Hearts for Love Alone

Sermon

What does it mean to be God’s people?

Our Southern kin, upon meeting someone new, will ask, “Who are your people?” My people are the Merrills of Gray’s Corner, Maine; my people are the Henslers of Einsiedeln, Switzerland. My people are the Presbyterians. My people are Gregg and Sarah. My people are you.

If God were asked, “Who are your people?” the answer would be a bit obvious – all of us are God’s people, whether we want that or not. But what does it mean, for us, to be God’s people?

To be God’s people implies that we have a relationship with God, which feels like an awfully big responsibility. We know what it is to be in relationship with another person. C. S. Lewis says, “Love anything, care for anyone, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.” In The Spiritual Staircase, Karen Armstrong writes, “In a relationship, you constantly have to go beyond yourself. Each day you have to forgive something, each day you have to put yourself to one side to accommodate [the other].”

One of the desert fathers, “Abba Mios was asked by a soldier whether God would forgive a sinner. After instructing him at some length, the old man asked him, ‘Tell me, my dear, if your cloak were torn, would you throw it away?’ ‘Oh no!’ he replied, ‘I would mend it and wear it again.’ The old man said to him, ‘Well, if you care for your cloak, will not God show mercy to his own creature?’” (Yushi Nomura, Desert Wisdom, as quoted in Henri Nouwen’s Home Tonight)

To be God’s people and to be in relationship with God, then, might mean that we choose to go the extra mile in following God’s law. It might mean we choose to forgive God. It might mean our hearts get broken when God doesn’t do what we want God to do. It means staying in relationship despite those things that make being in relationship difficult or even wearying.

The human-divine relationship is at the heart of this morning’s lesson from Jeremiah. It’s a bit refreshing, this lesson, after three weeks of despair and rubble, to hear that God has had a change of heart, that despair and rubble will not last forever.

“The days are surely coming” says the Lord. There’s a lot packed into those five words – they are the words of a promise, of a future that is not yet, of the day that God will bring about. To the people living in Jeremiah’s time, those words were a balm. They lived in the rubble of the city that had been destroyed, or they lived in the foreign land of their captors, in Babylon amid strange languages and unknown gods. God tells them that they will not live in rubble or in exile forever. God gives them hope. We might wonder if those days have yet arrived.

“The days are surely coming… when I will make a new covenant,” says the Lord. God had made a covenant or two already. God made a covenant with Noah never again to destroy the world in a flood. God made a covenant with Abraham and Sarah to make their descendants as numerous as the stars. God made a covenant with the freed Israelites there on the slopes of Mt. Sinai, a covenant to be their God and for them to be God’s people.

Now the interesting thing about ancient covenants, unlike those covenants we know today, is that in ancient times, the covenants were completely one sided. Of the two parties involved, one had all the power and decreed what the covenant would be; there was no negotiating. The weaker party had no say in the whole thing.

And so with this new covenant, God is still the one making the decree and the people still have no say. To make things harder, this new covenant will be written in the people’s hearts; they cannot hide from it. It is literally a part of them.

“I will make a new covenant with the houses of Israel and Judah, not like the old covenant which they broke, though I was their husband. I will write it on their hearts.” I don’t know if you noticed the shift in language here, but God is no longer talking like a king or warrior. This is very intimate language. God calls Israel and Judah houses – families or dynasties – and not nations. God considers Israel a wife, a bride; God is not talking to the people’s minds but to their hearts. This is the language of relationship, not the language of politics or war.

At the end of the passage comes the real kicker. “I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.” One commentator described this as “divine amnesia.” The whole reason for the book of Jeremiah was the people’s infidelity and God’s response to that infidelity. And now, God says, all that will be forgotten – clean slate, fresh start.

* * * * * *

My brother Jack is seven years younger than I am, and by the time he was in high school, my older siblings and I were long gone from the house. At that time my parents had an old Jeep Wagoneer that was Jack’s to drive. This thing was a tank that had been through the trenches – a perfect car for a teenage boy.

Well, one day Jack was on his way somewhere with a thousand things on his mind. He got to the car, turned the ignition, and backed out of the garage. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to open the garage door. Mom and Dad were not amused.

Fast forward ten or so years. Mom and Dad have retired and are living in California. One day Dad was on his way somewhere with a thousand things on his mind. He got to the car, turned the ignition, and backed out of the garage. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to open the garage door. We were all amused. And it took ten years, but with a lesson of empathy, Dad had a new understanding and forgiveness for Jack.

Maybe that helps us understand what is happening with God here. When you’re in a relationship with someone, the relationship is strengthened by empathy, and often what holds it together is forgiveness. The people of Israel and God hurt each other; in order to stay in relationship they would need to forgive each other.

I don’t know if you have ever felt the need to forgive God. Surely all of us here have felt the anguish of unanswered prayer, or the persistence of wrongs that never get made right, of injustices that continue from generation to generation.

Last week in the Toothmarks Bible study, Mark Hess passed around a cartoon that read, “Sometimes I’d like to ask God why there is poverty, famine, and injustice when God could just do something about it, but I’m afraid God might ask me the same question.”

To be in relationship is to care deeply about the same things. In writing this covenant on our hearts, in promising – without condition – to be our God, God is asking us to care about the things God cares about. God cares about human suffering, especially when it’s related to poverty and fear of the stranger. God cares about the creation, especially caring for this earth and all her resources. God cares about us – about you, and asks us to care about others, without condition.

“The days are surely coming,” says the Lord. It may be that those days have not yet arrived, but that doesn’t mean we act as though they are not here. We live between the present and the future when it comes to our relationship with God – the present reality that God is with us right now, and the future that God promises to us, a future of restoration and wholeness and peace.

Tomorrow I leave for Guatemala to learn about how a microloan program is helping women to care for themselves and their families. In preparing for the trip, I was given these words of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and I offer them to you.

“This is what we are about:

We plant seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,

An opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results,

But that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; minsters, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.” Amen.