ABC BREAKFAST FEBRUARY 2, 2008

Kate Harvey, Executive Director, Ministers Council

As we left the concluding plenary of the magnificent New Covenant Baptist Celebration days I was speaking with someone about the hope of genuine Baptist cooperation on Jesus’ agenda of justice and peace for all. “I hope it works,” she said; and then immediately she amended her words to,” We have our work cut out for us.”

You hear the distinction. The first comment is a passive expectation that someone else somewhere else will implement all the hopes of the gathering. The second puts responsibility where it must be, on all of us who hade been drawn by Jesus’ call on our lives to gather with Baptist sisters and brothers from many different bodies for the sake of the covenant that binds us.

As Baptists, covenant is our language. Covenant is nothing new. Now we have been here these days to celebrate a New Baptist Covenant. We know that covenant is actually ancient and is initiated by God not by any human beings, but it is we human beings who honor covenant in our relationships with one another and thereby operationalize its demands. It is the day that is new, that calls for new ways for us to honor God’s old covenant. Relationships are the glue that hold covenant together and give it life.

You know, we gather for an event such as this, and exciting as it is to hear renowned speakers, where the pleasure and the possibility lie is in the reunion with old friends and the meeting of new – a foretaste of heaven here and now through relationships that begin right here and extend there. Then we go home where everyday realities press in on us, and the potential of a new thing begins to fade. But home is where the rubber hits the road, where relevant changes are awaiting our action, where relationships can forge new pathways.

Right now before we head back home, after the buzz of a zillion Baptists, we are here, just us, American Baptist Churches family, to focus on what we take from here and what we will do there. Around these tables this morning we share a meal and conversation to inform our going home to further the vision of these days.

I have a suggestion for you: the Ministers Council offers Together in Ministry grants for the formation of collegial covenant groups, the resources to bring together groups of colleagues back home. Why not seize the opportunity to strengthen old relationships and create new ones shaped around God’s call on our lives, for the sake of God’s old covenant lived out in this new day? The Valley Forge Ministers Council is doing just that through discussion luncheons on Brian McLaren’s new book Everything Must Change. I invite you to visit the Ministers Council website for information on how you might form your own group at home to focus on covenant.

Max Stackhouse has a new book called God and Globalization, in which he says that of all the elements that comprise a covenant, three are especially relevant for this globalized, postmodern world:

1. Who is in?

2. By what rules are we called to live?

3. What is the point of it all?

1. Who is in? As Deuteronomy 4 ff. at the covenant renewal ceremony in the time of the Josiah reforms has it: “Not only with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant but with all of us here this day.” In other words, all of us who have accepted the invitation are in.

2. The rules? Moral commitments that bring into being a whole world of justice and peace, in this new time when globalization both multiplies our power to wreak havoc to the ends of the earth but also allows us far more than ever to know our sisters and brothers everywhere.

3. And what is our purpose? To bring into being things not yet realized, for the sake of a new beginning that creates the end to which God is calling us.

This morning as we share a meal around these tables we also have the opportunity to share with one another as that special breed called American Baptists who we are and by what commitments we seek to live together, for the sake of God’s dream realized. And then we go back home to be the change we hope to see.

Let us pray:

God of all that we cherish and so much more than we know: always you summon us to a table to pour out blessing upon your whole beloved world, and we are grateful.

You summon us to the table of Jesus Christ, where we receive grace that over and around us lies every second of our lives and before and beyond, eternally.

You summon us to the tables where we roll up our sleeves to partner with one another and with you in the hard work of developing and implementing plans and policies that your dream of a world made whole and holy shall be so.

You summon us to the table at the end of time, the great marriage supper of the Lamb, where the Church is the Bride: every tribe, people, language and nation, all of us together united in love and celebrating the consummation of your covenant with us.

You summon us to these tables, where you feast us and fill us with good food and with family relationships, the ties that bind, the glue that holds covenant together and gives it life.

For all your blessings we thank you, committing ourselves even as we receive to pass them on to the ends of earth and time.

We make this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, who came that it shall be so. Amen.