Trinity Presbyterian Church

2200 North Bell Avenue # Denton, Texas 76209

Rev. Craig Hunter

March 8, 2009

Contracts and Covenants

Scriptures: Romans 4:13-25; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

A doctor and a lawyer go golfing. On one of the holes, the doctor gets hit on the head with a wild ball. An apologetic golfer rushes over and asks the doctor how he is. The doctor begins to say that he's fine when the lawyer interrupts, "He has a huge lump on his head. We want five thousand dollars or we'll sue." The golfer responds, "But I yelled 'fore!'" At which point, the lawyer says, "We'll take it."

Then there is the joke about how many lawyers it takes to change a light bulb. The answer is three -- one to turn the bulb, one to shake the ladder, and the third to sue the ladder company.

Lawyer jokes seem to be some of the most popular around. There are webpages full of them. They rank right up there with blonde jokes in terms of their prevalence and popularity. What makes these jokes funny is that they play on the stereotype of lawyers as self-interested swindlers willing to do whatever it takes to maximize their own profit. That reminds me of the joke about an associate working at a law firm late one night. Suddenly there was a burst of light and Satan stepped out of the smoke and said, "I understand you'd give absolutely anything to become a partner. So I've come to make you an offer. I'll make you a partner, but in return I will take the souls of your wife, your parents, your children, and all of your friends." The lawyer looked strangely puzzled and thought hard for several moments. Finally he turned to Satan and said, "What's the catch?"

Seriously, though, these perceptions are deeply entrenched in the American consciousness. A CBS/New York Times poll reported over a decade ago that 70 percent of respondents agreed that "lawyers encourage too many lawsuits in order to make money for themselves." How closely this perception mirrors the truth, I cannot say, but it certainly wasn't a good sign when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger said a few decades ago, "The entire legal profession . . . [has] become so mesmerized with the stimulation of the courtroom contest that we tend to forget that we ought to be healers -- healers of conflicts. . . Healers, not warriors . . . Healers, not hired guns."

Blaming the lawyers isn't entirely fair, however, because the problem is more widespread than that. The problem is with society as a whole. The United States is a uniquely litigious society, we are ready to sue each other at the drop of a hat. Our culture must look strange to foreign eyes. While the United States has well over a million lawyers, Japan, with a population about 40 percent of ours, has about 2 percent of our number of lawyers, namely around 20,000. In Europe, only Germany has more than 100,000 lawyers, and even Germany's ratio of lawyers to its general population is less than half of ours.

It isn't these numbers themselves that are the problem, it is what they suggest about our obsession with litigation. A Newsweek article several years ago talked about declining numbers of slides and seesaws from children's parks because of concerns about bankruptcy in case of lawsuits. Teachers can't hug children anymore for fear of being sued for sexual misconduct. It is not that there aren't real threats, but a common sense balance seems to have been lost. You remember the case of the woman who sued McDonald's after spilling coffee on herself, claiming it was too hot? She won over half a million dollars, and now McDonald's coffee cups carry the warning, this cup contains an extremely hot beverage. The resultant fear of litigation has many costs, as people sometimes avoid helping each other for fear of being sued. There was the case of the medical graduate, a week away from receiving her doctor's license, who didn't come to the help of a badly injured accident victim for fear of being sued for practicing without a license. And the Quarterly Journal of Economics estimated that $50 billion dollars a year are spent on medical treatments and tests that are done primarily as a safeguard in case of potential lawsuit.

Former Vice President Dan Quayle spoke to the problem years ago when he said, "We have become a crazily litigious country. Today a baseball comes crashing through a window, and instead of picking it up and returning it to the neighbor whose kid knocked it through -- and who pays the glazier's bill in a reasonable, neighborly way -- the "victim" hangs on to the ball as evidence and sues the neighbor. (Or the baseball's manufacturer. Or the glassmaker. Or usually all three.) Several lawyers are soon billing hours, and the civil docket has been crowded by one more pointless case that's probably going to be part of the 92 percent of cases that are settled before they come to trial -- but not before a huge amount of time and money has been wasted on everything from "discovery" to picking a jury that will be discharged before it ever deliberates this case that shouldn't have gotten started in the first place. In America, we now sue first and ask questions later."

I am reminded of my experience earlier this year of being summoned for jury duty. Forty prospective jurors all spent about two hours in the selection process for one case. The six selected for the jury were required to give a further morning of their time. By the time the whole process was over, I estimate close to 200 man-hours were spent trying the weighty matter of whether a young woman was indeed going 42 miles an hour in a 30 mile per hour zone on Bonnie Brae.

The problem of our litigious society is not merely a political or sociological one, it is a spiritual one as well. It suggests a certain perspective on relationships. The self-interested ones willing to do almost whatever it takes to maximize their own profit or self-worth -- well, that is us. We tend to view relationships through the lens of the question, "What do I get out of it?" Relationships are often implicitly understood in terms of a contract or exchange -- I will give this, and get that. It is kind of a tit for tat view of things. When the contract is broken, or the items no longer needed, the relationship comes to an end. Even when we think we are giving something freely, usually there are ulterior motives at work -- we give because it makes us feel better, because of a hope of getting something in return, etc.

I can't help but think I detect this contractual view of relationships in some of the celebrity marriages that make the tabloids. The marriages are as transitory as morning mist, they disappear as quickly as chocolate almond ice cream from my freezer. It is almost as if some of them have a "Spouse of the Year." When there is no longer a favorable balance of trade in the relationship, one disinvests from the other more quickly than one sells falling stock. Nor is this only true among some celebrities -- I read this week about an Indiana woman who married 23 times. She almost literally had a different husband every year.

