Covenantal Neighborliness

Passage— Exodus 16:2-4

Thank you worship team-- we are so grateful for your talents making worship possible today. 

It’s our third week of our series called “Thank You Notes,” where we are taking a deep dive into exploring what gratitude is and what it means for us in our walk as we are trying to become more like Jesus. Our first week we wrote thank you notes to things that we never have thanked before. 

This past week, we got to thank an air conditioning system that decided to quit on the one day of the week we really wish that it hadn’t. We talked about what it meant to take our feelings of gratitude out of our hearts or minds and put them into the lives of those around us. We asked the question, “when we look at the story of our lives, who is the hero? Is it God or is it ourselves?” You had some fill-in-the-blank work for your tangible homework.

This week we continue our study of “Grateful,” by Diana Butler Bass and move outside of our personal feelings and ethics of gratitude. We are moving into the communal world, the “we,” the group identity that we carry. This is our chance to look at who we are as a people and ask what our corporate identity will be when it comes to gratitude.

The idea I want all of us to hear today is a phrase I never heard of until I studied for this Sunday-- and that idea is “covenantal neighborliness.” This is the idea that as a people who are called by God, in devotion and connection to God we are also called to be neighbors. We are called to be neighbors because of our devotion to God and our neighborliness is what ultimately shows the fruit of our connection to God. We must be neighbors to those on the outside of our congregation and we must be neighbors to those within our congregation.

And our passage this week is decidedly less funny to me than the last chapter of Jonah. This passage is one that can sometimes feel like a repeat of other stories in the bible. Knowing I wanted to talk about a time that Israel complained and not knowing the location in the bible I googled “Israel complains,” and got so many hits for different passages.

Whenever we look back at passages from the bible where people are griping at God, it can be easy to judge those complaining with the gift of perfect retrospect. Whether it’s the disciples or the children of Israel, we are able to see all of the information and so it’s easy to think that the people we are reading about are overreacting. Maybe you’re like me, I always think I would have acted differently. 

Of course, I’m probably wrong. I probably would have also complained along with the rest of Israel. But this one is pretty rich. The children of Israel talk about how much they would have rather stayed in Egypt. Now for those of us who need a refresher on biblical basics: in Egypt, the children of Israel were enslaved persons. They did not have freedom to protect their own children, let alone make their own divisions of what they wanted to eat. This was total and complete oppression, one person to another.

And here they are, free from lifelong bondage and they are complaining. It is hot. They are hungry. Their feet hurt. They look at their rescuers and complain-- they look beyond that all the way to the heavens and blame God for all that God has done for them.

How are we supposed to respond to this narrative? Well of course this passage is here to show us that when we are complaining, we are not alone. It is a human response to the world around us to see how things could be a little bit better. To look at how hard things are for us and say that thing out loud. We are not alone. It is important for us to acknowledge that when we see difficult things in the Bible that we may in fact be seeing things about ourselves that we don’t love.

And of course we know the nature of God through scripture. What is God’s response to these complaints? We see a glimpse of God’s response to our own complaints in our lives-- nothing but deep and powerful generosity. God gives all of Israel exactly what it needs. Perfect and complete sustenance that supplied them for forty years. This is the nature of God-- complaints are met with grace, they are met with love. 

his is the very nature of God, that God will see our lack of faith-- our fear, our uncertainty and our fear of the future and meets it with love and grace.

Our role is to move from the response of the people of Israel towards the response of God. we are a community, much like the people of Israel, and our corporate love of one another must be a reflection of God’s nature to the world around us. It is gratitude that will separate us from the response of the people of Israel and the response of the God of Israel.

In Grateful, Bass talks about the idea of resonance patterns. These are the cultural and societal markes that elicit a certain response from folks. It’s the way that when someone sneezes, we feel the compulsion to say “bless you.” Or when someone says “righty tighty,” you may feel the urge to say “lefty loosey.” 

On a deeper level, these resonance patterns can cause us to feel deep emotions like gratitude. We feel these deep emotions simply because we are a part of a community action. 

My dad, third from the left. Not paying attention.

My dad immigrated to this country, that is him third from the left. My grandfather came to the states, earned some money and then on Halloween day, my dad, mamere and uncles joined papere from Canada. I say it was halloween day because my dad always told me his first English phrase was “trick-or-treat.”

