On that note the first Annual Meeting of the Covenant [September 25-30, 1885] ended.
It is tempting to find more in the adoption of the corporate seal than is there, but it may
serve as a symbol of what the Covenant wanted to be. Waldenström had said earlier that summer that the incorporation of the Covenant would not be a sin but a simple recognition of the fact that just as the individual person is body and spirit, so is the
Church. Incorporation is the acknowledgment of the corporeality of the union of
congregations.
The union of hands above the recumbent lamb as well as the explanatory rubric given in
the minutes, “the Covenant owes its existence to a true union in Jesus and is founded on
the crucified and risen Savior,” as well as the attendant motto, “Conjuncti in Christo”--
all of this points to the belief that the Covenant as a family of faith is a manifestation of
the mystical body of Christ. Paul expresses it in 1 Corinthians 12:13, “For by one spirit
we were all baptized into one body.”
Despite the painful and erosive struggles with the “Free,” through which the Lutheran
Mission Friends passed on the way to be established as a Covenant, their mystical
solidarity with the “Free” in Jesus was not ever doubted or in any way assailed.
The differences arose because the proto-Covenanters saw the “true union in Jesus” as
being not only mystical and spiritual but historically real and valid. What it celebrates is
not only spirit but body, not only the heavenly but the earthly, not only the imperishable but the historical and mutable. What is recognized is the tangible, and particular--the often vexing reality of people in community, the bonding with created beings who are both justified and sinful, and the acceptance of the self as such a single and double being.
In this God's primal creation is acknowledged--the tissue of coherence emerging from
the first chaos “which was empty and without form”--a tissue which in being bodied
forth gave us the saeculum-the good gray earth we habit and our time on it, and “the one stock of all human races.”
The seal speaks of this. Through the message of the seal we are united with our sacred
history, the life of the people of God, but also with our earth--time and our generations,
in Augustine's words, “ours and our fathers' years.” This contact with our history makes
us aware of the rude and coarse-trained roots but also the delicate blossoms and fruit of
the generations--the reality and rite of passage and succession; the christening and
confirmation of the child; the maturing and marriage of the young; the bittersweetness
of aging and death; the hand on the head in anticipation and blessing, and the hand
under the thigh, claiming the birthright.
And very close in meaningfulness to that intimate, up-close fabric of family--its images,
maxims, lullabies, relics, heirlooms, prides and shames--lies society--O cold and
measured word--the connections of history and high technology, coping skills to master,
runes to know, people with whom to identify in the enterprise of consensus and control,
cultivation and liberation, discipline and freedom, decision and consent--an awesome
expansion into space and time of the complexities of multitudes of people.
To all this the corporate seal relates us. It makes us a body, a corporation with all other
corporations; it signals a place for us, however small, in the world of property, deeds,
mortgages, loans, ventures, promises, and, yes, defaults.
Because our ultimate bond is with Christ, we cannot give the earth our worship but only
our stewardship. On earth we are residents as well as pilgrims. We live on earth as we
live in our bodies, with tentativeness but with faithfulness. We are not called upon to
adore the earth or the body which is formed from its dust, for we are not to adore the
creature but only the Creator who is blessed forever. But although we may not adore it,
we are called on to “provide and care for it” as we provide and care for our bodies. The
cherishing we give the creation is hence more chaste, devout, and charitable than the
adoring that glorifies the flesh and offers it up to itself in a sequence of unspeakable
idolatries, “whose glory is its shame.”
Of this the seal speaks. It celebrates the meekness and suffering of the Lamb of God,
“who for us and our salvation became flesh” and allowed that flesh to die. It testifies that
in the moment of final servitude and emptying the banner of resurrection is unfurled
over his head. The glory is at the door.
So the Covenant, together with all the historic Mission Friends, Lutheran and “Free,”
has celebrated the meaning of meaning--the God who emptied himself in Jesus in order
to fill us with his fullness, and the God who in exalting the crucified Lord has given us
the ultimate design for a meaning-filled cosmos--an old creation birthing a new under
the breath of the Holy Spirit and the discipline of the passion.
But to be thus risen with Christ does not mean being lifted above the crudities our life
and time; for despite Darby's insistence that the Church (the assembly) is “properly
heavenly,” we are being taught that it is properly both earthly and heavenly, fulfilling its
destiny in timely servitude and in imminent hope.
Jesus says it for us in Luke 12:35,36: “Being ready for action, with belts fastened and
lamps alight, like people who wait for their Master's return from a wedding party, ready
to let him in the moment he arrives and knocks” (NEB).
Thus the Covenant, together with all the saints, representing what was, and is, and is to
come, both rooted in time and filled with eager longing, welcomes the returning Lord
into his creation, “ready to let him in.” Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
Text by Karl A. Olson, Taken from Glad Hearts (Covenant Publicatons, 2003) pp. 289-291
At the heart of our common life and faith as a Covenant church, the following prose/poem interpretation of the Covenant Seal that marked its incorporation in 1885 is
well worth reading and pondering. It was authored by Karl A. Olsson, the late Covenant
historian who both taught in North Park Seminary and was in later years the president
of then North Park College and Seminary.
It seems fitting to offer it as an September centerpiece for Rooted Wings--only ten months before the denomination gathers in St. Paul, Minnesota for its 125th Annual Meeting. The copy is taken from Into One Body...by the Cross, Volume One (Covenant Press, 1985). It is also the centerpiece in Glad Hearts: the Joys of Believing and Challenges of Belonging (Covenant Publications, 2003), which offers over 700 readings from the midnineteenth century to the present that further illustrate the Covenant spirit.
The Corporate Covenant Seal
September, 2009
James R Hawkinson
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Choric Interlude
