5 LENT, YEAR B
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY
29 MARCH 2009
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Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-13; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33
“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.” (Jeremiah 31:33)
Another Sunday in Lent, another covenant. Number four today. Another of God’s ongoing attempts to reach the people, to establish a relationship with the people, to lay out God’s dream for them, for us.
“I’ll never again destroy the earth with a flood.” Covenant #1. “I’ll plan for you, Abraham, and you, Sarah, old as you are, to have a son so the human race can continue.” Covenant #2. “Here are the guidelines that will allow you and me and all of us to live in harmony, the Ten Commandments.” Covenant #3.
And today, the next one. “You’ll no longer have to learn about me from teachers….Now I will be written in your hearts. Here it is, here’s how it’ll work, a new covenant. “
We talk about the patience of Job. How about the patience of God?
God makes promises. The people listen for awhile and then they go their own way, thank you very much. God puts it a different way. The people listen for awhile and then they go their own way. What must God do to get their attention? What does God have to do to get our attention?
God saved the people by helping them escape from captivity in Egypt. The people danced for joy at first. But after awhile, God’s attempt to be their intimate master and companion became old hat; they soon forgot what God had done for them. And when life became unpleasant for them, the people complained and were consumed by their own misery. All God was good for now, it seemed, was to be a target for their complaints.
So our all-patient God said, “I know….! I’ll make a new covenant….This one won’t be like the earlier one…that the people broke, though I was their husband….I’ll write this one on the people’s hearts….They’ll all know me then…I’ll even forget their sins so we can start over, together.”
This sounds like a deal that’s too good to pass up!
The people complained. We complain. Sometimes we whine (Read the psalms—there’s plenty of whining in the psalms). We complain and whine. God listens to our complaining and our whining. There are other times when we cry out in genuine distress. God especially listens to our distress calls. That’s part of God’s continuing promise. God cares about our suffering.
God cares about our suffering. I want to turn that around. God cares about our suffering. But do we care about God’s suffering? What is God saying today? Once again God had been lavishing attention on the people with promise after promise. But the people had drifted. Some of them forgot what God had done for them. Others remembered God but they spent their time grumbling to God because what they had wasn’t good enough. How much is “enough” anyway? A question for ourselves as well. God laments that in spite of everything God had done for them, in spite of God’s passion (“though I was their husband!”), in spite of that, the people had broken away and had abandoned God. I don’t know what you hear here. But for me, this is profound sadness. God’s sadness. God’s suffering. God isn’t angry. God isn’t seeking retaliation. God is merely sad. Do you hear it? God’s incredible sadness? Did the people hear it? Did the people care? Do we care about the suffering of God? Can we even imagine that God suffers?
When our self-concern causes our hearts to shut God out, when our preoccupation with our own selves shrivels our hearts so there’s no room left in them for other people, let alone God, we have sinned before God. And God suffers. I invite you to sit sometime and imagine God, suffering because of what WE have done or not done…….
Well, in this brand-new arrangement, this new covenant, God re-opens our hearts. So that once again there is room in our hearts for God and for others. So that God’s passion is not merely written on tablets of stone or in the words of teachers, but is embedded deep within us. Written on our hearts.
God is giving us an escape route, an escape from the sin of self-concern into the saving good health which comes when we let our hearts be opened and we can hear ourselves saying, “Here I am.”
Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Crafton points out that “human beings are more than brains with legs. We are hearts, too. Many things can reach us, through many doors other than the door of our understanding. We own it to ourselves to open all the doors, and then open a few windows, too, while we’re at it!”
Today’s new covenant is born, I believe, out of God’s own deep distress and suffering. What does God have to do to get our attention? “Create in me a new heart, O God,” cries the psalmist. And so God did and so God does. Bringing the possibility of healing for us and the possibility of end to God’s own suffering. Our relationship re-established. What a deal!
The New Testament, you will remember, is often referred to as the “New Covenant.” We have been given the gift of new hearts, as Jeremiah the Prophet described them, opened to receive not simply God-with-us, but God IN us, this time, God in the flesh, Jesus, living within our hearts. Remember the Greeks in the gospel today, the Greeks at the festival, who opened the door and windows and eyes of their new hearts to Jesus by saying, “We wish to see Jesus?”
We enter now the last week of Lent, the ending of our journey with Jesus to his Cross. Whether you have been observing Lent with care and attention, or if you are just now getting into it, no matter. May this be a time of renewal for each of us, that we may open the eyes of our new hearts to see Jesus, to receive the risen Christ anew, even as we receive him in the holy food and drink of the Eucharist each week, and to be filled to the brim, even overflowing, with the presence of God.