God is up to Something
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Text: Jeremiah 31:31-40
One of the great joys in meeting with a couple when they are about to get married is talking about all the various and sundry things that they want in a marriage ceremony. There are so many fascinating things on the agenda when they come in and meet with me. Usually they bring a note pad with a few things that they want to talk about and usually there are things like the music, the colour of the flowers, the timing, and the reception, who the best man or maid of honour will be, who is going to be an usher, where everyone will stand, whether my gown will clash with all the other outfits, those kinds of things. I remind them and there are some here this morning that I have married who will know this, that that is all important, but it is nothing compared to one thing: their vows.
The vows are the most important thing. From those vows emerge their entire relationship, for marriage is a covenant, a covenant between two parties. Like any covenant, there are two parts to it. There is a promissory note, which says they promise to do such-and-such and then it is followed by a statement of precisely what that means. When a couple make a covenant, they make a covenant that says they promise and they pledge themselves to each other, but then they go on to explain under what conditions: in life, in death, in good times and in sorrow, and so on.
It is a covenant then of two parties who come together. Now, I think that is the way you have to look at the passage that we have from the Book of Jeremiah today. Jeremiah has looked at the relationship between God and Judah and Israel as a covenant, somuchso that he describes God as being a husband to Judah and to Israel, the northern and the southern kingdoms. This relationship, this covenant has within it all the things that ordinary covenants have. They have a promissory note, an agreement and then they have a statement of the things that actually manifest themselves because of the relationship.
Basically, the promise is this: I will be your God and you will be my people. That is the promise. And then the statement is that everyone will be faithful to the law and to one another. A simple, simple covenant! It is a covenant that is set by God. God is the one who makes it, but the people are the ones who respond to it, and make that covenantal promise to be faithful to God. Like any relationship, like any marriage, like any bond, like any covenant that is made, the words themselves are important, but the words are not the most important thing. True covenants require one thing above all else: faithfulness.
It is one thing to make a commitment on paper, and to agree to something; it is another to keep it, and to make sure that you are faithful to it. The Book of Jeremiah is written at a moment of great sorrow: the covenant has been broken. It is not God who has broken this covenant; it is the people ofIsrael
First, by their idolatry: they have ceased to worship God alone, and have worshipped other gods. Rather than being faithful in their worship, they have chosen other gods above the worship of God, thus breaking the very first of the Ten Commandments: you shall have no other gods from me. Israel broke that covenant.
Israel had furthermore entered into military alliances with nations that hitherto been the enemies of Israel, the feeling being that Israel could no longer trust God and had to trust alliances with powers that did not have their best interests in mind and certainly did not have the will of God in mind. So, they broke the covenant with God by having alliances with nations that rejected God.
They also performed injustice. The separation between the rich and the poor was great in the land of Israel. The power of the monarchs and the kings was too great and ordinary people were left to wander. They had broken the law. They had broken the covenant. They had not treated their neighbour properly, they had not taken care of their widows and their orphans, they had not acted with justice, and they certainly had not acted with morality. The covenant, the relationship was broken. It was decimated!
The decimation was manifested in their exile. The people of Israel had been taken over by the Babylonians. They had been thrown out of their houses, their Temples were no longer places of worship and many of them were living in other lands. Servants and slaves of Babylonian masters and mistresses, they were no longer able to associate as a covenant people. The nation was divided - the north from the south - and it was weak. Their idolatry, their alliances, their injustices got them absolutely nowhere.
They thought they could save themselves by doing these other things and worshipping their false gods and it brought about their destruction. Jeremiah knew that would happen. He is deeply concerned. How do you get back what is broken? How do you take this covenant that has been shattered and renew it? Is there a road back for the people who have broken their side of the promise?
The answer for Jeremiah is “Yes.” There is a way back. It will require a new covenant. And, because there needs to be a new covenant, there needs more than anything else to be forgiveness: forgiveness of sins, wiping the slate clean, having a new covenant that is based on a new people. This is what God required. There is no point going over and trying to re-patch the old, filling in the holes; there needs to be something new.
Jeremiah speaks of this new covenant in this magnificent passage of Jeremiah 31. It is a theme, as we shall see later, that is picked up in The New Testament. What does this tell us about God? What is there in this encounter between Jeremiah and the people that speaks about the very nature of God? Well, it is that God is above all merciful. Jeremiah writes: “God will forgive our iniquities and he will remember our sins no more.” Jeremiah is saying that there is a new day dawning for Israel. There is a new day dawning for Judah. The slate will be clean. God will forgive. God will be merciful if the people will turn to him.
Even though the covenant has been broken, something new will be given. As The New Testament scholar N. T. Wright suggests, so much of what the prophets were saying during this time was that the forgiveness of Israel would be manifested by the return of the people from exile. The return is a sign of God's forgiveness. They will come home. They will come back. There will be an opportunity to begin again because God is merciful.
