Sermons

October 21, 2007

Rev. Scott Swanson

21st after Pentecost -Jer. 31:1, 27-34

This is our last encounter with Jeremiah. As I said last week, most of the lectionary's dealings with Jeremiah focus on the first part of the book and with the details of plucking up and breaking down. Today's text is firmly situated in the second part of Jeremiah. Written to the people in exile, it concerns God's second promise to build and to plant. It is a text of hope and liberation and promise of a time when we will no longer be bound by the mistakes of the past and a promise that God's forgiving love frees us to "delight in God's ways and walk in God's paths," as the old prayer goes.

There is a lot that could be said about the first half of this reading ... but that's not what I want to focus on today. If anyone is interested in discussing the ancient Israelite theology around the problem of evil, see me after and we'll make a date to get together. I'll even let you buy me a drink.

Today I want to focus on the end of today's text, where it talks about a new covenant. Before we explore what this new covenant is, let us look at what it is not.

This passage was taken by some early Christians, including the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, as a sign that the old covenant with the Jews was nullified. The new covenant was understood to be constructed around Jesus and the Christian church. Jesus is still in many Christians' minds understood to be the fulfilment of this passage in Jeremiah. This is absolutely wrong. You will not hear me say very often that something is categorically wrong, but I am saying it about this. Hebrews has distorted its reading of Jeremiah, and it is precisely these kind of distortions and misreadings that have led to the 2000 years of abusive treatment of Jews in western society, culminating in the atrocities in Europe in the '30s and '40s.

In order to do this passage justice, we must recognise its specific Jewishness. The Christian scholar Walter Bruggemann says this about this text: "at best we may say that Christians come derivatively and belatedly to share the promised newness. This is not to deny Christian participation in the newness, but Christian participation is utterly grounded in Jewish categories and claims, and can have participation on no other terms."

In defining a new covenant, this text is not about a new law, or Torah, which is internalised, in contrast to the old Torah which was external. The law, Deuteronomy tells us, was always meant to be internalised. The difference between the old and the new covenant will be in the way it is received by Israel and Judah, and later by Christians and others. ... So that is what the new covenant in Jeremiah is not about.

Fundamentally, covenants are about relationship. They are one of the ways that people enter into relationship with each other. Covenants often include the terms that the parties agree to live by. Covenants vary in length and intent, but the basic function is always the same: to acknowledge publicly that a relationship exists.

There are a couple of important elements in Jeremiah's description of a covenant relationship.One is that it is engraved into our very being. That makes it fairly primary, I would guess. Whatever happens in every other relationship of which we are a part, our relationship with God is primary. We can choose to ignore it, but we can never get out of it. God initiates the relationship, and only God can terminate it. And guess what friends? God never terminates it. Never forces it either, but never ends it. "In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone."

So we are in this primary relationship with the creator. Before our parents, our siblings, our friends, our spouses if we have them. Before everyone else, we were in relationship with God. And after they are all gone - or we are gone - we will still be in relationship with God.

Another element of this new covenant that seems important to me is that this relationship is fundamentally one of grace. Nothing we do can separate us from God and God's love for us. No matter what sin, limitation, or brokenness we experience or create, divine grace has been etched on our hearts, and divine compassion written on our souls. Anyone who has lived long enough with their eyes and ears and hearts open knows that there is apparently no limit to the pain we can inflict on one another, the world, and ourselves. All of that has the power to separate us from each other, from ourselves, from creation, and even from God - at least in our own perception. But none of it can separate God from us.

So here's a question. What if this primary relationship of grace and compassion in which we all inextricably find ourselves really were primary? In other words, what if it were not only primary in the sense of being first chronologically and in importance, but what if it were the realtionship by which we allowed all our other relationships to be defined and modelled? Notwithstanding the reality of human brokenness and our ability to mess up royally, what if we allowed all our relationships to be characterised by the same grace and compassion that characterises God's relationship with us? What if God's yearning for justice for even the least of our world became our yearning? What if our persistence mirrored God's persistence? What would such a world look like?

At the risk of reducing all of this to a John Lennon lyric I'm going to stop with the "what if" questions, but it seems to me this is precisely the invitation the gospel makes to us: to engage in our relationship with the world and the world's people on the same terms that God engages us in relationship. That would be part of a faithful response to God's invitation to us to be in relationship with God. The other piece would be to cultivate that connection with the Holy through our own prayer lives.

Thanks be to God for all God's graces, and for these words of good news to us and all who, like Jeremiah did, live in difficult, difficult times. Let us pray.

For more information or to comment on this sermon, please email Rev. Scott Swanson.

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