God the Scribbler Jeremiah 31:31-34

 Jeremiah 31:31-34 Lent 5 year B

            Have you ever had a scribbler in your life? You know the one.

Crayon at the ready, bright blue lines cross-cross the lovely flocked, cream-colored wall-paper it took you days to put up after first prepping the walls, carefully measuring and cutting the paper and then, wetting and applying to the wall, endlessly brushing it to smooth and remove all wrinkles and bubbles of air. Your pride and masterpiece. Ruined by lines and curlicues of Mediterranean Blue wax.

            I remember the day I found a stack of old family photographs – you know the kind, treasured even though you couldn’t name half the people in them, but sacred because in some way they tell the story of generations gone by, irrevocable stained by permanent marker through the artistic endeavors of a visiting friend’s child.  Where did that pen come from, anyway?

            And then of course, the pages of books scribbled through by errant hands, or the one and only photo we have of my husband at that remarkably adorable age, marked decades ago, likely by the hand of a big brother. The cherubic image will forever bear an ink-lined mustache and goatee.

            In each case, a hand irrevocably marked and forever changed the object in question.

            Once again through the Scriptures we focus on the covenants of God and how they shape us, and how they shape God. The prophet Jeremiah delivers this beautiful promise of God. I simply love the language in the prophecy that reads, ³¹The 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’s not going to be like the other covenants I made with my people, God proclaims – the ones they broke again and again. Remember the Ten Commandments? Remember the rainbow? Remember Abraham and Sarah and the promise I made to them? Well, this covenant isn’t going to be like all those that were sullied and ruined by continued and outrageous sin, says God. This covenant doesn’t remove those previous promises, but….

You all failed at all those covenants, failed at following me, failed at keeping alive the promise, failed to cherish the gift, failed the holy relationship we had and failed at honoring those other relationships that I gave you. So I will inscribe a promise in a place where it will remain, indelible, inviolable.

It is common for us to get caught up in the beauty of God’s promise and the lovely language we receive in Jeremiah’s words. In so doing we can forget that in the book of Jeremiah, the prophet laments and mourns over the mess the people of Israel have created for themselves and the punishments they have endured as a result – fallen kingdoms, separated people, broken relationships, society, and even religious practices, lost; Exile from their home, ruin of their city, destruction of the Temple.

In chapter 17 Jeremiah writes that the sin of Judah is written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts, and on the horns of their altars.

Noted Old Testament scholar and author Walter Brueggemann writes,

Like other prophets before him, Jeremiah has spent ample shrill time and energy on the claim that Israel has systematically and long-term violated the covenant agreement of Mt. Sinai. They have violated the Ten Commandments of Sinai by economic policies that abused the poor, by foreign policy that depended on arms, by theological practice that offended God, and by illusions of privilege before God. Such violation brings with it, so say these poets, severe sanctions, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of its leading residents.[1]

That’s Jeremiah’s reality. Like the other prophets he has given warning, he has advised repentance, and he has reminded the people that God has previously placed God’s promise, God’s covenant, in symbols like a rainbow, and stone tablets and even our DNA as descendants of Abraham and yet we have scribbled all over the heart that God has claimed. Like graffiti the iron pen indelibly marks our hearts with our offenses. They will never be the same as the new hearts God created and loved. But God is not done.

Brueggemann writes, “now in the book of Jeremiah, in the wake of brokenness and its resultant shame, defeat, and anxiety, Jeremiah asserts God's resolve to renew the covenant that has been broken by ancient Israel.

There will be mutual accountability – God will provide instruction and guidance for obedience, and Israel will remain under obligation to God. The difference is that this time Israel will have a ready inclination to obey as it did not have in its ancient recalcitrance; the covenant now will be a glad practice of mutual fidelity. This will be for Israel a genuine starting over!

            It is God’s love that does this. It is God’s determination to continue in relationship with Israel, despite her infidelity, despite her cruelty toward God, despite her inability to live in gratitude and mercy as God has been merciful.