Some years ago, there was a movie that at the time I confess I didn't go to see, but a little later on found it on the television late at night. It was a movie that was made in 1983. It is what I would like to call, and please excuse me for this reference, “a chick flick.” It is a movie that really does pull on the heart strings, butas a man in my early thirties it didn't do a whole lot for me. It was called Tender Mercies, not really the kind of stuff I was into then, but I watched the movie one night and actually I realized that either I had softened and changed, or maybe it was a good movie all the time.
It is the story about a man and a woman who marry one another. The man is a tough-living, tough-drinking country singer. It stars one of my favourite actors of all time, Robert Duvall. Robert can make almost any part seem meaningful. He plays this country singer who has never made it and because of that, he drinks and he leads a rough life. His wife, who was firstly widowed when her husband was killed in Vietnam, is the exact opposite. She is devout. She is faithful. She is Christian. And she wants the best for him.
The man's life spirals downwards despite their marriage, despite the love she offers him. He gets worse and worse, more abusive. Things go wrong. He is not making it. He is bitter and angry. Then, at the end, finally it reaches a climax. He jumps into his pick-up truck, he takes a bottle of Southern Comfort with him and he decides that he is going to go on his own and disappear. His wife is absolutely terrified. She is mortified. What does she do? She goes into her room, takes out a Bible, and prays for him.
The story goes that at some point along the way he finally has an epiphany and rather than disappearing, he comes home. There she is, having prayed for him, faithful all along. As the relationship takes on a new life and he has come to his senses, he finally begins to become the musician that he always wanted to be in the first place. But to become it he had to be loved through it. Tender mercies!
I think in so many ways that is exactly how God was with Israel at times. Oh, he let them go into exile. He allowed things to happen. But all along there was this tender mercy, this desire for the people to return, always wanting them to be faithful to the covenant he had made, always wanting to reaffirm “I am your God and you are my people.” He wanted them to return home. He wanted them to come back.
When we read The New Testament and we read about Jesus in the Upper Room on the night before he was to be betrayed, when he gathered with the disciples, he said these words. He said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” (Luke 22:20) In that one moment, in that Upper Room, on that Passover evening, God's Son was saying to the people, “The new covenant is here. What you had hoped for and prayed for, the forgiveness that you desired the new beginning that you wanted is here.” This is where God brings all God's children home. This is when God brings back those who are from Israel and Judah. This is where God brings back those who were Gentiles and had wandered from the past. This is when God had a new covenant, the new covenant in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
My friends, you cannot understand Holy Week, you cannot understand Good Friday, and you cannot understand Easter Sunday without grasping the enormity of what this new covenant means and what it meant for those who were in that Upper Room with the disciples, because what they heard was the prophet, the prophet of mercy, the prophet wanting to bring God's people home. This also showed great hope for Jeremiah five hundred years before Christ to say what he said, hopeful and desiring it. The people did come home. Their sins were forgiven. There was hope.
But something had changed in the process. Jeremiah prayed that the law, rather than being written on tablets or being external, would actually rise up in the heart and be inscribed on the heart, not just on the minds of people. People would not have to say, “I know the Lord” because they already know the Lord and that it would come from within, not from without. This is what the new covenant is all about. It is a covenant that renews not from the outside in but from the inside out.
I read a marvellous story, and it is one that has probably been told many times. Maybe it is a fable that many believe is rooted in history about a church in Switzerland. In this church in Switzerland and, most scholars agree now that it was probably in Sion at Notre Dame de Valere, a church that was founded in 1334. In this church, in a town in a valley, there was an incredible organ. This organ was so spectacular that when it was played, the sound echoed through the town, and could even be heard on the hills.
There was not much distracting noise, the doors and the windows of the church were open and the words and the sounds and the music would echo from it. People would listen on the hills and would wake up in the morning to the organ playing and would be inspired. People in the town would go about their commerce and the organ music would lift them up. This incredible organ had the most beautiful doors on it, painted by a Peter Magdeburg from Freiburg.
One day, the organ sounded sick. The notes were not pure. There was discordance to it. It was not the organ everyone expected. Finally, they decided to play the organ no longer, for the organ itself had become an irritation. They hired and brought in organ builders and those who maintain organs from all over Switzerland to try to figure it out and to fix it. Many did not know what to do but they came and the tried to fix it.
One day there was a knock on the door and an elderly gentleman came in. He said to the priest, “You know, I can fix this organ for you. I would like to be given a chance.”
He wasn't from any of the recognized companies that were known for making and restoring organs, but the priest said, “Okay. Fair enough! But, don't take too long about it.”
The old man said, “Not a problem.”
He went into the organ and he was there for three or four hours. Finally, he got to the console and played all the beautiful restored sounds that had always come from that magnificent, magnificent organ.
The priest said to him, “How is it that we have had the big organ companies come and try to fix it, and you do it?”
The old man said, “It is because I am the one who built it in the first place! I know it, and I love it!”
