“Stone, Heart”                                                                                                        

Jeremiah 31: 27 – 34                                                                                               

Makemie Presbyterian Church                                                                              

October 17, 2010

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel & the house of Judah with the seed of humans & the seed of animals. ²⁸And just as I have watched over them to pluck up & break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build & to plant, says the Lord. ²⁹In those days they shall no longer say: “The parents have eaten sour grapes & the children’s teeth are set on edge.” ³⁰But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge. ³¹The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel & the house of Judah. ³²It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 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 & I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God & they shall be my people. ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity & remember their sin no more.            

                               This ends the reading.

I read a delightful story the other day, about when Mother Teresa went to visit Edward Bennett Williams, a legendary Washington criminal lawyer. He was a powerful lawyer. He once owned the Washington Redskins & the Baltimore Orioles. Bennett Williams was the lawyer for Frank Sinatra, Richard Nixon & Michael Milliken.  Evan Thomas's biography of Williams tells this story of Mother Teresa’s visit to see Edward Bennett Williams because she was raising money for an AIDS hospice. Williams was in charge of a small charitable foundation that she hoped would help. Before she arrived for the appointment, Williams said to his partner, Paul Connolly,

“You know, Paul, AIDS is not my favorite disease. I don't really want to make a contribution, but I've got this Catholic saint coming to see me & I don't know what to do.”

Well, they agreed that their strategy would be to be polite, hear her out, but then to say “no.”                                                                                                          

OK. Mother Teresa arrives. She’s like a little sparrow sitting on the other side of the half acre big mahogany lawyer's desk. She makes her appeal for the hospice, & Bennett Williams says, “We're touched by your appeal, Mother, but no.”          

Mother Teresa said simply, “Let us pray.”

Williams looked at Connolly; they bowed their heads & after the prayer, Mother Teresa makes the same pitch, word for word, for the hospice. Again Williams politely says, “No.”                                                                                         

Mother Teresa says, “Let us pray.”   Williams, exasperated, looks up at the ceiling, “All right, all right, I’ll get my checkbook!”

Our text this morning illustrated a little bit by the above story is about how God has loved us from the very beginning; a God who finds ways to help us, God who has dipped his finger in the cosmos & written on our hearts. Another story.

It’s about a young boy named Frank who was walking along the bank of the Mississippi River & he notices in the shallows of the river another boy about his age wrestling with a homemade raft. Frank asks him, “What are you doing?”

The other boy says, “I'm going to take this raft out to that island in the middle of the river. I dare you to go with me!”

Who could resist a dare like that? Frank couldn't so he scrambles down the bank; gets on the raft. The two boys head out to the middle of the river but the current is swift & strong. As they approach the island, the raft breaks- up & sinks.  Now the boys swim to the island. And there they are, abandoned on an island; it’s late in the afternoon. Nobody knows where they are. What will they do?

Right at that moment, they see one of those paddle-wheel steamers coming down the river. So Frank runs to the shore of the island & begins screaming & waving his hands, “Help! Help!”

The other boy says, “Don't waste your breath. They can't hear you & even if they could they wouldn't pay no attention to boys like us.”

But at that moment the paddlewheel steamer turned toward the island. The boy said to Frank, “How did you do that?”

And Frank says, “Well, there's something you don't know. The captain of that boat is my father!”

As Pat read to us a moment ago, our text this morning ends with God declaring, “I will be their God & they shall be my people. ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity & remember their sin no more.”         

Now the text begins with Jeremiah comparing two different covenants through which God established a relationship with his people.  “‘The time is coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel & with the house of Judah.’” 

If God is going to make a new covenant, that means there was an old one.  And sure enough, Jeremiah tells us a little about the old covenant.  “‘It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,’ declares the Lord.”  This was the Ten Commandments the covenant carved into stone.

Jeremiah looks back several hundred years to the time when the Israelites escaped from slavery in Egypt.  God convinced Pharaoh to let the Jews go free after several terrible plagues struck Egypt.  But then Pharaoh changed his mind.  He sent Egypt’s army chasing after the Israelites, who were pinned between the impending army on one side & the Red Sea on the other.  With the odds against them, God performed a stunning miracle for his people.  God opened up a dry path through the sea so that the nation could escape to the other side.  When the armies of Egypt followed, God sent the waters back over them & turned them into fish bait.

With that stunning incident lingering in their minds, God established a covenant with God’s people.  This was a two-sided deal.  If they observed his laws & commands, God would bless them.  But if they failed to live as God instructed, they would suffer.  And we know from reading our Bible that before the chisel marks had even cooled off on the old stone covenant, the people break it by engaging in all sort of pagan immorality.  Even though they had been saved by one of the greatest miracles recorded in the Old Testament; somehow they forget what God had done to rescue them.  We can read all about it in Exodus.

But this wasn’t just the story in Exodus.  It’s the story of their whole history.  Fast-forward several hundred years to the sixth century B.C., when Jeremiah served the little nation of Judah, the remaining fragment of the original Israel.  Jeremiah’s book is filled with doom & gloom & warnings to Judah, because the people forsake God time & time again. 

