Like the apostle Paul, the prophet Jeremiah didn’t seem to have much use for lawyers. And like Paul, he could have used a good one! In our scripture lesson this morning, we find Jeremiah in prison, and the first thing you’re supposed to do when taken to jail is to call your attorney. Jeremiah, on the other hand, keeps on doing the kind of thing that got him there in the first place – prophesying! While he was relentless in pointing out the injustices and social inequities that plagued his society, what got him thrown into prison in this case was his prediction that the Babylonians would soon overthrow Jerusalem, and that this was God’s punishment for their sins. Not something the authorities wanted to hear. But from his prison cell Jeremiah also offered hope. He purchased a plot of land -- a very gutsy thing to do when foreign invaders are at the gates – but he wanted to say: the time will come when we will have our country back, and we will need a field in which to grow crops. He also spoke of a “kinder, gentler” God, and in language that would not be used again for seven centuries, described the “new covenant” that God was offering the people, one written not on tablets of stone, but on the human heart. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors...that they broke...But... 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.... they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest...... for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
Throughout this season of Lent we have been looking in each week on the journey that God’s people have been making, as told in the Hebrew scriptures, and we have seen how at every turn, God was still speaking, and expressed care through continually remaking the covenant. We began with Noah emerging from the ark to see a rainbow, a promise that God would never again destroy the earth. We moved ahead to Moses, receiving the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, a sign that God wanted to frame the relationship in constructive ways, characterized by positive behaviors. Last week we heard the story of how God cured snakebites by offering “a way out of no way” in the form of a surprising homeopathic remedy. God was always there, meeting the people where they were, yearning for a faithful relationship, and a people who would respond by treating each other – and indeed the whole earth – in just and caring ways.
And now, several centuries later, they have come into the Promised Land, built a great and prosperous society, but have never really lived into the dream as fully as they were called to. By Jeremiah’s time, the nation had divided into northern and southern kingdoms, prophets had plenty to rage about, and the Babylonians were about to conquer them and send their leaders into exile.
Time for God to step in again. But not to magically set things right. Not to subdue Nebuchadnezzar, not to confer wealth on the poor. It was simply a matter of making a new covenant – this one not expressed in a rainbow, or on stone tablets or a snake on a pole, but in a different language, heart language. No longer would it be sufficient to know all about God – from now on people would actually know God. The covenant would no longer be a matter of law, but something internalized. Not something you could read, but something you would feel. It would not be about rules, but relationships. Not a faith than could be proved, but one that must be lived!
It was indeed a new covenant, which is what God is always ready to offer. God is always the God of second chances, and third and fourth and fifth. God never gives up, no matter how many times God’s people mess up! God never says about a people, or about any of us, “I’ve had it! Enough! You’ve had your chance.” Redemption is always a possibility. That’s why each and every Sunday in our worship we not only pray a prayer of confession, we also hear words of assurance, assurance that God will not give up on us, and life is made fresh and new. God always offers a new covenant.
And it is not just a new covenant, it is a new covenant. Whenever I counsel couples before marriage, I also talk with them about how marriage is not a contract, but a covenant. There was a time, a few years ago, when “marriage contracts” were popular. This was kind of precursor to pre-nuptial agreements. These contracts basically spelled out how the marriage would work, who would do what, sometimes in excruciating detail. I’ll take out the garbage and you do the dishes. I get to go bowling on Thursday nights and you can hang out with your friends on Wednesdays. Now it’s not that couples shouldn’t work out arrangements that make their lives together go more smoothly and harmoniously and fairly, understand how each is gifted differently and has differing needs – it’s just that contracts like that are hard to live up to perfectly, and can be easily broken. You didn’t do this so I don’t have to do that, and it just keeps going down hill from there.
I have a contract with the company that delivers my home heating oil. I pay them money, they make sure I always have fuel and my heater works. I fail to pay, and they don’t have to deliver. They don’t deliver, I withhold payment, and after I thaw out, look for a new heating oil provider.
