Text: Jeremiah 31.33. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people.

Scripture lessons: Jeremiah 31.31-34; Luke 1.68-79

We are gathered here today to respond to the gracious call of God to bind us into a new fellowship with Him and with one another. It is a new covenant that God makes with us as representatives of his churches in many lands; and like his faithful people of old, without repudiating the God of our fathers, we today enter into a new relationship made broader and deeper by the variety in our pasts. We believe that all of us will be enriched by our separate traditions now brought into a new process of mutual enrichment which, under the divine blessing that we claim, will produce, we are confident, new fruits and flowers of our new obedience. At the end and climax of this uniting service we mark the new covenant by the holy sacrament distributed to all about one table, receiving bread and wine, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, broken and shed for us, by which sacrifice our sins are forgiven and we become in a new and renewed sense God's own people.

It was a rather daring choice that I made when I decided to preach to you on this occasion from the 3ISt Chapter of the prophet Jeremiah the 33rd verse which reads: "But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people".

It is a daring claim to make that this ancient and central promise of God, directed by his prophet Jeremiah to his people Israel, may be related and directed to us who are gathered here. It is, I recognize, a further boldness for us to talk together about a covenant to a people many of whose fathers in the faith used this concept as central in their theological teaching and others whose ancestors sacrificed their lives and fortunes in their loyalty to their political covenant against a tyranny which they believed had usurped the very crown rights of Jesus Christ himself.

Furthermore, the idea of covenant has such a long and varied history in the rites and religions of peoples both primitive and sophisticated that it could easily lead us into dead-end roads from which we have been rescued, our feet having been placed upon the very highway of God and His salvation.

Nevertheless, I have dared to choose this text and in its interpretation I make three points (In the number of my points, three, you doubtless note that I am most traditional and not daring at all).

Covenant written upon our hearts

The very word covenant is a dangerous word because its common use from ancient times even until now is connected with legal and binding agreements with penalties for their infraction. And if there has been a common and recurring weakness of the Christian tradition our particular churches represent, it has been a tendency towards legalism both in theology and ethics. Together with Israel and with the Roman Catholic Church, our reformed and Presbyterian theology has again and again tended to distort and limit God and his will for man by attempting to put into legal systems truth that is better expressed in liturgy and worship, and to put into abstract rationality and logic insights and values better expressed in poetry and music.

It is for this reason that I speak today not academically about covenant theology, perhaps the most sophisticated theological system developed by any of the Protestant reformers, but rather about the "covenant idea" which, although our fathers in the faith emphasized it more than any other Christian tradition, nevertheless is hared by all Christians. Among the early fathers Irenaeus in the east and Augustine in the west made use of the idea of God's covenants and nowhere in Christendom was the biblical concept of covenant entirely lost. But our fathers in the faith contributed to the division of the church by pushing the legal covenant so far that we have needed our separated brethren to help us back to the central understanding of the divine revelation.

Having said this much to avoid any suspicion of reformed or Presbyterian or congregational triumphalism) let us note the contribution to Christianity made by the emphasis of the "covenant idea" in our tradition.

So long as we emphasize the insight of the prophet Jeremiah of the internal covenant) written in our hearts) and do not allow ourselves to become entangled in the external Pharisaism either of the Mosaic code of law or modern canon law or moral casuistry whether Catholic or Protestant) our tradition of the covenant has at this moment of history a spiritual contribution to make to all Christians and all Christian churches.

Professor. James Hastings writes: "Covenant theology... expressed the difference between a God whose purpose was known and whose character could be trusted) and a God whose nature was mysterious and whose actions were unpredictable." I submit) at this moment of human history) this kind of knowledge of and confidence in God is what is most deeply needed in the church of Jesus Christ.

Please let us be precise. There is infinite mystery which clothes and enfolds Christian faith in God and we cannot fathom that mystery in any of our theological systems; but the revelation of God in Jesus Christ has made available to us a God to worship and to serve "whose purpose is known and whose character can be trusted.

In a day of vast increase of ever more complicated knowledge and of rapid change from hallowed ancient customs) it is precisely the God whose nature and character may be known and trusted through Jesus Christ that alone remains the basis of expectant faith in troubled times. It is that internal covenant written on the heart that has produced the recognizable saints in our tradition as it has produced such recognizable saints in all other Christian traditions even though their dogmatic formulations have been a matter of dispute for centuries.

God is the sovereign and gracious author of the covenant

I am very well aware of the fact that in the Old Testament biblical revelation there are two kinds of covenant that can be distinguished: namely God's covenant which is unconditional (Noah"s rainbow and the promise to Abraham for example) and God's covenant which has the condition of obedience. (His covenant with Moses and with David, for example.)

It is clear that the new covenant relationship which it is proposed to initiate in this service of union and communion is one of the second category, that is to say: unless we and our churches are obedient to it, we can claim from it no blessing from God.

