(Note: Today’s guest blogger is our very own Rev. Celie Katovitch. We are grateful that she said “yes” again this year to contributing during Lent. I always love her wisdom and uplift. Thanks, Rev. Celie!)
Readings: GN 17:3-9; JN 8:51-59
I like the word “covenant” a lot. It’s a type of promise we make: a commitment we enter into.
Some commitments, we enter into with a CONTRACT. We sign one of those when we buy a house, start employment at a new job, or make a business agreement. A COVENANT is also a binding promise— but one made not out of legality, but out of love. Instead of signing on a dotted line, it’s an inner pledge of the heart. Instead of being about goods and services exchanged, it is about a relationship: a promise to love one another and stick together, through joys and sorrows, agreement and disagreement, ups and downs.
Marriage is a covenant. Friendship is a covenant. Belonging to a spiritual community is a covenant. In ways spoken and unspoken, we promise to accompany each other, not because we have to, or to “get” something out of it, but because this is what love calls us to do. What are the covenants in your life?
The first two readings speak of God making a covenant with humanity. God promises to stay with human beings, no matter what. Even death cannot separate us, as Jesus points out in the Gospel. We are always connected to God; and we have that connection in common with every person who has ever lived, or will live in the future. Jesus dares to say that in God, everyone is alive— from ancestors as distant as Abraham, to future generations decades away from yet being born on earth. God’s love transcends time; it gathers up the past, the future, AND the present in one big healing embrace. This is a mystery… but it makes me think of something Robert Frost said. Someone once asked him, in a world with as much war and chaos as ours, did he have hope for the future? In response, the great poet replied: “Yes, I have hope for the future. And I even have hope for the past.”
This bears repeating, I think. We can have hope for the future—and even hope for the past.
“I have hope for the past,” Frost said, “that it will all turn out to have been all right for what it was. Something I can accept. Mistakes made by the self I had to be, or was not able to be.”
In God’s time, all healing is possible. Death is not the end; even the wounds of past generations can be soothed; and the future is always open. Nothing is lost. As Richard Rohr says, “everything belongs.”
4 Comments
Theresa Tensuan-Eli
Such a beautiful reflection, Rev. Celie and precisely the words that I needed to start today; will be sharing these with the prayer group this morning and sending much love and appreciation to you and to Mike for providing us with this through line throughout Lent – mahal kita! Theresa (in Ardmore, PA)
Barb Simmons
I love the line, “God’s love transcends time; it gathers up the past, the future, AND the present in one big healing embrace.” As I approach the final chapters of my life, (I definitely have read more pages than I have left to read), I think about the world that will be left for my grandchildren. Will unaddressed climate change destroy the planet, will the wealth gap continue to widen so that poor become even poorer (if that is even possible) while the wealthy fly around in weird space ships? But then I remind myself of how much good is in the world and how hope and the love of God will see us through. We don’t have to understand everything that happens, but faith does teach us to trust. God embraces all of us, even the non believers. As Frost talks about hope even for the past, I see how time has a way of softening the mistakes and hardships that I have faced. What was a difficulty at the time turned out to be that blessing in disguise. I have had regrets and made mistakes, but also grew and learned from them. The past can’t be changed but we can decide how we go forward. Living with regret stifles us. Thank you for this reflection Rev. Celie. Thank you, too, Mike for your faithful daily delivery of Lenten messages into our inbox.
Kathleen Hanford
Thank you. Your words always warm my soul.
Francene C McCarthy
I love the word covenant and also Robert Frost’s words. I love that there is hope in the past and also in the future. It makes our covenant with God so perfect and so beautiful because either way we go, we have hope, we have love, we are one, we are at peace. Thank you, Rev. Celie for your beautiful words.
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