitude of mind which makes us constantly ask, “How would Jesus approach this issue?”, a willingness to place ourselves in situations which might lead to criticism or worse. I’m not sure I’m prepared for that – yet God, in order to create the New Covenant, gave his Son to be mocked, whipped, unfairly tried and put to death. What should be our response? It’s certainly one that those Scrooby Christians thought deeply about: they had to choose between committing themselves to Jesus, which could mean persecution, exile or death, or ignoring and rejecting his gift of love. Which was it to be?

So covenant, in Christian terms, means the establishment of a mutual commitment between us and God. But, as those Separatists knew very well, it also means establishing a commitment between fellow-believers, creating what today we’d call a “support network”. That phrase doesn’t come in the Scrooby document, but one which does appear in early Separatist declarations was the call for believers to “watch over one another”. What did this mean? Yes, it meant looking to see if anyone in the church was in trouble and seeking to help them in practical ways; but it also meant enquiring about their spiritual condition, encouraging them if they were “down” and upbraiding and correcting them if they were felt to be “going off the rails” or doing things that appeared wrong. This to me suggests a level of fellowship which most of us would resist; we’d say, “I’m not going to tell you how my life is going” and we’d bridle if someone said, “You need to change your ways, they are dishonouring Christ”. Well, we probably value our privacy more than they did – but perhaps they understood what “being church” is better than we do. For they were surely following a New Testament pattern far more closely than we are. “Watching over each other” and bearing each others’ loads may be something we need to learn.                             

Finally, Christians make promises to work together with those in other churches. Here is a typical “statement of intent”, drawn up by two London churches, one Baptist and one Anglican: “In the belief that God’s will is the unity of his Church, we seek to express that unity in the life and work of our two churches. We therefore covenant together to share our life as fully as possible, seeking to do separately only those things we cannot do together and so work for the common good of all people and the greater glory of God”. I don’t know these churches so I have no idea how well these fine-sounding words actually work out; my experience is that, apart from working together on practical projects such as a homeless shelter, a youth event or an Easter walk of witness, it’s far easier to say them than to do them.

This brings me to why I wanted to talk about Covenant today. For some of you will know that, back in 1975, five Christian denominations in Wales made a Covenant which committed them to ultimately form a single Uniting Church. Here in East Cardiff an Ecumenical Area was created; its immediate aim was for the local churches to share ministry and co-ordinate their work. I believe this worked quite well for some years; “Cardiff East” was held up as a model for what could be achieved.

But the hoped-for unity was never achieved, locally or nationally; the enthusiastic people who had set things going moved on, got tired, or died; theological differences were impossible to resolve; and working in this way was too complicated and time-consuming. As the mainline churches aged, declined or closed, and as new churches which had never been part of the project came onto the scene, the grand scheme ran out of steam; Covid possibly dealt it the killer blow. So now, fifty-one years later, it’s being proposed that the Covenant should rest for seven years, with the hope that one day it might be resurrected. This Sunday each year, one week after Trinity and two weeks after Pentecost, was designated as “Covenant Sunday”. I have no idea if any other local churches are marking it; I suspect that we are the only one.

So we finish on something of a downbeat note. For it seems that the covenant which was made so solemnly and hopefully half a century ago has been broken – or at least, allowed to slowly disintegrate. We may know why that happened; but we may need to ask if it should have happened. Then we need to think of the covenant relationships within this church. Those of us who are church members have made public promises of commitment: so are we watching over one another other, bearing each others’ burdens? And what about our individual discipleship, our own faith in God? The courageous, even reckless faith of those Scrooby Christians must surely challenge us.

But this isn’t where we must end. We know that we all fail to keep our promises – but God isn’t like that. As an old chorus says, “His promise is true, he will not forget you”. Let that thought encourage us all.