But it would be a grave mistake for us to think of the covenant we make before God this day as a bond which we have initiated. In the biblical sense God is always the sovereign and gracious author of any covenant. It is as God's servants we are gathered here. It is in response to His initiative in our own times that we dare to do this new thing together.

It might be thought to be "carrying coals to Newcastle" for an ecumenical representative to emphasize the unilateral grace of the sovereign God to a company of Christians who have so largely been influenced in their theology by John Calvin and Karl Barth.

But as one of that tradition with you, I remind you that this emphasis continues to be important in the whole church just because it is the pride and arrogance of human sin which continues to resist God as creator and God as saviour. Man in his sin resists being a creature and his pride entices him to believe that he can save himself.

And although I do not belittle the amount of work and effort which the leaders of our churches and of the Council and Alliance have contributed to bring us to this happy day, nevertheless, it is important that all of us confess that it is God the father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has called us together to be manifestly one people by means of the covenant which we believe He has initiated. This is important not only for this occasion but becomes even more important for our understanding of the ecumenical movement as a whole and our participation in it.

It is unfortunately true that the ecumenical movement is understood by many "grass roots" Christians as being the doings of some of the leaders of all the churches - "the ecumenical jet ". They use the expression "ecumaniacs" to distinguish ecumenists from ordinary normal Christian people. No attitude could be farther from the truth.

The fact is that God has been clearly acting upon us in our time. It is true that the most widely known ecumenists are many of the leaders of our churches. But it is also true that the great and overwhelming majority of committed ecumenists are lay men and women, young people in our churches who grow increasingly impatient with the slowness of their pastors and leaders to act ecumenically in response to what God has been doing in these past decades. I dare to say to you that God is the leader of the ecumenical movement and its initiator. It was God by the Holy Spirit who made John Mackay ecumenical even coming, as he did, out of the strictest sect of the Presbyterians. It was God who made John Marsh ecumenical even though he is a leader of a minority church in England. And it was God who made the good Pope John XXIII an ecumenical leader when hardly anyone Catholic or Protestant could believe that any Pope could transcend his Roman Catholic tradition and position.

Let me then repeat my point. It is our faith that God in his sovereign grace is calling his whole people, Congregational, Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, Baptist, Orthodox and Roman Catholic into a new covenant relation to Him. What we do here today must be understood by us all as a step towards that unity and renewal of our churches which is his will and not initially our design.

So it is right and proper that when we repeat our covenant of union today we include in it these words "acknowledging Jesus Christ as head of the church, and rejoicing in our fellowship with the whole church, covenant together to seek in all things the mind of Christ..."

God's covenant requires of us a celebration of joy and hope

We European and North American Puritans and Presbyterians are a notably solemn, not to say stuffy people. Most of us are more at home in rational discussion than we are in joyous celebration. That is one reason I am very glad that the setting for this new covenant is in Africa where we may hope that these once daughter churches of our missions, now sister churches in this Alliance, may increasingly give to our fellowship forms of joyful celebration that we, reformed of the North Atlantic community, have somewhere lost in the several centuries of our separate history.

Let me use a very personal illustration. When I was a theological student being taught how to preach (not too successful a course I have always feared) the Professor of Elocution tried to teach us how to make graceful and free gestures as we preached. But perhaps you will have noticed that my arms have been chiefly hanging at my sides during this sermon up till now. It was not the professor's fault. He taught us how to make a sweeping gesture, the hand following the fully outstretched arm -like this and not like this. He warned us against pointing the finger like a dogmatic school teacher. But partly because of a changing style of public speaking and partly because of my cultural inhibitions, I have never gestured much. But all of us, preachers and congregation, need to learn to move our bodies, to stretch our arms, to sing and shout: to celebrate. You've been sitting quietly for some time. Let's do it now! Lift up your hands -as high as you can reach. Let's shout out "Praise God" - louder, "Praise God".

We need to break out of our stiff formalities. The Hallelujahs and Amens need to be loud, the hymns really sung and the physical actions, whether a handshake, a salaam, or an embrace must be open and truly represent physically the inner spirit. And when we come to the sacrament, let us with outward signs truly exhibit the inward and spiritual grace. Let us really and freely give the "peace" to another.

But we need not only celebration (which I have been talking about) but a particular kind of celebration -a celebration of Joy and Hope. Oliver Cromwell sent a message to his daughter through Fleetwood, his son-in-law, in these words: "Bid her be cheerful and rejoice in the Lord, once and again, if she knows the covenant, she cannot but do so".

We know the covenant. Let us this day rejoice in it. And as we approach the eucharist let us come with thankful hearts for God and his Gift and his gifts in Jesus Christ, looking forward to resurrection and hope even as we remember the cross and suffering.

For this is the good news from God. This is the New covenant that God writes upon our hearts today. This is the blessing in which we rejoice in hope and joy.

"Blessed be the Lord God of Israel
for he has visited and redeemed his people...
as He spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old...
to perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant...
that we being delivered from the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear...
and you child will be called the prophet of the most high...
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our way into the way of peace."
Amen.