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.
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.
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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