My dad lived as a documented alien (which as a kid always sounded very men-in-black) until I was about 17 or 18 and then he decided to become a citizen. It was great to go to his citizenship ceremony. All of these people from all over the world filled a convention center in Tampa and stood nation by nation and pledged to become American citizens. It was so incredible and there was not one dry eye in the place.

Now, these emotions were not because of any personal accomplishment or success. I wasn’t crying for me, I was instead crying for “we.” You see, all of us were Americans. We shared a nation and a story. It was a moment of a resonance pattern. 

Every Sunday morning, we experience a resonance pattern. We come in those doors, we hug necks, we drink coffee, we sing songs, we find a seat. These are all very normal things, and yet they are rituals that cause us to feel more than an individual. All of us with our different experiences and stories all enter here and become something more than just an individual. I becomes we.

You’ll hear me call us a church family. I say that because we have a unity that is beyond ourselves. I have two sisters whom I love very much. I think they are wonderful and talented people and that has no bearing on how I actually feel about them. You see my love for them goes beyond who they are and is based instead on who we are as a family. It is our shared identity that ties me to them forever.

It is our family identity that ties us together. That is why worship is so vital. It comforts us when things are hard but it also reminds us that we belong to something much bigger than ourselves. I stop being me and I begin to be a part of “we.”

Our passage today shows us how powerful these resonance patterns can be. The children of Israel are at a crossroads and because of their group mentality make the wrong choice. They get angry at God they get angry at Moses. Instead of seeing the easy path towards gratitude they choose to go with group think and instead tell God they wish that they were enslaved again. The resonance pattern is so strong they begin to reminisce about bondage in Egypt.

We can also get caught in this group think. These resonance patterns become powerful things. When we identify ourselves as a part of an family or a group, we can sometimes turn that into an identity that is against everything else. I am a Boston Red Sox fan. Not only does that mean I know the truth that Fenway Park is the closest thing to Heaven this side of eternity, I also know that the New York Yankees are evil.

It’s all fun and games when it comes to sports but that same idea, when applied to other groups further away from us it can become quite destructive. That patriotism that I felt at my dad’s citizenship event? Unchained, this becomes nationalism--this causes us to overlook the needs and hurts in our world. The church family that we have here? When that goes haywire, churches can become country clubs or museums of religious relics. These acts of community can either tear down walls between us or build bigger ones that separate us from people God calls us to love. When we see that the community we are a part of, including this church, is an act of God’s indiscriminate love to all of us, we see that all of the world is invited as well.

Of course, the children of Israel get it wrong. They try their best and it just doesn’t work out. But God continues to show up. And the way that God shows up for them is in a very unlikely way-- it is through the party.

And the people of Israel, they loved a party/ festival. Walter Brueggemann who is an Old Testament scholar with a great last name said that the life of Israel as described in the Hebrew Bible was split into three different festivals. These festivals centered on a communal sense of gratitude. Since all of life for the children of Israel was centered around these festivals, that means that their life was centered around gratitude.

These three festivals were Passover, Booths, and Shuovot. Each of these festivals focused on different aspects of God’s love for us and God’s Divine nature. These festivals also focused on different aspects of our relationship of the world around us.

In Passover, the people of Israel were instructed on the nature of God. This was the festival that helped Israel remember God’s goodness towards them. The people of Israel ate unleavened bread to remember that God saved them and they had to get up and go so fast, the bread didn’t have time to rise. This was their reminder that they had been freed from bondage.

This was also the festival that reminded Israel that they were to be covenantal neighbors to one another and the world around them. Not only were they bound by their love of and obedience to God through their worship of YHWH, they were also tied to their love of neighbor. Because of their covenant to God they had to be good to the person next to them.

In Booths, they were reminded of the laws, rites, and rituals of their faith. This was a festival that was for the people of Israel alone. In this festival they were reminded of God’s sustenance to them in a physical way but also reminded of how God sustained their spirit. If passover reminded the people of Israel to love the neighbors around them, booths reminded them to love the God that saved them. This was the resonance pattern that showed the people of Israel that they were freed from something-- they were freed from death.