A covenant is different! A covenant says, I will love you forever no matter what. For better or worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. Circumstances may change, but my love will not. And I do not need to have all the details spelled out in a written legal agreement, because my heart will tell me what to do.
When I lived in California, I used to compare this to the way they build houses in earthquake country. When you’re preparing for the “Big One” or even a not-so-big one, the safest house is not one made of what may appear to be the strongest, most solid material, but rather the most flexible! A brick house can’t bend with the seismic shock waves, and may fall down. A house made of frame stucco construction can bend without breaking. It’s flexible and not a bad place to be during an earthquake.
That’s what a covenant is like – it says simply, I’m committed to you, no matter what may happen. I don’t know exactly what may come, what earthquakes may shake up our lives, I don’t know exactly how I will handle any given situation, we may have to improvise and figure it out as we go. But I am yours and you are mine. I know this much, and I will love you, come what may!
That’s a covenant. Marriages are built on them, churches like ours shape their life around them, God’s realm is characterized by them. And the best covenants are those like this one of which Jeremiah spoke - written not on paper, but on the heart.
A covenant of the heart is kind of the way I approach and experience music. I can read music, but am much more comfortable when I play by ear, or by heart. I can play or sing the notes on the page, and technically there will be a song, but it’s only when I internalize it, when I feel it deep inside, when I “play my heart out” that it really becomes music and enters another realm. We print the words to the Lord’s Prayer in our worship bulletin, which is something churches never used to do, because there was a time when you could count on everyone’s knowing the Lord’s Prayer by heart. Now, we realize that there is a large percentage of the population that was not raised in church, and never learned the prayer Jesus taught. And so in our efforts to be inclusive and welcoming, we don’t want to assume that people know too much. But it’s not just a matter of memorization but internalization, when a prayer becomes part of who we are and wells up from the depths of our being. I was with a group of folks from another church the other evening, helping them work through some difficulties they are having, and we closed with prayer, joining hands and hearts together, and spontaneously praying, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” It was a powerful, heart-felt moment, undiminished by the fact that when I said “debts” they said “trespasses!” No one was reading the prayer or even reciting it by rote – they were praying it.
A new covenant of the heart is like that. No longer is God’s program posted on the wall or carried around in a box, or thought about or debated – it is installed in our hearts – our emotions, our hopes, our dreams. It’s not something we know about, but something we live.
When I came to Westmoreland nearly five years ago, I didn’t sign a contract, but a covenant. True, it spelled out the duties that I as Senior Minister would attempt to fulfill, as well as how the church would treat me. But because it is a covenant, it is flexible. It allows for the fact that I am human, and for the possibility that circumstances will change. And now as a result of our Congregational Meeting last week, they have, and it’s time for a New Covenant. No doubt this is something that will be worked out with the Transition Committee. It will add new duties and modify old ones. But it’s not just about me fulfilling a checklist of responsibilities, or even about the congregation stepping up and becoming the church we are capable of becoming, living out our Statement of Purpose in new and courageous and caring ways. It’s really about a covenant of the heart, where we say to one another and to God, “I am yours and you are mine. We are bound together in the bundle of life, we are here for each other, we are here to listen to God still speaking in our midst, we are here to move forward into the unknown future that God gives, knowing that as God will never give up on us, so we will never give up on us.” It is time now, as it was in Jeremiah’s time, for a new covenant of the heart.
Seven centuries after Jeremiah spoke of the new covenant, Jesus of Nazareth came along and embodied it. Where the Pharisees pressed for rules, Jesus called for relationships. He said, to know me is to know God, and to follow me is to enter the realm of God, to live from the heart in the ways of love and justice. And the story is told how on the last night of his life, he sat with his friends at supper, broke the bread of life and said “This is my body,” and he lifted a chalice of wine and said, “This is the cup of the new covenant. Whenever you do this, remember me.”
They say that wine is good for the heart. As we receive this sacrament today, may it be a reminder and a celebration of God’s covenant with us and with one another, an ever new cardiac covenant, in which we live and move and have our being.
