Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
April 2, 2006
Jeremiah 31:31-34
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people.” A law, a covenant, a promise, written, not on tablets of stone, but on the human heart. What do you suppose that means?
The test results are not encouraging. Her cancer has returned with a vengeance. She is told she has six months to live. The church gathers around her and her husband – running errands, bringing casseroles, cleaning their house. Someone comes up with the idea of giving her a foot massage and painting her toenails red. It does more for her spirits than any visit from the pastor. She gives her jewelry away, lets her driver’s license expire. She starts writing poetry again. She prepares to die, but instead she gets better.
On Christmas Eve she is back in church for the first time in months, with her oxygen tank slung over her shoulder and a clear plastic tube running under her nose. After the first hymn, she makes her way to the lectern to read the first lesson from the prophet Isaiah. Her tank hisses every five seconds. It seems that every candle in the sanctuary glistens in her eyes. “Strengthen the weak hands,” she reads, bending her body toward the words, “and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear. Here is your God.’” When she sits down, the members of congregation knows they have not just heard the word of the Lord. It isn’t something they have read on a page. They have seen it in action. “I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts.” A relationship – a faith – not just talked about, but lived out, seen in action. The fullness of God just spilling over and filling the human soul. Sounds good! How do we get some of that?
The Book of Jeremiah comes out of a dark time in the history of Israel. The country had been overrun by the Babylonians, the best and the brightest carried off into exile. People feared that God had deserted them, even worse, that God had forgotten them. And what about God’s promises, God’s covenant with Israel, a covenant that went back to Abraham and Sarah? “You shall be my people and I will be your God.” Had somehow God broken God’s own promise?
Well, Jeremiah, that often dour prophet, is quite willing to tell them what has happened. It isn’t God who has been unfaithful. They, the people of God, have been unfaithful. It isn’t God who has broken covenant promises. They have broken covenant promises. Read Jeremiah 21 sometime, he is merciless: they have snuggled up to idols, they have made unholy alliances, trusting more in the Lords of the earth than their Lord in heaven; they have neglected the poor, have failed to pursue justice and have destroyed the shalom of the community. They know what God would have them do. It’s right there in the scripture. Anyone can read it. But they have ignored it and have ignored the prophets who warned them. Basically, says Jeremiah, you got what you deserved, so quit whining.
As someone who works a lot with words, I love the delete button on my computer – except for those few unfortunate times when somehow I manage to deleted my entire sermon! Misspelled word? Delete! Awkwardly phrased sentence? Delete! Redundant story or paragraph? Delete! With the mere push of a button I can clean up a letter, a sermon, or a newspaper column. Make a mistake? No problem! Just push delete. It is as if it never happened.
Wouldn’t it be nice if life came with a delete button? That cheeseburger, fries and chocolate shake you had for lunch? Just delete! That bad career choice? Delete! That sermon that seemed so brilliant on Friday and so awful on Sunday – it’s gone. The insensitive word spoken to a friend or hurting word spoken to a loved one? Delete. Wouldn’t it be great if life could be edited, cleaned up, bad moments deleted forever just as if they never even happened? But, as AA has so eloquently taught us, life doesn’t work like that. The alcoholic who is determined to live a new life, still must honestly deal with the fallout from the old life. And the same could be said for all of us. As much as we wish we could, there is no deleting the bad stuff and just leaving the good. And that is precisely what Jeremiah tells the people of Israel. You can’t just walk away from your unfaithful past like it never happened. You are going to have to deal with the consequences.
But that isn’t all he tells them. Even crusty old Jeremiah can’t leave the people in despair, it is as if God won’t let him. And so he adds, “The days are surely coming,” he says. “New days when God will do something new, something we haven’t seen before. “I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts.” Stone tablets have not been enough; words of prophet and patriarch have not been enough; the teachings of hundreds of years have not been enough. So now God will do this…will place God’s covenant deep into the human heart where it cannot be forgotten or ignored. It’s a dazzling possibility; a hopeful vision. Not exactly a delete button, but perhaps the next best thing. God is offering, as only God can, the revitalizing of the people, the possibility of starting over again with God’s will, God’s covenant actually entwined in the human soul; not as words on a page but a fire in the heart.
I believe that Howard Thurman, that great saint of the church, captured the spirit of this text, when he penned this prayer: “Kindle thy light within me, O God, that your glow may be spread over all my life. More and more, may your light give radiance to my flickering candle, fresh vigor to my struggling intent, and renewal to my flagging spirit.” That’s the key, isn’t it? Allowing that light, that promise which God has placed within, to spread over all my life. Trouble is, do I really want that? Maybe I’d like it just over a little of my life.
Rene Rodgers Jensen, a Disciples of Christ pastor, writes, “For my entire adult life I have either been on a diet, just going off a diet, or thinking about going on a diet. I want to be thinner and still have a McDonald’s quarter pounder for lunch. I want to be thinner but don’t want to change my eating habits in any fundamental way. So I go on a diet and lose a few pounds. I go off the diet and I gain it back – and then some! And this will always be true unless I make a lifelong commitment to eating in a healthy, balanced sensible way.” Turning to our text she says, “God is not interested in making cosmetic changes in our lives. God wants to be in our hearts, to be in the marrow of our bones, at the center of our very being. And unless we can open ourselves to that possibility, to that kind of knowledge, so that the knowledge of God is as close to us as the beating of our hearts, we will always be doomed to a half-way, half-hearted, half-baked sort of faith.”
It is an ancient promise – you will be my people and I will be your God. Yet here is something wondrously new – I will place my law, my promise, deep into your heart. Can we allow such a thing to happen? Can we allow the knowledge of God to seep that deeply into our bones, into our spirits? Are we ready for renewal of our flagging spirits and radiance for our flickering candles? The promise is right here – it’s so close! Can we just let it in? I love these words of a 17th century mystic: “The present moment is always full of infinite treasure. It contains more than you have the capacity to hold…The will of God presents itself at each moment like an immense ocean which the desire of your heart cannot empty…O you who thirst, you have not far to go to find the source of living waters. That source springs up close to you in the present moment. Shall I die of thirst running from stream to stream when there is an engulfing sea on all sides? The very thing I seek everywhere, seeks me incessantly and gives itself to me.”
I think if there has been one theme of our faith journeys this year, it has been this. I have seen it lived out in the lives of everyone who has spoken on these Tuesday evenings. Every single person has shared a time in their lives – maybe it was a time of tragedy, a time of illness, a time when all doors seemed closed and there seemed no way out – they’ve shared a time when finally, maybe because there was no where else to go, they dared to go deeper into the Holy, finally to let go and let God and actually dare to believe that God would make a home in their hearts. And amazingly, God did just that. These Tuesday evenings I have been reminded of something I once read – I never thought it applied to me, but maybe it is for all of us: “After all, a mystic is not a special kind of human being, but every human being is a special kind of mystic.”
We carry so much in our hearts. It can be so hard to imagine any possible change, any forgiveness, anything new for us…not for the likes of us. But there is this promise – the promise of a new relationship, a relationship set within our hearts. Could it be that God refuses to share our despair, refuses to give up on us, indeed is always at work re-creating us? Could it be? Dare to be a special kind of mystic. Dare to join God in this work. As theologian James Whitehead has said, “We are called to participate in God’s own imagination – to see ourselves, our neighbors, our church, our world through the eyes of God, full of possibility, full of promise, full of life and hope, ready to be transformed at any moment.”