In the Christian tradition, we have a long history of making and breaking promises. The bible is the ongoing story of the cycle of promises made and then broken and then made again between God and humanity. In biblical language, when we make a promise based in faith with call it a covenant. But just because we call them covenants, just because we include faith and God when we talk about such promises, that doesn’t mean that we’re any more guaranteed to stay true to them than we do to our New Year’s resolutions. The descendants of Abraham repeatedly reaffirmed their promises to God and then turned their backs on God. The people of Israel who promised to worship no other god turned around and gave offerings to the gods of other nations. The concept of a covenant community, a people bound together with a common promise of faith, comes from the bible. But the bible also points out that such promises are often broken, and the consequences of those broken promises are despair and distance from God and an increasing reluctance to trust in future promises. Still, our charge as Christians today is to create a covenant community in which we share our promises with God and with one another. Even in the face of past disappointments and betrayals, God’s commanded us to make a new covenant, a new set of promises, to remain faithful and to hold one another accountable to our commitments in faith.

You might think that pastors would have an easy time living in covenant with one another. But you’d be wrong. The United Methodist pastors in the Pacific Northwest are ostensibly in covenant with one another. We say that we’re part of a covenant community with all the other pastors in this region. But over the past few years, we’ve been unable to agree on the nature and scope of our covenant together. Some argue that our covenant should be based on all of us promising to preach and teach and model the same beliefs about controversial matters of faith. They say that our covenant is broken because we disagree about how to lead our congregations when it comes to matters like homosexuality and abortion and divorce. Others of my colleagues argue that United Methodist pastors ought to be tied together in a covenant of collegiality and mutual support. They say that our covenant is broken because we speak publicly against each other and we file disciplinary complaints against one another when we disagree. At our last annual clergy retreat, I suggested to my colleagues that perhaps we ought to try to find something simple that we could all agree to promise one another. If we could find some common denominator that we could all agree to, and then hold one another accountable to that common agreement, then perhaps we’d be closer to truly building a covenant community. Someone suggested that perhaps we could agree to all return again to next year’s clergy retreat. It was proposed that we begin to build our understanding of covenant with one another just by agreeing to show up, to be present, to choose to gather as a community. I was genuinely astonished when we couldn’t even agree to do that. People refused to promise to show up because they still wanted to argue about whether our covenant was broken because of unsound doctrine or lack of collegiality. We couldn’t even promise to be present for one another because we were too passionate about assessing blame our past disappointments in one another. I offer this story about our United Methodist pastors as a cautionary tale. It’s entirely possible for any of us to become more devoted to brokenness than to healing. It’s not at all uncommon to sabotage any hope of covenant because we can’t let go of our feelings of past betrayal. In order to create a new covenant, we must let go of old disappointments. We must decide to stop playing the blame game. We’ve got to make room for the possibility of building a new covenant relationship by leaving behind our old broken promises.

For our New Year’s resolutions in faith, I offer some suggestions. You probably have plenty more insights into how to make a promise that will stick, but here’s what I suggest in making promises to ourselves and to each other and to God this year. First of all, start simple. When it comes to building a covenant relationship, begin with something basic. Don’t immediately expect complete unity of thought, action, and spirit with those you’re creating a covenant with. Instead, start simple. Our baptismal vows are a good place to start, I think. When someone joins the church, they make a promise to support the church with their prayers, their presence, their gifts, and their service. These are four simple promises. Pray for the church; be present at church; share your resources with the church; and offer your time and talent to the ministries of the church. Living into these promises looks very different from person to person, but at the heart of our relationship with one another, we simply promise our prayers our presence our gifts and our service. Keep things simple. I think keeping things simple is a good rule for most any relationship in which we’re trying to build or rebuild trust and accountability. We’ve got to start with the simple things like promising to be present, to show up, to listen. Eventually our covenant relationships can expand to include more vulnerable sharing, to depend on one another through difficult times, to trust one another when trust is hard. But to start off with, keep it simple. Make a promise to show up for coffee with a friend. Make a promise to stretch in the morning when you get out of bed. Make a promise to pray at the end of the day. Once you’ve made and kept your simple promises, then you can move on to build greater trust and accountability. But first of all, when it comes to making your promises, start simple.

Second, agree to how you’ll hold yourself and one another accountable. Determine how you’ll measure your faithfulness to your covenant. Promises made without accountability are easily abandoned. So decide who and how you’ll be held accountable to the promises that you make in faith this year. This past fall many of us agreed to be in small groups called “Class Meetings.” Classes met once a week for a month to share our faith journeys with one another. In our Class Meetings we studied scripture together, we prayed together, we even sang together. And then we shared with one another our hopes. We shared a part of our spiritual journey, in order that the others in the group could check in with us from week to week to ask how we were doing, to hold each other accountable to our goals and intentions. A friend of mine who’s a personal trainer told me that the crucial difference between those who succeed in getting fit and those who give up is whether or not they have a work out partner. It’s too easy to talk yourself out of going to the gym, or volunteering your time, or being in prayer, if you do it all alone without anyone else knowing the goals you’ve set for yourself. We dramatically increase the likelihood that we’ll live up to our promises when we let others know about them, and when we allow others to hold us accountable to the covenants that we choose for ourselves. When you make a promise, whether it be to yourself or to God or to someone else, figure out who you can share your promise with in order to hold you accountable to all you intend to do and become.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, never fear to make a new covenant. No matter how often you’ve disappointed yourself, or how often others have disappointed you, make new promises. Don’t allow yourself to become so jaded that you lose all faith that you can live up to your promises, or that others can live up to their promises, or that God will live up to God’s promises. No matter how often the bible tells of people breaking their promises with God, God continued to come back over and over again as soon as the people were ready to enter into a new relationship and enter into a new covenant. Never give up, not on yourself, or on others, or on God, because God is about to do a new thing. Have enough faith to believe in the promises of God and of each other once again. Have enough faith to make a new promise, rooted in faith and grounded in the love of God that makes all things new. Amen.