Finally God says “Have it your way!  If you don’t want to live under my covenant & be my people, fine!”  So God gives them a seventy-year “time out.”  God allows an enemy nation, Babylon, to attack, defeat & deport them from their homeland for seven decades.  This is what’s going on when Jeremiah writes his book.

          If God is a loving God, why do bad things happen?  If you haven’t asked that question yourself, you’ve probably been asked the question.  If God is a loving God, why doesn’t God just put an end to all the evil & suffering in the world?  That’s a fair enough question, don’t you think? 

Parents, teachers, relatives, you know that no one on this planet loves your children more than you.  You also know that no one can frustrate you more than your children!  Sometimes you see them doing something you know is bad & you put a stop to it.  But sometimes you choose to let them suffer the consequences for their mistakes.  If you are a loving adult, why would you let bad things happen to children?  The answer is: We don’t.  But we also don’t turn them into robots.  Sometimes, when they choose to do the wrong thing, we may say to ourselves, “I hope they learn from this.”

            If God is a loving God, why does God let bad things happen?  The answer is: God doesn’t.  But God refused a long time ago to turn us into robots.  Even when we have continued in the sinful tradition of ancient Judah, of Israel in the desert & ultimately of our first parents.  Adam & Eve chose to disobey God & since then our free will has been attracted to one thing, the no-nos, things that we’re not supposed to do.  It’s why we confess our sins every Sunday.  We have a difficult time keeping up our end of the stone covenant.  It is outside of us we say. It doesn’t really apply to me. But does God give up on us? Does God move away from us? Or does God create something new?

            And what would this new covenant say? According to Jeremiah, “‘This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel,’ declares the Lord.  ’I will put my law in their minds & write it on their hearts. I will be their God & they will be my people. For I will forgive their wickedness & will remember their sins no more.’”

The old covenant was a two-sided arrangement.  People do their part & God will do God’s part.  But the people never did their part.  No ordinary human being has or ever will keep God’s commands perfectly.  So the Lord looked ahead to a time when his new covenant would be put into action.  “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.”  The Hebrew word for “law” is torah & it can mean much more than what Presbyterians usually think when they hear the word “law.”  The word can simply mean a “teaching,” & the teaching that God would write on our hearts is good news.   “I will be their God, and they will be my people.”  The special relationship that the old covenant couldn’t accomplish will happen under the new covenant.  The new covenant relationship with God won’t be based on what we do; it will be based on the One in whom we believe. Sin forgotten.  Iniquity against God pardoned for the sake of Jesus.  Failure to reach the holy standards God requires no longer remembered, because God remembers instead his Son’s sacrifice on our behalf on the cross.  No strings attached.  No fine print on the bottom of the page.  A one-sided deal, a unilateral covenant signed, sealed, & secured by our Savior Jesus Christ, a covenant written on our hearts.  And as we learned last Sunday, even our faith is not really our doing, but the gracious working of God’s Spirit in our hearts.

Despite our professional efforts at sin & rebellion, despite our amateur claims to be self-sufficient without God, God came forward with the divine rescue plan of this new covenant.  In fact, God not only came forward, but God came to our world in the person of Jesus Christ.  God came with the righteousness that covers our sinful hearts; with the sacrifice that atones for our sin.  God came with the resurrection victory that promises our resurrection from the dead & victory over sin. God as the Son continues to absolve us, at the font to cleanse us, and at the altar to feed us. For we are God’s people & God has written this on our hearts.

            Of course sometimes the way we are saved are not the way we would imagine. One last story.

Several summers ago, I spent three days on a barrier island where loggerhead turtles were laying their eggs. One night while the tide was out, I watched a huge female heave herself up the beach to dig her nest & empty herself into it while slow, salt tears ran from her eyes. Afraid of disturbing her, I left before she had finished her work but returned next morning to see if I could find the spot where her eggs lay hidden in the sand. What I found were her tracks, only they led in the wrong direction. Instead of heading back out to sea, she had wandered into the dunes, which were already hot as asphalt in the morning sun.

A little ways inland I found her, exhausted & all but baked, her head & flippers caked with dried sand. After pouring water on her & covering her with sea oats, I fetched a park ranger, who returned with a jeep to rescue her. As I watched in horror, he flipped her over on her back, wrapped tire chains around her front legs & hooked the chains to the trailer hitch on his jeep. Then he took off, yanking her body forward so fast that her open mouth filled with sand & then disappeared underneath her as her neck bent so far I feared it would break. 

The ranger hauled her over the dunes & down onto the beach; I followed the path that the prow of her shell cut in the sand. At ocean's edge, he unhooked her & turned her right side up again. She lay motionless in the surf as the water lapped at her body, washing the sand from her eyes & making her skin shine again.

        Then a particularly large wave broke over her & she lifted her head slightly, moving her back legs as she did. As I watched, she revived. Every fresh wave brought her life back to her until one of them made her light enough to find a foothold & push off, back into the water that was her home.

Watching her swim slowly away and remembering her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or being saved by the hands that write upon your heart, turn your life upside down & bring you home.  “You will be my people.” Amen.