Passage for reflection: Jeremiah 31: 31 - 34
For me, one of the greatest treasures of Methodism is its annual covenant service, which John Wesley instituted as a new year festival to remind the Methodist people of the promises of God and to ask them to examine their commitment in the light of those promises.
This year, of course, we cannot do the service as we would normally. I had six of them in my diary this month, two of which were sharing the service ecumenically. I’ve had to do two on Zoom, and one on you tube and encourage people to say the prayer at home.
Why is the covenant prayer so important?
The Rev. Dr. Calvin Samuel, preaching on the covenant prayer on Radio 4 in January two years ago said this about what we are doing when we make our covenant promises every year:
“The covenant is an annual attempt to remind ourselves that we belong to God and God to us. One of the striking things about God is that God is revealed in scripture as a covenant making God, a Creator God who chooses to bind himself to his creation in a covenant of love. This is important: we celebrate Covenant Sunday not because we have made a covenant with God but because God has made a covenant with us.”
I want to look at some phrases in the prayer which leap out at me in the midst of another national lockdown.
I am no longer my own, but yours...
We’ve just reminded ourselves that God has come down to us to share all of life with us in Jesus Christ. But in the dark days of January perhaps even more so this year, we soon forget that and we bumble on in our own strength and wonder why it all feels like hard work. We need to know, as we start a year whose beginning we now know will be very difficult, that we are held by a God who never lets us go. We are his, he reaches out to us and never gives up on us.
To know we matter to such a God is vital for our confidence and our wellbeing. John Wesley described the covenant as an “abandonment to divine providence.” Perhaps we need to alongside praying this prayer, rediscover what early Methodists were disciplined in: accountability to each other in a small group. In those groups questions were asked how it had been for folk with God since last they met. They encouraged each other and built each other up. We are now pretty hopeless at talking about what God is up to. But God is still working his purpose out and maybe this prayer each year is a wake up call to us out of our malaise. The gift of God is that we are his people. We came from him, we will return to him, and for now we are made to serve him, being God shaped in our words and actions, and God bearing in our mission.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for you or laid aside for you.
After remembering God’s side of the covenant, there are some hard things for us to think about. Some people avoid the covenant prayer as it is too hard for them and they don’t want to make promises that they can’t keep. I understand that viewpoint. Does God really put us to suffering? Does God really lay us aside? Are we really content he appoint us our place and work, ranking us with whoever he chooses?
Roger Walton tells us that it was suggested to him some years ago, that before you say the covenant prayer you should imagine the words on the lips of Jesus speaking to God for the sake of the world he enters. “I am no longer my own but yours, put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will, put be to doing, put me to suffering…” takes on a new depth of meaning, if you hear these words as the self-surrender of God’s Son to the task before him. Then, when we say the covenant prayer, we are mirroring what God has done. ‘We love because he first loved us’.
Perhaps we can say the prayer confidently only if we are confident in God’s love and grace holding us through whatever happens to us. At the beginning of a year, we instinctively try and have a new start, a wiping of the slate clean, a more positive outlook. The hard thing is to sustain that positive outlook when the tough stuff comes.
We will suffer. Can we find God in that suffering?
We will be brought low. Can we find the resources to cope in those times?
We will be laid aside. That’s a hard thing to cope with.
I remember saying this covenant prayer while off work and getting really upset saying it. But there was a peace and a renewal knowing I might be able to use that laid aside time to be useful in another way. I discovered writing and that writing is ministry. I’m thinking of the church I led the covenant prayer with a year ago at Outwell in the Fens. This was pre pandemic. None of us knew they would sadly make the decision to close never reopening after the first lockdown. We said the prayer in faith. But none of us know what the future would bring.
Maybe you feel laid aside as we enter another period of lockdown which looks like it might be a lengthy one. Maybe our church buildings have been laid aside. Maybe we will be less building centred when we can use them again. Maybe we need to refocus in a time of not being able to do what we want. I’m shielding again and that’s hard. I have to do my ministry differently. I can’t visit people. I can’t shop. I can go for a walk. I’m stuck in and I’m frustrated!!! But God can use this period. He works in us no matter where we find ourselves.
We will be asked to take the yoke of Christ sometimes. Help! A yoke is heavy. But sometimes we need a reminder that genuine Christianity isn’t easy. We may need to stand up for what we believe in. We may need to be in the world more. We may just need to keep going when it’s easier to give up.
And, horror of horrors, we will be ranked with people we’d rather not be ranked with!
To return to Calvin Samuel:
“So, what kind of mad person prays such a covenant prayer? Turns out they’re not so mad after all. Those who pray that prayer recognise that the God whom we worship is a God who calls us into covenant relationship and that in that relationship that we find our true identity and vocation as covenant people.”
The key to not just saying this prayer but living it is a relationship with God. In Wesley’s time the covenant service would be preceded by a period of preparation, including prayer, fasting and exhortation, which helped to underscore the importance of what was taking place. We have lost that. But it’s clear the covenant service was a time of great spiritual blessing as these words from Wesley’s Journal show.
On Sunday 1st January 1775 Wesley wrote: “We had a larger congregation at the renewal of the Covenant than we have had for many years; and I do not know that ever we had a greater blessing. Afterwards many desired to return thanks, either for a sense of pardon, for full salvation, or for a fresh manifestation of his grace, healing all their backslidings.”
Jeremiah saw that a covenant made between God and his people as a radical new beginning because it was mind blowing! It would be written on the heart. Not something to know about but something to know inside you.
The Methodist website helpfully reminds us:
“God's gracious offer to us is therefore simultaneously a challenge. If God is committed to us, are we prepared to accept that as reality and commit ourselves in return to God? Even if we do choose to accept it, how can we manage to live out our commitment adequately, frail and human as we are?”
So it seems to me we need to take time this year to know God’s love and grace more. Let’s be more disciplined in prayer time, let’s open the Bible, let’s talk about what God might want of us. Let’s prepare to be surprised. And when it all seems too much, let’s support each other as the early Methodists in their classes and bands did.
This year we cannot say the covenant prayer together except if we try it unmuted on Zoom. I encourage you after reading this reflection to find a quiet space, read the Jeremiah passage again, think about your call to be faithful and what’s going on for you at the moment, then just pray the prayer as a promise you will do your best and you will turn to God whose grace is all sufficient whatever mess we find ourselves in. In January 2022, I hope we shall be saying the prayer in every different circumstances.
I am no longer my own but yours.
Put me to what you will,
rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing,
put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you,
or laid aside for you,
exalted for you,
or brought low for you;
let me be full,
let me be empty,
let me have all things,
let me have nothing:
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things
to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours. So be it.
And the covenant now made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.'
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