31The days are surely coming, says
the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and 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, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be
their God, and 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, and remember their
sin no more.
(Jeremiah 31:31-34, NRSV)
But 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, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
Dr. Paul Brand spent 18 years doing pioneering research on leprosy in India and is a world renowned rehabilitation specialist. After all that time of working on pain, he needed, in his own Christian journey to step back and look with wonder at the human body that God has made. So he joined forces with Christian writer Philip Yancey to use the science of the body to understand Biblical and spiritual truths and they produced a beautiful book called Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. Brand writes:
How does the roaming white cell in the bat's wing know which cells to attack as invaders and which to welcome as friends? No one knows, but the body's cells have a nearly infallible sense of belonging. … What moves cells to work together? … The secret to membership lies locked away inside each cell nucleus, chemically coiled in a strand of DNA …
Brand goes on to recognize that God, who created DNA and this whole system of membership, also created in us the genetic possibility of belonging to another body: The Body of Christ. And then Brand, this world-class surgeon and scientific researcher, says that membership in the Body of Christ is as radical as a newly encoded imprint inside each and every cell.
I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their
hearts.
The promise we read in Jeremiah is a promise that God's own truth will be written within us. It will not be something outside us, like the 10 commandments given to Moses, but will be something that is part of our very nature. Something imprinted in our systems, like the DNA codes imprinted on our cells. This passage has been called the most important teaching in Jeremiah. It takes 31 chapters for him to get to it. And if you know anything about Jeremiah, you know that the previous chapters have been anything but hopeful.
Jeremiah is known as the complainer, the lamenter, the weeping
prophet who told of gloom and doom. His message to Israel was almost
despairing because he looked on the sin of the nation and found it
unbearable. He says in chapter 17, The sin of Judah is written
with a pen of iron; with a point of diamond it is engraved on the
tablet of their heart …
The prophet looked around him and
felt like the sin of not just the people, but the entire culture, was
so deep, so ingrained, it was as if it were written on their hearts.
Cut with a diamond. Engraved with iron.
What could cure such deeply intrinsic sin unless it is the even more deeply confirmed promises of God? And so we get this image of God's law being dug into our hearts, right in there with that engraved sin, so that no matter what we are up to, we are never far from the truth.
In our heart is the heart of God. It is imprinted on us. Encoded in our cells. The blood coursing through our veins cannot help but pass through this loving center where God has promised to be.
For they shall all know me, from the least of them to the
greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and
remember their sin no more.
Not only has God injected our hearts with the antidote to the sin that lives there, but in God's amazing grace, the promise is that the sin that Jeremiah saw so blatantly around him will not even be remembered. We will be forgiven completely. Fully. No yes, buts. Absolute forgiveness. This is God's promise.
In Brand's book he claims that by being born of God we share in
the God-stuff
of the divine life; divine DNA, if you will. And he
proclaims: As a result of this stuff-exchange, we carry within us
not just the image of, or the philosophy of, or faith in, but the
actual substance of God.
This is really good news. Mind-blowingly
amazing news. We carry God-stuff in us! We have God's law
imprinted on our hearts! God gives us a completely clean slate.
Whew! It's terrific, isn't it?
Here's what I've been thinking about this week: then why don't we always feel God inspired? If God is right there with us at the cellular level, why does it seem so hard sometimes? Why are we still hurting and hateful and hard-hearted and sometimes just sad? Why do we sometimes long for moments of divine clarity or heavenly healing or that peace that passes understanding and come up feeling empty? Why does God sometimes seem so very, very far away?
A small personal example: sermon writing. Sometimes I'm in the flow. I get inside the Scripture and get juiced and the words just come. And then there are weeks like this one. Where they don't. Where I stare at a computer screen and think about the Scripture and think about this congregation and offer up prayer after prayer and get, well, not much.
And I find myself saying, OK, God, where are those words that
you supposedly engraved right here? Where are they? I can't hear
them!
Then there are the times I watch someone I love suffer and want to throw some flames God's way to get a spark of response.
Or the times I watch the world we live in and see the tangled webs of deceit and greed and competition and apathy that seem to be leading us down a path of no return and want to cry.
God doesn't seem so close as the beating of my own heart at those moments. Is the promise only true on even numbered days? On months ending in R? Why the ebb and flow?
I would really, really like to blame God. And, well, I have. Repeatedly. Then I remember those 31 chapters leading up to this promise, when Jeremiah stood crying, shouting, shaking his fist and his head, before he got to the promise. By the time we get through those 31 chapters of despair to these few little verses we read today, we are reminded that this is not cheap grace. This is not an easy fix. We don't just snap our fingers and God magically makes everything OK. This is grace carved in blood. Carved into our hearts in the same place that diamond pen has already marked the way for sin.
John Calvin, founder of Presbyterianism, said that our minds are
idol factories, constantly, incessantly creating things that seem to
us more important than God. He also said that so long as you live,
sin must needs be in your members.
It's part of us. There is
something intrinsic to being human that insists that we can make it
without God, that we can figure out what is most important, that we
can be masters of our own destiny. Yeah, whatever. It doesn't seem
to be working out all that well, does it?
The fact is, we constantly cloud our thinking with lots of worries, lots of ideas, lots of concerns, lots of information, that have nothing to do with loving God and loving our neighbor. Our hearts are filled up with all of our needs and desires and fears. It's not that God has gone away. It's that we've crowded God out. We put ourselves in the center of that pulsating hub of our body and soul. Me first. Me, me, me, me, me. My family. My work. My church. My nation. Me first.
The universal results of this orientation can be read in the headlines of the daily paper. But God provides another way. Put it right inside us, so it's never beyond reach. Tattoos it right in the place where love begins. My way, God says. Try my way. I'll forget about all the mistakes you've made. I'll forgive every last one of them. Just, please, come. Be my people. Let me be your God.
Resources
- Brand, Paul and Yancey, Philip. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing Co. 1980.
- Interpreter's Bible, Vol. V. Nashville: Abingdon Press. 1956.
- Keesecker, William, ed. A Calvin Treasury. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1961.
The foregoing sermon was preached at the United Parish of Bowie on April 2, 2006, by Rev. Laura Collins.
© 2006 Laura Collins