God’s over-the-top generosity and resolve leads God to begin anew. This is grace. This is God’s readiness to forgive and forget. This is the astonishing mercy, love, and beneficence of our indescribable God. And now it is God’s turn to graffiti our hearts. Jeremiah writes:

³³But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: 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.

Wow. Just, Wow!

Because of God’s generosity and forgiveness, when the people return to Jerusalem, they will return as God’s people who will form a Judaism that is an outgrowth of the faith of ancient Israel and they will begin again, begin anew, with the ugly iron lines removed and replaced by God’s own writing on their newly created hearts. God becomes the scribbler. God is the great graffiti-artist.

 ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,”  continues Jeremiah, “for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

These new hearts will be directed by their desire to be faithful to God and to live out the commandments in obligation to the God who has truly given them life.

In our own day, we suffer from hearts that are marked by our systemic turning away from God and falling away from lives lived in the mercy and generosity of God, lives shaped by the commandments with the same obligation to God that returned life to the Israelites. Brueggemann writes,

A while ago the great sociologist, Robert Bellah, penned a book entitled, The Broken Covenant[2] in which he contended that US society had violated its own resolve about being a democratic society committed to justice and to the general welfare. Thus Bellah's theme of broken covenant pertained to US society that echoed that of the ancient prophets.

In our world we see the vivid and unmistakable pattern of a broken social covenant whereby too many are shut out of the economic covenant intended by God that makes society possible and workable. As a result, in what has historically been the most prosperous nation in the world, a staggering poverty and homelessness rate exists.

We again see as in Jesus’ time, a disappearing middle class and a broadening disparity between those with obscene wealth and those caught in an unending cycle of poverty. We see “freedom” used as a weapon of this side against that side, playing a wicked game of Chance, with the lives of the helpless and hapless dangling at the margins. We see people ostracized, vilified, judged, rejected and targeted for violence because of the color of their skin, the slant of their eyes, the clothing they wear, the religion they embrace, their genealogy, ethnicity, and sexuality.

The news broke on Wednesday of a horrific series of shootings targeting women of Asian descent. Whether these crimes turn out to be racially motivated or not there was good reason for that question to be raised – in the past year violent crimes and the persecution of Asian-Americans have sky-rocketed as they have become scapegoats for the existence of a pandemic. Several Asian-Americans have died as a result of the attacks on them, and others live in fear. Reports of this kind have come not only from cities far away but also right here in Lancaster County.

God’s compassionate love and committed covenants illustrate a “forgive and forget” attitude assumed by God. Yet, writes Brueggemann, “When we think about "forgive and forget" in our society, such an option contradicts the seething rage that is everywhere voiced and acted out among us, in which nothing is ever forgiven and nothing is ever forgotten. One sometimes even wonders if there is an unresolved "gene" of violence and revenge among us that precludes "beginning again."

God's generosity pushes beneath and beyond our committed thirst for retaliation. One could imagine that God could forgive, as Jeremiah says, so that forgiveness of social-national proportion might be thinkable.

            God’s steadfast love and forgiveness demonstrates the tendency of God to hold God’s people in sacred relationship with Godself. It was and always has been God’s expressed desire to keep the covenant intact for future generations. God’s generous establishment of covenant relationship, covenant generosity, covenant guidance is a gift to us that indeed renews our hearts and guides us through the worst that the world can bring. Through the hearts on which God has inscribed God’s own righteousness.

Finally, in Jesus Christ, God’s everlasting covenant with us is established. There will be no more. When we fall short, God renews the tender planting of seed that God has planted through his steadfast, sure love for us. In Jesus and through the cross, the graffiti-artist God writes clearly and concisely, “you are mine”. May we embrace God’s love, live in God’s covenants, and cherish God’s generosity and forgiveness, and in so doing, shine God’s light and life-giving Spirit in the world. Amen.

