Following Jesus

In session one, “Noah: God’s Covenant with Creation,” participants will connect God’s regret over what creation had become to God’s effort to re-create the world rather than to destroy it and walk away forever. They will recognize how God connects covenants with memory, through the sign of the bow that God places in the sky. They will experience some of the sense of wonder that Noah and his family must have felt in seeing that first, miraculous rainbow. And they will see in God’s re-creation their own call to forgive, to reconcile, and to participate in the healing of the world.

In session two, “Abraham: A Promise of Nations,” participants will connect Abraham’s willingness to step into the new and unknown with their own spiritual journey. They will gain a deeper understanding of what it means to “walk by faith and not by sight” or by previous experience. In confronting Abraham’s own times of doubt and wandering, they will more fully appreciate how God remains faithful to covenants even when we fall away in our own lives.

Session three, “Moses and Israel: Words of Life and Freedom,” takes participants along with Moses and the children of Israel to the foot of Mount Sinai. In sharing this journey, they will gain a deeper appreciation of how God’s covenant was not about arbitrary rules mandated by an all-powerful being but an invitation to experience abundant life in a community that is in a harmonious relationship with God.

In session four, “David: An Eternal Covenant,” participants will place themselves in the position of those who first understood God’s promise to David as an eternal covenant with the Jewish people. They will consider how those words would have been understood in David’s time and by people of subsequent generations who remembered God’s deliverance, God’s elevation of the lowly and unpretentious, and God’s faithfulness across the centuries. Then they will apply this understanding to gain a deeper appreciation of what God’s covenant with David means for Christians, who understand Jesus as both the fulfillment of God’s promise to continue David’s line and the restoration of the original ideal of God as the true king over God’s people.

In session five, “From Jeremiah to Jesus: The Covenant of the Heart,” participants will understand God’s actions through the prophet Jeremiah in light of the utter rebellion against God’s love and justice that the people have committed. They will recognize how this rebellion came to be associated with our image of hell—a place not created by God for punishment but as a construct of human beings choosing to separate themselves from God. Against this backdrop, participants will recognize the astounding depth of God’s love and commitment to an intimate relationship with humans, as expressed in Jeremiah’s announcement of a new covenant that God will write on the hearts of the people.

In session six, “Jesus and the New Covenant,” participants will place themselves in the position of the disciples who gathered with Jesus for what they would later remember as their final meal together. They will connect Jesus’s language, in which he says his blood represents a renewal of the covenant, with previous covenants. They will understand his invitation to act “in remembrance of me” as a call to remember what Jesus is about to do as a model for self-giving love and to understand the cross, like the rainbow in the time of Noah, as an eternal sign that human death and violence have no power to prevent God’s love from reaching us—or to prevent us from coming home at last to God.