The organ needed to be restored and renewed from within and Jesus came to renew and restore from within. Jesus still comes and renews and restores from within.
The new covenant is a covenant of faith. It is a covenant of God's presence. It is a covenant of forgiveness. When I think of the Church, I think in many ways it carries on the ministry of Israel. Israel, as Paul makes abundantly clear, did not have the covenant taken away from them. They broke the covenant. As he says in The Book of Romans, God is always faithful, even to the old covenant, right to the end. God never breaks his covenant, whether it is the old or the new. God always remains faithful. Israel and Judah will be saved: that is the good news. The Church, it seems to me, is to be a body that proclaims that newness and lives out that newness and gives hope to the world that God's mercies and God's truth are everlasting.
This past week I had the most incredible experience. I have had two great experiences in the last month with complete strangers. This was while I was walking along in a place that I walk along every day and there was a man who was selling one the Outreach papers. These papers are mainly sold by those who are homeless, but not exclusively homeless, sometimes they are those who have been formerly homeless. This gentleman and I passed each other almost every day and we always stop and speak even if it is for a minute.
One day, I was walking along and the temperature was twenty-five degrees, he said, “You know, on a day like this a pair of shorts would go really well with that pin stripe jacket that you have on.”
I said, “I am sorry. I don't have the liberty to wear shorts in what I do.”
He said, “No, but I am going to wear shorts tomorrow.”
And sure enough, he had his shorts on. We have talked about everything over the while, over the months, from hockey to weather to just “How are you doing?” But, this day was different. I was wearing my clerical shirt and I was on my way to the funeral home. He looked at me with incredulity, and he said, “Oh, my lord, so you are a priest then!”
I said, “Yes, I am a minister.”
He thought, and then said with a big smile, “Na, this has got to be April Fool's Day or something.”
I said, “No, no, I really am a minister.”
Maybe my behaviour hadn't been very good up to that point and he was trying to tell me something? He looked incredulous. So, he said, “Where are you?”
I said, “I am at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church.”
There was this long pause. And then, he just said, “God bless Timothy Eaton Memorial Church!”
I said, “Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.”
He said, “No. You don't understand. When I was homeless, we were kicked out of the shelters early in the morning and I had nowhere to go, I was very hungry, I had been drinking heavily and I was disoriented. One of my friends said that if you go to the Food Bank at Timothy Eaton Church just up the road they will take care of you. You will get some food there.”
So, he came and he got some food. He ate it outside and then he stored it safely where no one else would find it and each night went back to shelter.
He continued, “The next time I went back to the Food Bank something strange happened. A woman came to me and she said ”˜You know, you don't only need food, you probably need to change some other things in your life.'”
He said that it was like this massive wake-up call.He said, “I cannot describe what it was like. I just decided at that moment that I had to do something. My life was spiralling downwards. I was probably going to die. Here I am, coming to a church for food. How much lower can I get? This is how bad it is right now.”
He thought about what the woman had said to him and decided that from that moment on he would stop drinking.
He said, “For a number of nights, I slept right behind this door over here on the north side, and I detoxed there on my own. I went through days of hell. I couldn't go back to the shelters, because there would be booze for me again on the street right after. I had to do this alone. I sat there and I did this alone. I was so, so full of pain. Then, I realized that I needed something else in my life. I had to stop drinking as well and then again, I found that the church could help me. Here I was, helped by a place I had never really known, or thought anything about. It is just on a street. It had nothing to do with my life. Yet, somehow, in some strange way it had saved me.”
All the time he was talking to me, he couldn't look up. Then, all of a sudden he looked up and said, “And, I haven't drunk for two-and-a-half years. I realized that where I worked before had a pension for me, but I didn't know about it, because I wasn't sober. I didn't realize what I could do with my life and what resources were out there to help me. I thought no one would ever help me. Here I am now. I have an apartment. I haven't drunk for two-and-a-half years. I sell these papers because it is wonderful just to get out and to see people and for me, it is like having a job where I can greet the public and sell something. And now I run into you! I can't believe it! I just can't believe it!”
Later on that day, Marial walked past him. Knowing that she was often walking with me, he said to her “Is he really a minister?”
And, she said, kind of begrudgingly, “Yes, yes, he is.”
He just couldn't get his mind around it. I think to myself, “This is what a church is like that lives out the new covenant. This feeds people when they are hungry and gives them hope.” Whoever that person was who spoke to him deserves great credit! A word that says, “You need to change. Something needs to happen.” A safe place, because clearly our sextons had been kind to him during that difficult moment. A place that there is a sign, there is a hope, and there is mercy, and a chance to begin again.
We are not always that for everyone. But sometimes we are. And if the Church of Jesus Christ is not about mercy, forgiveness, and hope, and if it is not about the new covenant in Christ, if it is not about the joy that it brings to return home, then it isn't the Church. But, if it is, it is exactly what Jeremiah hoped for: that it would proclaim a new covenant that comes from the heart.Amen.