Written On Our Hearts – Written In Our Hearts

Lent 5B; Jeremiah 31:31-34, St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC; March 22, 2015

Jim Melnyk, “Written On Our Hearts – Written In Our Hearts”

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is the only Lord.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”  For several weeks now we have listened to these words as our services have begun.  This is the ancient creed of Israel, the Shema, which all Jews are called to recite each morning and each evening of every day – and obviously important enough for Jesus that he called it the greatest of all commandments – followed immediately with: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

And yet, what does it mean?  What does it mean to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength?  Does it not mean to love God with all that we are and all that we may ever hope to be?  To love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength is to come before God with every fiber of our being, offering to God “ourselves, our souls and bodies” as the Apostle Paul (Romans 12), and one of our older Eucharistic prayers (Rite I) puts it – a self-offering to the God who gives us life and breath.  It is to seek from God the ability to love – to love both God and one another with our whole created selves.  But what in the world could motivate such love on our part? 

There are bunches of Facebook memes with Boromir from the movie version of The Lord of the Rings out there.  In the movie Boromir says, “One simply does not walk into Mordor.”  I can see one captioned, “One simply does not love God with all one’s heart for no reason at all!”  In today’s passage from John’s Gospel Jesus once again speaks of being “lifted up from the earth,” hinting at his coming crucifixion – at his execution. 

My sister-in-law Glyn writes, “In the cross, God speaks truth to power. There is no army storming the Roman Governor’s home. There are no riots in the in the temple courtyard. There is no angel of death killing the first born in each unbelieving household. There is only Love. [Love]Freely offered. [Love] Violently killed. And held up for all the world to see….”  She goes on to say, “But it only works if we are able to understand that God does not require this sacrifice. God in Christ offers the sacrifice. God is not angry. God in Christ suffers with us and for our sake. The sacrifice does not placate or mollify an outraged deity. God in Christ goes to the utmost length, allowing his arms to be nailed open in a posture of acceptance and embrace”(http://motherglyn.com/2015/03/21/twenty-eighth-day-of-lent-saturday-march-21-2015/).  One simply does not love God with all one’s heart for no reason at all – this incredible love from God is the kind of love that calls forth the Shema, or the Great Commandment, as a response in our lives.

For centuries people of faith have struggled with the whole purpose of the cross and with this call from ancient Scripture for complete abandonment to God.  And even if our minds can wrap themselves around the concept at all, we still struggle with the “how to” of it all.  It is all well and good to says, “Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” or, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” and all together another thing to make it so in our lives.

And if history is any indication, humanity as a whole has never found a way to love God with such reckless abandon.  From the first moments in the Garden, until this very day in the Middle East, Ukraine, or the Triangle and Eastern North Carolina, people – God’s people – find ways to ignore or trample God’s call to love.

The Shema, this wonderfully poetic creed Jesus quotes in the Gospels, finds its roots in the book of Deuteronomy.  Rediscovered by the Temple priests during the reign of King Josiah in the 7^th century before the birth of Christ, words such as these helped Josiah carry out great reforms in Judah.  It was also during Josiah’s reign that Jeremiah came upon the scene as one of Israel’s greatest prophets.  He, too, called Israel to reformation.  The great power behind words such as the Shema and the rest of Deuteronomy actually managed to put Jeremiah out of business for a while, having made such an impact on the leaders and people of Jerusalem.

Yet, as is often the case, much too soon the people’s faith wavered – and we all know what it means to have our faith waver, don’t we?  The wavering of faith, and the wavering of faithfulness, isn’t just an ancient thing, or a Jewish thing, or a Christian thing, it’s a human thing.  Vision fails and courage lags – and it does so in every generation. 

It is well and good to tell one another, “love God with your whole being,” and yet it is something so completely different to live that way.  And so God calls Jeremiah out of retirement, and it is through Jeremiah that God offers a new way – a new way inscribed upon the heart – a new way offered to the houses of Israel and Judah, and then, down through the ages, to all people.

“’The days are surely coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…This is the covenant that I will make… I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’”

First and foremost the new covenant God proclaims through Jeremiah is made with the people of Israel and Judah.  Make no mistake – it is a renewed covenant with God’s firstborn before it is ever a covenant with the followers of Jesus who come to be called Christians.   It is a covenant that will once again show the overwhelming desire of God to welcome and forgive.  It shows just how much the Jewish faith is deeply rooted in forgiveness and grace. 

It is into this powerful relationship of forgiveness and grace that Christians will come centuries later.  This promise of new covenant relationship invites first the Jews, and then the Christian people, “to stand in grateful awe before the miracle of forgiveness, to receive it, and to take from it a new, regenerated life” and then share that new life with the world. (Brueggemann, To Build and to Plant, page 73)

Second, we cannot forget that the initiative is God’s.  It is God who makes this new covenant with us – just as it is God in Christ Jesus who chooses the way of the cross centuries later.  It is God who offers us forgiveness from the least to the greatest. 

And it is God who makes this new covenant by writing God’s law deeply within us, by writing God’s law upon our hearts. 

In older days we used to carve our initials with those of the one we loved on the trunk of a tree, with a heart surrounding them.  Do people still do that today?  Some of you remember seeing that, I’m sure.  This is what God does with and for us – only God’s promise – God’s love – God’s name alongside our names – is etched upon our hearts, and upon a tree on Calvary.

As Christians, we experience the promise of new covenant relationship written in our hearts and signed upon our foreheads in Holy Baptism. 

Like a door opening wide for someone to enter in, our hearts welcome the miracle of God’s forgiveness and grace – God’s promise of new life.  One task that lies ever before us, then, is to listen to our hearts – to look deeply within ourselves to find – and then proclaim, live, and offer to all – the rich promise of God’s grace which awaits each of us.