In the festival of Shuvot (or Pentecost, sound familiar?) the people of Israel were invited to have joy in the God of Israel. This was the party that everyone was invited to. This was the festival that reminded them of the goodness of the creator-- it was to remind them that they didn’t serve some far off God who didn’t care about them, but rather they served a God who blessed them daily. Not only did this festival remind the people of Israel that they had to be good neighbors, this was a festival that reminded them to go out into the world and invite those neighbors to join the celebration.

We see this reflected in our sacred festivals as Christians, don’t we? We have Christmas which, much like Passover, reminds us of a God that draws near and lives a human life so that we can both know God and be truly known by God. During this festival we give and receive gifts, reminding us that we have been given the greatest gift, which is a relationship with God. During Christmas, we reflect on the work God is doing in our lives and how we can be a part of the work God is doing in the world around us.

In the festival of Easter, we are reminded of our crucified Lord, rising again in the power of life. We are reminded that the whole world is being redeemed through the power of Christ, conquering death. We are also reminded that we ourselves are being redeemed when we choose life over death, through the resurrection of Jesus.

And lastly, and most important for our time together as we talk about gratitude and covenantal neighborliness is the festival of Pentecost. This is when we as followers of Jesus acknowledge, celebrate and remember the Holy Spirit that moves within us. God, manifesting as wind, ushering in new life to the whole world. It teaches us about the work of God in our lives and it causes us to celebrate in gratitude the work God has done already.

It is important for us to have these festivals because they cause us to stop and take account of what we are thankful for but, how are we as a church going to celebrate in gratitude throughout the year? Of course when we hit those festivals we will have celebrations for Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. But how will our weekly resonance patterns reflect the work God is doing in our lives as a community? How will we be different because of what we do here every Sunday morning? I believe that there are a few simple action points that will help us live into this call.

First, like the lessons of Passover and Christmas, we must give as we have received. In our life with Christ we have been given grace-- we must share grace with others. We have been given new life-- we must help others find that new life as well. Our God drew near to us, even taking on human flesh--we must draw near to God by way of spiritual practices. This is the covenant part of covenantal neighborliness.

Second, like in Easter and Booths, we must have a devotion to our own spiritual lives. We must work on this spiritual life we have been given. That means not only participating in worship on Sundays but also having a life of prayer and devotion to God’s word. Being in a small group community and using our gifts are all ways that we can grow in this work. We never need to do these good acts to earn God’s favor, we do these acts so that we can know God and ourselves better.

And lastly, we grow in covenantal neighborliness by going out into the world and sharing the love of God. Through both the Hebrew and Christian celebration of Pentecost, we see that the love of God is worth sharing. Now, I am not telling you to go about handing out tracts and trying to convince people to convert. That is not the work of Pentecost. Instead, I am telling all of us that our work is living in a way that causes people to notice the work God is doing in you. This way of life invites others to join us.

When we become a community marked by gratitude-- when we are marked by covenantal neighborliness and when we experience resonance patterns we become an inviting church. Our worship becomes infectious, we have a story worth sharing and more and more people join us.

No one joins a church because they read a tract or lose some intellectual argument. People come to church because they see the work of God in our lives and they want to be a part.

And so my tangible work for all of us is rather simple and it is much more difficult. Who in your life is receiving covenantal neighborliness? Who is being invited to the work of our church through your actions and the work God is doing in your life?

When we worship, we share in a resonance pattern. You may have seen in some of our social media posts the phrase “it’s better when you’re here.” This has been something I have said over the years in ministry as a point of invitation. I tell everyone I can that it is better when they are here because it is. Worship is a point where I become we. This is our chance to grow in community, one to another and to grow closer to God in the process. So my prayer for all of us is that become a people of invitation. Good neighbors living in such a way that the whole world seeks to be a part.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Let’s pray.

Almighty God who came down from heaven to dwell among us-- help us to know you more.

Holy Spirit who came to us as a mighty rushing wind-- change our hearts and fill us with your fire.

King Jesus who conquered death through the power of Divine Love-- show us new life and life until the full.

Make this church a place of covenantal neighborliness, that the whole world might become your Kingdom. Use all of these ten acres to transform all of creation. 

In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.