Our first reading this morning (Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18) sounds like it has walked out of a Damian Hurst exhibition at Tate Modern. Abram takes a collection of animals, cuts them in two before carefully arranging them on the ground as if they have fallen apart where they stood. A smoking fire-pot and a flaming torch pass between the pieces. There is no hint of a vegetarian alternative, though for some reason the birds are spared, but the heifer, the goat and the ram ‘gets it’. What is this about?

It appears to be some kind of covenant ceremony; a ritual act of making a covenant. The point of the symbolism is that if we break the bond we become like those animals, split in two and separated from our other half; our vital organs are divided and cease to function, such is the strength of the bond that is being created. A covenant is something much deeper than a contract.

In a contract the various parties come together for a particular purpose and agree to do various things. It might be a sale, or the terms of an employment, or the small print at the bottom of a service agreement. The terms are binding and there can be penalties for breaking them, but for all that there is a certain distance between ourselves and the contract. In many ways it is about limiting and defining the scope of something so that there are clearly marked boundaries that only affect a particular aspect of our lives or work or shopping.

A covenant, on the other hand, goes much further to the core of our being. It expresses something fundamental about who we are, our identity; something that exists in the union that forms the covenant and is therefore absent or injured where that union is damaged. Marriage vows use the language of covenant and we feel this very deeply in happy marriages, where interestingly for this bible passage we talk about our ‘other half’ and couples grow together in a way that changes how they see themselves and are seen by others. We feel it deeply too where relationships break. The wounds take considerable healing and run very deep, as if we have been split in two like a piece of Damian Hurst art.

We are in Lent, a season that has a number of layers to it. It is the run up to Easter, a time of preparation for that New Covenant defining celebration, the covenant that comes through the passion and resurrection of Jesus. In him God has made it abundantly clear that he will not break his side of the covenant relationship with his creation and even death is unable to break it.

Lent is also a time when we are encouraged to make space for strengthening our side of the covenant of God’s grace. We are encouraged through study groups, or reading, or making a special effort to pray and read the bible, to renew our grip on the hope that is in us. Lent is a season that is about so much more than giving up chocolate and I think we live in such stressed times, such stressing times with 24/7 commercial pressures and means of communication that make it hard to get away, that we need to include some pampering in our Lenten fasting to reinvigorate how we see the covenant. If we are not careful we confuse holiness with being miserable and that could not be further from the case. A covenant based on the resurrection, even though it comes through the cross, is not founded on being miserable.

So far, I seem to be having a chocolaty Lent. I was at a meeting with the 1st year curates in the diocese last week. A couple of them had a birthday so we had chocolate cake. I went to a conference a week last Friday and we had chocolate éclairs, with real cream. I’ve given up beer, well it does me good to do that, but I have a let out clause that if it becomes medicinal then it’s OK to break it.

The point of the pampering as well as giving something up is to refresh our sense of God’s goodness to us and to make this covenant of Easter come alive and glow within us. We give things up to stop us taking good things for granted and learn to appreciate them more. We pamper a little to counteract the forces that would make us miserable. We then become people for whom Alleluia is not some strange word we sprinkle over everything during Eastertide, but for whom it is just how we approach the world. And that will make more difference than anything else we can plan.

The opposite of this is to become like one of those poor beasts, split down the middle. It’s a feeling we may all know and there is something about the pressures of daily living that disintegrates us. There are forces that would disintegrate us in attacking our common humanity through racism and sexism, and tomorrow is world women’s day, through oppressive assumptions in some forms of management and popular culture. One of the things that annoy me about R&B music is the use of the word ‘girl’. It is a put down and is not very respectful, it is about putting someone in their place, or more to the point in a place of subservience and unequal power in a relationship. This disintegrates people in their self worth and our pop music scene is peppered with it in various guises. The chief inspector of schools has called for more role models like Buffy as one way of counteracting some of this.

So a bit of pampering in Lent can be a way to reassert the worth which God gives us through his grace and the covenant built on Easter. This is a time to confront the forces that would squash us and keep us down, that would disintegrate what it is to be loved and cherished by God, to know ourselves to be loved and cherished by God. Lent is a time to be reminded of the covenant built on grace and the warning that the opposite of that covenant is to be like Damian Hurst beasts, cut in two and with all that gives us vitality separated and unable to function.

© Ian Black 2004

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