Rev. Betsy Aldrich Garland
March 29, 2009
Jeremiah 31:31-34;
John 12:20-33

Deep in Our Hearts

During Lent we have been treated to a series of covenants in the Hebrew Bible.  Our first was God’s covenant with Noah, when God is sorry that he had made humankind; [the corruption and violence] grieved him to his heart,” and God vows to destroy the world and everything in it. 

Only Noah and his family have found favor – and two of each kind of animal – and they survive on an ark.  After the rains stop and the earth dries up, God has a change of heart.  Creation is not perfect – but God will work with us on our behavior problems.  And to show that he means it, God establishes a covenant with Noah and Noah’s descendents and sets a [rain]bow in the clouds as a sign and a reminder of the covenant.

Covenants, sworn, formalized agreements between two parties, often between unequal parties, such as God and the Israelites, were common in the ancient world – but they generally were conditional.  Rulers would establish an agreement with their people that they would provide A, B, and C as long as the people would keep the X, Y, and Z stipulations of the covenant. 

The next Sunday, we touched very briefly on God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah, that despite their advanced ages, they will be fruitful and multiply and give rise to nations.  And then two weeks ago, the Hebrew Bible scripture was the covenant that God made with Moses on Mt. Sinai and the receiving of the Ten Commandments – the focus of the children’s “Sermon in a Sack.”

And now today, we have another covenant, this one with the prophet Jeremiah – but a very different kind of covenant – more like a covenant in the New Testament.

Let me set the scene:  Jeremiah began his work as a prophet around 625 BCE.  His role, like that of all the prophets, was to speak God’s truth to power, to kings and officials.  The Hebrew people had been divided into two kingdoms for some time.  Israel, in the north, had been conquered by the Assyrians a hundred years earlier.  Jeremiah was a prophet to the southern kingdom, Judah. 

And Judah was in turmoil:  They were caught in the military tension between Babylon in the east and Egypt in the southwest.  Now, Jeremiah knew that the Israelites had rejected God, had turned to idolatry; they had violated their covenant with God, they had violated the covenantal stipulations to live God-fearing lives.  So God would not protect them from either of the enemies.

Jeremiah predicts that the Babylonians will prevail and that the temple will be destroyed, and he urges them to give themselves up to the Babylonians.  For this bit of foretelling the future, Jeremiah was considered a traitor.  But his prophecy came true in 598 BCE when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon conquered Judah and marched its leading citizens off to Babylon.  Then in 587 more trouble arrived when a second wave of exiles was taken to Babylon and the temple destroyed. 

This was not all bad.  During the 50 years in Exile the Hebrew people forged their identity and came to understand themselves as the Jewish people; that’s when their sacred texts were written – but that’s a different sermon.  It does show, however, that times of transition between the past and the future –

like that of Edgewood church in this time of transition – can hold promise for a people.

In the midst of this national disaster, Jeremiah prophesies that God will renew the promise that God made through Noah in the flood, through Abraham and Sarah in granting them children, and through Moses in the Exodus.  This covenant, however, is different:  In the old covenants, the focus is on God and God’s commitment.  This covenant is more like a marriage.  This time, God and humankind will be present together, and God will fulfill not only God’s part of the covenant, but humankind’s as well.  This time, God’s law will no longer be an external agreement that can be broken by people’s unfaithfulness; this time the law will dwell in the very being of each person, in each person’s heart – and God will help us with this.

I have a clergy friend who splits her time between Providence and China.  Right now she and her husband are in Beijing where he works for the Episcopal Church, and Elyn is doing pastoral work in the countryside.  For several years, Elyn has been working on a devotional book based on Chinese characters.  Every day during Lent, when I boot up my computer in the morning, I find another devotional that Elyn has emailed me, and many other friends, while we slept on the other side of the world.

It is surprising how many of the characters about important concepts include the character for “heart.”  The character “forget” for example, is made up of two characters:  the top is the character for “to escape” and the bottom, for “heart.”  To forget, means something has escaped from your heart, it is forgotten. In her meditation, Elyn writes,

[I]t is such a blessing to have things that have “escaped” from your heart. When we can put aside old hurts and forget the things that should be put aside and forgotten, we have a whole new direction possible. That direction is not clouded by our past, but can be led by those things that should be remembered, like the importance of kindness, support, encouragement, and humor in [our] relationships with others.

