The Rev. Ann R. Lougee

April 2, 2006

On Our Hearts

Jeremiah 31:31-34

There is good news to share this day (like every day!): a new covenant, transformation of our lives and of our life together, a future filled with hope. All of this is because we believe that God is at work as God always has been, in the midst of people. God is still speaking!

During Lent, we’ve been hearing stories of covenant, from Noah and the rainbow, through Abraham and Sarah and their many descendants (including us), Moses and the people at the foot of Sinai. Now, the prophet Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant not of stone, not external, but written on the very hearts of people.

One often hears that "the God of the Old Testament" is a harsh and punishing judge while "the God of the New Testament," is a much "kinder and gentler" God. I don’t think that assumption holds up well, though, because this word from Jeremiah is just one of many texts from the Hebrew Scriptures that speak of a loving and forgiving God.

Jeremiah’s vision is that even though the people keep straying and breaking their covenant with God, God still remembers the people and loves them. Jeremiah perceives that God tries over and over to establish the relationship with them that is described tenderly in both parental and marital imagery ("took them by the hand," "I was their husband").

Jeremiah is addressing the broken spirits of a people in exile, the lost vision and lost hope of a people conquered by a powerful empire and taken to a strange land, people who feel abandoned by God. He speaks to their suffering with words of comfort and hope. He says that God offers the people of Israel a new covenant.

Jeremiah’s vision can be seen as one for the people not only long ago but for us today as well, even though we inhabit a very different world, with very different but even more powerful empires: the empires of militarism, materialism, and greed. We live in a time of transition, something beyond "post-modern" but not yet called anything, and the times are "a-changing" so fast that we’ll have moved on to another "new age" before this period has even been named.

Perhaps one of the best things that have been said about covenant is that it’s something that each party enters for the sake of the other -- not for one’s own protection or rights, but for the sake of the other. We might accept that this may be true of God, but is it true of us? Do we do anything only for God’s sake?

If this covenant is not with individuals but with the people as a whole community, how does our private faith need to be experienced in the context of a community of faith? Are we ever tempted to keep our faith a private thing, a "personal relationship with Jesus" that seems to have little to do with this covenant that Jeremiah envisioned so long ago?

We live, it seems, in uncertain times. But what time, we might ask, has ever been "certain"? In every age, however, people have been able to have hope. So what is the hope that our church longs for? What would transformation of our church look like? What has it looked like already?

The gospel reading in the lectionary for today is from the 12^th chapter of John’s gospel, verses 22 to 31. As today's passage begins, "some Greeks" come to Philip, asking to see Jesus.

These are probably Greek-speaking Gentiles, perhaps God-fearers, who respect the tenets of Judaism without becoming full converts. In Jerusalem now for the Passover feast, they seek out Jesus about whom they have heard.

Since Philip is a Greek name and Philip is identified as being from Bethsaida in Galilee, an ethnically diverse region, it is likely that he spoke Greek. That would explain why these Greeks came to him first.

Likewise Andrew, the one to whom Philip turns, is the only other one of Jesus' disciples to sport a Greek name, so he probably spoke Greek also. In any case, what could be more fitting than that these Gentile seekers should encounter Jesus through his disciples, since a large emphasis of this gospel is that others will come to know Jesus through the witness of his disciples.

When they come to Jesus, his response seems odd: "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

The arrival of these Gentiles seems to signal the arrival of his "hour." He now begins speaking and praying about his coming crucifixion and resurrection. As these Gentiles are drawn to Jesus, he immediately seems to recognizes that their arrival signals the end of his mission to the house of Israel exclusively. In death, he will cease to be restricted to a place and a people; God's mercy and forgiveness will now reach even to Gentiles.

Jesus implies, further, that for his glorification to be complete, there must be a new crop of disciples to proclaim him as the glorified one. The message to questing Greeks and others, therefore, is a call to discipleship. To "bear fruit" has been Jesus' own mission, but it now becomes the mission of each new disciple and group of disciples.

The gospel writers, in different ways, crafted their stories so as to show that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified by the Romans as a criminal, has been the perfect expression of God's promise to Jeremiah to write God's law on the human heart. In all of the gospels, Jesus is the New Covenant come to pass, brought by God to fulfillment. His whole life, as well as his death, shows this law of love in action, as one who seeks to serve rather than to be served.

Parker Palmer has written of the "true" covenant that "means acceptance of weighty obligations to a God who asks that we ‘do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God’." The church in accepting this true covenant would "serve as a channel of reconciliation in a world in love with divisions…the church would proclaim not its mastery over the world but its servanthood – to God, to humankind, and to the vision of a peaceable kingdom" (In the Company of Strangers).

In what ways has our church been faithful to this covenant, and in what ways have we failed? How would "an outsider," that is, a person not already in our fellowship, measure our faithfulness to that covenant, to the law written in our hearts?

When we think about God’s law, we may remember a conversation of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke with the lawyer who asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asked him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?"

The lawyer answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."

To "live," in the biblical context, means to have an alive spirit. Eternal life, as a gospel concept, does not come after death but is available in the here and now to all who become disciples of Jesus. It points to earthly life lived in the timeless truth and reality of God.

Can we even imagine what the world would be like if we all loved God with all our heart, our soul, our strength, our mind, and our neighbor as ourselves? What if we were all transformed, as Jeremiah’s vision implies, with the law of love written on our hearts?

What if we all sought first to be forgiving, peaceful, and just? What would the world look like? In what ways would it affect our shared life, our public commitments to peace, to education, to ending hunger and poverty, racism, sexism, and prejudice?

How much of the energy of our church is turned toward forgiveness rather than judgment? How is our congregation opening its "heart" to being transformed into a new creation, and to seeing God’s hand at work in the life that we share? Isn’t this what it means to follow Jesus?

These are good questions to keep in mind and heart as we prepare to share Communion. Amen.