 

 

 

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[1] Day One “On Scripture” Dr. Walter Brueggemann on Jeremiah 31:31-34

[2] (Seabury Press, 1975),

Snakes Alive! And the Things That Scare Us - Sermon on Numbers 21:4-9 and John 3:14-21

Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21    Lent 4 2021, Year B

            It’s been almost eleven years now, but I still remember the day we were preparing the gardens and back yard of our home for our oldest son’s wedding. In the middle of mulching the flowerbeds from the supply of fresh mulch Jim had loaded into his pickup truck from the local gardening center the night before, we uncovered a big surprise: a large, black rat snake right in the center of the load of mulch.

The snake had made her nest in the middle of the mulch while it sat in the garden center’s lot awaiting purchase. She was apparently laying her eggs when somehow, they managed to move the mulch from the lot to my husband’s truck without disturbing her.

She had remained buried in the mulch sitting in Jim’s truck, presumably laying more eggs, overnight.  Somehow even my husband’s shovel failed to disturb her as he emptied half the truck-bed of its load without revealing her presence. Then one more thrust of the shovel, and he took away the last bit of mulch concealing her - and the dozen or so eggs surrounding her.

            While I love God’s creatures great and small, I am not so crazy about snakes. I don’t remember seeing many while growing up in a small city in Connecticut; what we did have in fields around town were of the harmless garden variety.

But, when I moved to Oklahoma I became aware that not only were there (what I considered) a lot of snakes out there, several types native to the region were poisonous. Since I didn’t know one kind of snake from another (except rattlers, of course – they kind of give their identity away) I simply feared and loathed any snake I came across.

While I was pretty sure that our mulch-pile snake wasn’t poisonous, I wanted nothing to do with her. Our younger son picked her up and moved her to a safe place away from the house, while I ran the other way, and then, truth be told, continued to keep an eye out for her whenever I ventured into the backyard – for the rest of the summer!

            My reaction isn’t all that unusual. Although there may be some of you out there who are rather fond of the slithering creatures, the fear and loathing of serpents is both instinctual for many of us, and, you could say, scriptural. All we have to do, is look to the story of the Garden of Eden and the serpent’s role in the “fall of humankind” to see where some of our attitudes about snakes come from.

Yet from antiquity, and still today, snakes are both valued and loathed, depending on your outlook and experience.   Aside from their scary qualities, snake oils, skins and the venoms are all used for healing and rejuvenation. The symbol of a snake entwined around a staff is used as a symbol for physicians and of the medical profession itself. So, our experience and attitudes about snakes are both good – and bad.

Still, when we read this story of snakes in the wilderness, of poisonous bites and death, and then read the loving Lord comparing himself and his cross to the slithering serpent and its staff, we have to wonder what this all means.

In the pairing of Old and New Testament stories today, we see the serpent as a symbol of both death and life – and Jesus himself referring to his coming cross as the same. These might be perplexing stories for us. But they are also indicative of the gift that God gives us in the wilderness – and at Calvary.

The Israelites endure forty years wandering in the wilderness, and even as God claims them for special inheritance by him, it is their grumbling that stands out by way of response.

They have certainly faced their share of challenges and struggles, but God has promised to care for them, and has always answered their need. Rather than responding with gratitude, however, what we read in the stories are accounts that they certainly did not suffer in silence, grateful, as it were, to finally be free. Rather, they fretted. Such fretting does is not exactly indicative of faith in God’s providential care.

Yet over and over again God patiently responded to their complaints and their whining. They were hungry – so God sent them manna from the sky. They were thirsty – and God brought forth water –water from a rock no less! God’s provisions were miraculous – illustrating his power and capability to do as he promised – to save and care for them, which he did, again and again.

Still, they complained they were tired of the manna; God sent quail. They were tired of walking; they were tired of setting up camp only to strike it the next morning and move on.