The character for “rest” also includes a heart.  The top part looks a little bit like a face and means “self” while the bottom half is a heart.  Why the heart?  Because in Asia, the “mind” is embodied in the heart.  In the West, when we talk about our minds, we are talking about our brains, what our brain is thinking.  Not so in the East.  You can see this in the Chinese word for psychology, which translated literally means, “heart-inside-study-of,” the study of the heart.  So the truth of resting is embodied in this character – to truly rest, we need to rest our hearts as well as our bodies.

We might, then, understand Sabbath, our Sunday, as a day of rest, a day to rest our bodies and our hearts.  Remember the beloved passage in Matthew,

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.”
To take this idea further, as nurture, Wayne Muller writes,
At our best, we become Sabbath for one another.  
We are the emptiness, the day of rest.  We become space,
that our loved one, the lost and the sorrowful,
may find rest in us.1

If we read Jeremiah in the Hebrew, the primary words for “heart” also mean mind, understanding and will – more like the Chinese concept than our Western concept for mind.  And in Jeremiah, in our lesson for today, God promises a new covenant, not like the covenants God made with the ancient Israelites when God brought them out of Egypt, when the people were punished for their disobedience, but a new covenant “written on their hearts” and this time, God will not punish them for their sin; God will not even remember their sin.

This new covenant sounds suspiciously like the New Testament and a prophecy about the coming of Jesus – although it’s not.  But it does reflect Jeremiah’s vision for the future, a vision for a future where God and God’s people will be in a covenantal relationship a relationship in which all the laws of ancient Israel are included:  “I am yours, and you are mine,” says the Lord.  This is the language of love and faithfulness.

But what a departure from the covenantal history of Israel!  In the past, because of the sin of the people, the Temple was destroyed and the land was lost.  The covenant was null and void.  God had abandoned Israel – and the people knew they deserved it!  But now, Jeremiah is prophesying that a new day is dawning.  God is full of surprises!  God is unpredictable!  God loves us in spite of ourselves!  God’s salvation is waiting for us....

How?  Because of what is written on our hearts!  Not our physical heart pulsing in the center of our chests,             but our spiritual center that only God can fill – a center that is based not on law but on a relationship with the divine.

Writing in Christian Century, Susan Andrews says,

[Presbyterian youth minister] Roger Nishioka and others have discovered the gap that exists between our dying churches and the hunger for Jesus that rumbles in the souls of the Gen X and Millennial generations.  Two qualities seem to be central to this hunger – a deep desire for authenticity and a palpable yearning for passion.  If our tired congregations don’t start telling the truth about life, faith, sin, suffering, war, sexuality and death, the get-real generations will tune us out. If we don’t ground the passion of Jesus in the passion of our own stories, the boundless energy of a new civic generation will pour into the secular culture and not into the church.2

What is written on our hearts, here at Edgewood church?  Can we acknowledge that we are broken people?   Undone by circumstances beyond our control?  Betrayed by the life choices of others?  Angry that the world around us has changed?  Grief-stricken with the losses that surrounded us?

What is written on our hearts?  At the heart of Christianity is the possibility of transformation and healing in human life – but first there is the passion – that is the message of Lent.    We have to suffer and die before we can live again.

What is written on our hearts?  Can we acknowledge that we are sinful people who yearn to be folded into the arms of a loving God?  And can we trust God to lead us? 

In John’s gospel, our lesson for today, the depth of God’s covenant with us is evident, but first we must make choices:

Those who love their life lose it,
and those who hate their life in this world will keep it
for eternal life,3 Jesus says.

In other words, those who play it safe, live in the past, think only of themselves, will lose their lives.  And those who are willing to risk a new future, will live forever in those who come after us – and in God.

Imagine a church where God’s people know the promises of God deep in their hearts – a community where the people sense the power of God’s saving love is at the heart of their identity.  This is the covenant we are being offered this morning.  This is the community of love into which we are being invited.  This is the salvation being held out to us. 

What about God is written deep in your heart?

Amen.

1 Wayne Muller in Sabbath.
2 Christian Century, March 24, 2009, page 20.
3 John 12:25.