What a Covenant

1 Samuel 17:55-18:9; Hosea 11:1-4, 8

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

18 August 2024

               David is fresh from his victory over the giant Goliath.  King Saul wants him for his armor bearer.  The women of the land sing victory songs celebrating David.  And Prince Jonathan falls in love with him. 

            If he looked anything like Michelangelo imagined him, then it’s easy to understand why everyone wanted David.

            The love between Jonathan and David has long inspired the imagination.  It begins in this scene but continues through quite a few others, until Jonathan’s death in battle, and David’s great outpouring of grief upon hearing the news.

            Reading their words of love and affection for one another, it strains credulity to read this story as anything other than some form of same-sex love.  What they have is clearly an emotional bond, transcending any political arrangement between the two young heroes.

            At minimum, their affection became the model of friendship in Christian theology.  Aelred of Rievaulx, the medieval Scottish monk who wrote the classic work on Spiritual Friendship, sites Jonathan and David for his model of friendship that “is the medicine of life.”  Aelred wrote that a true friend is someone worthy to be “the companion of your soul, to whose spirit you join and attach yours.”  With a spiritual friend you hide nothing, fear nothing, but fully entrust yourself.  Aelred writes that with a spiritual friend “you wish to become one instead of two.”

            The late Ted Jennings, who preached here once, wrote of Jonathan and David that they became “the very paradigm for all love.”  He also believes the story reveals a radical change in the culture of ancient Israel.  What we have in the books of Joshua, Judges, and First Samuel is evidence of a warrior culture.  One rises to prominence through feats of bravery on fields of battle.  But David himself represents a shift from a warrior culture to a new image of masculinity and a new culture.  Yes, he’s a military victor, but he’s also celebrated as a poet and musician, and he reveals a vulnerability.

            Part of what Ted Jennings sees in this story of Jonathan removing his armor and giving it to David is “the abolition of male rivalry on the basis of love.”  Jonathan is the prince, while David is the youngest son of the king’s servant Jesse.  David has no status in the social hierarchy.  Yet, Jonathan surrenders his privilege and treats David as an equal. 

            One could imagine the young prince, himself already a military hero, viewing this new young man David with jealousy, as an upstart and a threat to his succession.  But Jonathan is not like that.  Even when it becomes clear that David will one day be king instead of himself, Jonathan never gives up his affection for David.  In fact, Jonathan seems to play a part in helping to assure David’s rise to prominence and power.

            And in that way, they are shifting from a warrior culture based on hierarchy and power to a more equitable version of society and one based on relationships.

            This change is represented in the covenant that Jonathan and David make with one another.  A commitment to each other.  The commitment clearly is emotional and involves affection.  But it also includes their support for and protection of one another.  And it persists, such that later in life, when David is king, he provides for the surviving son of Jonathan and makes him part of his household.

            The Bible is full of covenants.  Some are between people, like this one between David and Jonathan or the pledge that Ruth makes to her mother-in-law Naomi, which I preached about at the beginning of this summer sermon series.  Many of the covenants are between God and individual people.  Like God’s promise to Hagar that she will give birth to a mighty nation.  Or to Sarah that she will have a son in her old age.  There’s God’s promise to all creation, given after the flood, never to destroy the Earth again with water.  And mostly importantly the covenant between God and the people of Israel that shapes so much of the Old Testament.

            The idea of a covenant between God and the people seems to first be spoken by the prophet Hosea, in passages like the one read earlier.  Hosea models the relationship between God and the people upon the commitment that a couple makes when they get married. 

            Yesterday, we celebrated a wedding.  Jake Sharpe, who grew up in this church, married Maives in a beautiful and joyous ceremony.  And I talked about how their love is a sign of God’s love for all of us.  A connection first made in the prophecies of Hosea.

            And this idea of covenant shaped the people of Israel.  Jacob L. Wright, whose book I’ve been teaching in First Forum the last month, talks about how the Hebrew scriptures were a project in forming a people.  That when Israel and Judah lost their kings, nations, and temples, they had to identify other ways to be a people.  And so they created the book we know as the Bible.  And they taught people to read, so they could pass on the stories and laws and study them. 

            And central to this project of peoplehood was the idea of covenant.  That the people covenant with one another and with God.  And the lesson is that if they are to thrive, then they must build a just and righteous society together, by following the laws of God.

            This Old Testament idea of covenant has also deeply shaped who we are as a Christian people in the United Church of Christ.  In the very back of the red pew Bibles is a brief description of who we are in the United Church of Christ and core expressions of what we commonly believe.  Under the discussion of “responsible freedom,” it says, “we are called to live in a loving, covenantal relationship with one another.”  And later it makes clear that our freedom and autonomy as individuals and congregations is  “constrained by love to live in a covenantal relationship” with each other so that the unity of the church can be manifest and God’s mission to the world can be carried out more effectively.

            The idea of covenant is central to all the various streams that joined to form the United Church of Christ.  Covenant language is there in the writings and commitments of our Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors on the Congregationalist side.  The Christian churches, often formed on the frontier of American settlement, emphasized the freedom to associate with one another in commitments of love.  The Reformed Church of German immigrants developed a “close-knit denominational life” in order to support each other’s ministries.  The German Evangelical churches emphasized how the covenant should focus on the mission God is calling us to.  And, the Afro-Christian stream was always communal and justice-oriented, rooted in African ideas of kinship and family.  Yvonne Delk writes that from the Afro-Christian perspective “Covenant can be seen as a way of giving gifts and receiving gifts.”  In fact, that’s why we are here as human beings, she writes, “because you are, I can be also.”

            Randi Walker, one of our UCC historians, writes that the merging of these streams meant that our denomination arrived at an understanding of the church as “the beloved community of followers of Christ, gathered by the Holy Spirit into covenant communion with each other and with Christ, for the purpose of carrying out God’s mission.”

            And in this local congregation, we have covenanted with each other to “pray for hearts that open, minds that understand, and lives that serve.”

            Wilda Gafney, in her commentary on the Jonathan and David story, writes that this language of covenant “invite[s] us to think about the full personhood of each person” and, thus, “we [Christians] are able to imagine and shape a world where we engage people as equal across gender, culture, and ethnic lines as we covenant together to build a world that reflects the love of the gospel.”

            What a covenant!