“What have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” they ask. “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

            The story of Israel is really the story of our lives, too. For all these years they traveled on a journey between redemption out of slavery in Egypt and entrance to the Promised Land – the Old Testament “place of rest.”

We have been traveling between our redemption by the cross of Christ and our entrance into the eternal Kingdom of God, our “place of rest”. Like the people of Israel, we have sinned, and sometimes lost faith. We whine and complain. We pursue other gods – the riches, and power, and satisfaction the world promises but can never truly deliver.

We hunger and thirst constantly seeking the worldly things that might satisfy us, when the truth is that nothing will truly satisfy us the way the love of Jesus can. Sometimes, we simply lose interest in God’s way and God’s will for our lives.

The past year shows us how the world responds to challenge and hardship. Some remain faithful, caring for themselves and their neighbor to the best of their ability, following best the most reliable information they can out of concern for the most vulnerable, workers and others at risk, and the world. Others, not so much.

From you I have heard gratitude for what you have – for your safety, shelter, food, and now, as hard as it has been for some to schedule their vaccinations – the hope that the shots represent.

But we all know that is not the case with large segments of society, and sometimes, we too get pulled into the mumbling, the grumbling, and the complaining. We waver toward doubt, at times. Does God really care about all this,? we wonder.

Meanwhile there are still so many in the world who need our attention and generosity, yet the evil one works to distract us from attending to the needs of many. The temptation is to focus inward. God consistently calls us to look outward, and, in thanksgiving for all that we are given, to respond generously with kind words, thoughtful gestures, material assistance and more, to those who are struggling.

The image of the bronze serpent had the power to heal only because God gave it, and only if the Israelites believed that God would heal them if they looked at it. They had to trust in God’s word that if they obeyed the command, they would be healed.

            Jesus lifts up this very passage from the Scriptures, and he draws this parallel: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” he says, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Whoever believes in him will live.

“For God so loved the world,” he says, “that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

Those who believe in him would be given life, says Jesus; those who believe will not die from their sin. What God accomplishes on the cross will save those who believe.

The thing is, on our own, we cannot even believe; we cannot trust; we cannot place our lives in God’s providential care. By ourselves, we are blind to the truth of God’s wonderful, fantastic, indescribable, love and mercy. Because of the lure of sin, on our own we see and judge only through the lens of human weakness, as the Israelites showed us so well.

The good news for us is that in God’s abundant love and mercy, God has the remedy for our blindness and our disbelief. Blessed by the lens of faith given to us through God’s Holy Spirit in our Baptism, we begin to see, if only dimly, if only for a little while, the grace and mercy that God has freely given and called us to.

            The bronze serpent fashioned by Moses by God’s command, is known to have resided in the Jerusalem Temple for 500 years, where it bore witness to the grace that God bestowed on the Israelites in the wilderness; the Cross of Christ is our symbol, our reminder of God’s saving grace and mercy through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Because of the cross, we can believe and trust, that despite the dangers, the hardship and forbidding landscape of life, God cares for our every need and guides us safely, securely to the promised kingdom.

            Just as I instinctually ran from the snake that day in my garden, we instinctually turn away from the horror of the cross. Yet God calls us, grants us the mercy and grace of faith, that believing in God’s grace and trusting in God’s mercy – all gifts given to us and fed by the Holy Spirit – we can come to see that the crucifixion story is not so much about how much God loved the world, but the way God loved and still loves the world.

            Trust the faith that God provides; know the faithfulness of the God who does not abandon us to find our own way. Experience with gratitude the way of God that is mercy, bought by God’s love, which comes to us because God so loved the world. May we be filled by the God who desires to be in relationship with us, and being so filled, may we open ourselves to relationship not only with God, but with one another.

God uses the most unlikely means for accomplishing God’s purpose – a bronzed serpent on a pole, a cross and risen body. God uses the most unlikely means to show others that in faith and trust all that we need is provided by the living and true God.  Amen.