Theologian Miroslav Volf describes our culture in this way: "We live in a culture in which, yes, extraordinary generosity does happen. But at the same time, that culture is largely stripped of grace. It's not a gracelessness that's necessarily apparent at first glance, but it nonetheless underlies so many of our interactions. If I were to say that everything is sold and nothing is given, that would be an exaggeration. But like any good caricature, it distorts reality in order to draw attention to what is characteristic. Mainly, we're set up to sell and buy, not to give and receive. We tend to give nothing free of charge and receive nothing free of charge. (from Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge) "The person who volunteers time, who helps a stranger, who agrees to work for a modest wage out of a commitment to the public good, who desists from littering even when no one is looking . . . begins to feel like a sucker," wrote Robert Kuttner in Everything for Sale." "

This contractual, tit for tat, maximizing self-worth perspective on relationships is present in the church as well. Commitment to church communities isn't what it should be, as all too often people jump ship at early signs of distress, when the pastor changes or when the programs no longer "meet their needs." We are called to share with the community of faith and beyond as a response to God's generosity, but if we do it at all, we often do it out of expectation of getting something in return. Even in our relationship with God, we are often self-seeking, we give ourselves to God with the hope of getting something back. Maybe it is success or health, maybe it is clarity of mind or peace of spirit, but our relationship with God is not immune.

I am not saying that what we desire is wrong, or that a contractual view of relationships is always bad. Quite the contrary, sometimes we do need to maintain our boundaries, to guard our interests, to change relationships when those relationships have become toxic. Giving with the hope of getting something in return is generally better than not giving at all, but we delude ourselves if we think that we are doing so out of pure motives. I tend to think that for most of us, most of the time, far from being too committed to others, our problem is generally that we are too centered on ourselves. We would do well to learn from that oft-married Indiana woman, now 68 years and alone, who gives this advice to others: "Just get married the once, and stay married." It seems she has learned what we have a hard time learning ourselves, the paradox that when you are in it for yourself, when you are out to maximize your self-worth, you end up all the poorer.

Fortunately, there is another way. It is the primary way God relates to us. It is a way of relating that is not based on tit for tat. The word that embodies this way of relating starts with the letter "c," but it isn't contracts. The word is . . . anyone? Covenant. Say it with me now. Covenant. Our Biblical text from Genesis this morning uses this word repeatedly, four times in the first eight verses of the chapter. God speaks to Abram, an old man by any measure, ninety-nine years old. God speaks to him and chooses to bless him. "I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God." God doesn't enter into this relationship with Abram to maximize God's self-worth -- such an idea is ludicrous, it makes no sense. Abram cannot give to God anything God needs or does not already possess. Rather, God chooses to be in relationship with Abram, God chooses to bless him, so that . . . in order to . . . because . . . well, because that's just who God is. God is a God who gives. God is a God who gives in a way that we do not. Through God's covenant, God promises to be faithful in a way that we never could. God promises not to give up on Abram and his descendants, to walk with them, to call them back to the path when they go astray or to make their crooked roads straight. God promises to give, and when those gifts have been used or discarded, to give again, and again, heedless of the cost to Godself.

Another word for God's covenant, a New Testament word that captures much of the same idea, is the word grace. God gives it freely. As Christians, we see God's covenantal way of relating,

God's grace, above all in the person and work of Jesus Christ. In Jesus, we see God's gift not to one people only, but to all people everywhere. Not just any gift, but the timeless gift of God's self. Through Christ's solidarity with humanity in his life and his crucifixion, we see what God's free gift to us costs God, we learn what love is.

Receiving this free gift isn't free. The paradox is that the more we understand the freedom of the gift, the more we will feel its demands upon us, the more the gift marks us and changes us. After all, in receiving the gift of the covenant, Abram's identity changed, he was no longer the same, he became Abraham. Lent is a time for us to reflect upon those demands, a time for us to prayerfully consider how God calls us to follow Christ in showing love to our neighbors.

We live in a world in which contractual, tit for tat relationships are still sometimes necessary, but following Christ means seeking to transform more of our relationships into covenantal relationships. It means seeking to discern and participate in the work of the Holy Spirit in our midst. These covenantal relationships go against the grain in a tit for tat world, they look kind of crazy, and we look a bit like suckers. But I suppose our God is a sucker God.

We see this kind of holy, covenantal relationship in the Biblical story of Ruth and Naomi. Upon the death of her husband, Ruth is no longer bound to Naomi, her mother-in-law, she is free to go her own way, but rather than going her separate way, she hitches her life to that of Naomi, even going to a foreign land, saying, "Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die -- there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!" That, my friends, is a covenantal relationship.

I see glimpses of that same kind of relationship in a church member who regularly visits another church member in a nursing home. The woman in the nursing home has severe Alzheimer's, she is not able to recall that she is even a church member, yet the visitor comes by week after week, month after month, it makes no sense, she gets nothing visible from it, you can't see how it maximizes her self-worth, but she visits anyway, year after year, as if she impossibly encounters within this woman with Alzheimer's the presence of God. Which I suppose she does.

You get a glimpse of covenantal relationship in companies that, when faced with difficult economic times, do not lay off their workers at the first sign of trouble, but that hold out to the last possible moment, and see their relationship with their employees as more than a mere financial one.

You get a glimpse of covenantal relationship in the Covenant Network of our denomination. This network, of which Trinity is a part, is committed to working for the full inclusion and ordination of gays and lesbians. but at the same time covenants to remain a part of the denomination no matter what.

You get a glimpse of covenantal relationships in countless marriages across the world, where one spouse cares for another day in and day out. They don't do it for their own personal sake. They do it because -- well, that's just what love does. It gives.

I pray that you and I may know that giving, that we might know it from the inside. May God give you a glimpse of covenantal relationship in your life this week. May you participate in one.