God smack dab in the middle...

Lent 5
March 25, 2012
Jeremiah 31:31-34

During the year before Holden and I got married, I read the entire Bible looking for the perfect readings for our wedding.  Our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah for this morning is one that made the cut.  I loved the promise God makes about the new covenant that will be written on our hearts so that all of us know the Lord.  The promise that God will be our God and we will be God’s people.  The beauty of that promise, combined with the joy of my wedding, led me to have this very warm and fuzzy feeling about the book of Jeremiah ever since.

In reading this passage this past week, though, I couldn’t help wondering about the fulfillment of this promise.  I look around the world and read the newspapers and see very clearly that we humans do not yet seem to have God written clearly on our hearts.  The recent shooting of civilians in Afghanistan, the teenager in Florida seemingly killed because his skin color scared someone, the political posturing and petty infighting in D.C. – Jeremiah’s promises don’t seem particularly evident in the world. 

And I’m not there personally, either.  More often than not I find myself frantically controlled by my to-do list, concentrating on the details of life instead of the people and relationships, bristling with impatience over my kids’ squabbling.  God is not written as indelibly upon my heart as I would like.

          But in preparing for this sermon, I went back and re-read the book of Jeremiah and I now realize that my warm and fuzzy feeling about it must have been wedding-induced.  There are two chapters in Jeremiah (sometimes called Jeremiah’s Book of Comfort) that are full of promise.  God tells the people: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”  “Again, I will build you and you shall be built.  Again you shall take your tambourines and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers.”  “I will turn you mourning into joy.  I will comfort you, and give you gladness for sorrow.”  And of course our reading from this morning.

But the other 50 chapters?  Not so much comfort there.  In those chapters, God talks about how the people have “forsaken the fountain of living water and made themselves cracked cisterns that hold no water.”  They have forgotten God and become “adulterous.”  They may be “circumcised in the foreskin”, but they are “uncircumcised in heart.”  God has called them to return over and over again and they would not.  God is left in “anguish and pain”.  The bulk of the book of Jeremiah is full of prophecies of the upcoming destruction of the nation.  And sure enough, as the book of Jeremiah was written the nation was overthrown, the walls of Jerusalem were leveled, the temple was destroyed, and many of the people were banished.  War and death and separation from God and each other were just as much a part of the people’s experience during Jeremiah’s time as they are for us.  A bleak situation indeed.

And yet, smack dab in the midst of that hopelessness is where this morning’s promise sprouts.  The people of the Old Covenant – the covenant that had been engraved in stone and displayed for all to see but none to follow, the covenant that had spurred thousands of detailed rules of behavior and practice – the people of that Old Covenant were given this new promise.  A time was coming when they would no longer know about God and be in relationship with God only by living in accordance with strict rules and requirements.  A time was coming when they would know God, they would belong to God and have God speak so directly to their hearts that all of their thoughts and actions and endeavors would flow naturally from that relationship.

          Maybe our promise is smack dab in the middle, too. 

It certainly is in the Church.  Here we are in the season of Lent – being repeatedly reminded of our sinfulness and our need for repentance.  Failing miserably (if you are anything like me) at even our simplest Lenten intentions.  And yet even during this season when we live in the shadow of the crucifixion, we know that the shadow is just evidence of the light that comes on Easter.

          I find that the promise tends to be smack dab in the middle in my own life too.  A few nights ago I went to the gym.  I don’t get there very often and I usually do this weights and cardio class that totally exhausts me and makes me feel like I’ve gotten great exercise.  But on this particular evening I had the kids with me and the class I wanted was too late for them to be in the nursery, so instead I found myself in a yoga class.  I was dubious from the start because I have always been a bit of a yoga doubter – not entirely sure all that stretching is really exercise, first of all, and then not sure it’s entirely natural for the body to contort in all those positions anyway.  It turned out that it took more strength and muscle than I thought, so that was good.  But at the end, there we were, lying on the floor in the dark-ish room doing our final shakra (at least I think that’s what she called it).  It was basically just lying on the floor relaxing, breathing deeply.  I was thinking to myself “Ok, we’re done, let me out please” and starting to resent being held captive in the room a minute longer when I had dinner/homework/books/bedtime to deal with not to mention the other 6000 details floating in my head.  And then it occurred to me how absurd it was that I could not even take a few minutes to slow down my head and relax.  It hit me that these few minutes were a gift of Sabbath time if only I would Stop.  And so I pushed aside those inner voices and just lay there in the peace.  And that is when I heard the music, a sort of chanting that went “We are all in the light of love.”  That’s all.  Just that one line over and over again.  But it was enough.  So much, in fact, that it actually took my breath away for just a moment, I felt so close to God. 

          I know objectively it doesn’t sound like much.  But for me it was an assurance and a connection to something that had happened a few nights before, during the prayer and listening group that meets here on Tuesday nights.  On Tuesday, Lisa Richard had shared a reading that had been rolling around in my head ever since and which I share with you so that it might roll around yours as well.  It is from Thomas Merton’s “Louisville Epiphany”:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping  district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.  It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race ... there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.  I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes.  If only they could all see themselves as they really are.

If only we could see each other that way all of the time.  There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…

          I think Thomas Merton’s Epiphany – his realizing for a moment the belovedness and beauty of each person that is at our core, even though we so rarely know it – I think that is the same thing Jeremiah was talking about.  To know that, to live that vision, is to have God written on our hearts. 

          And for a few moments on the floor of the dark gym when I heard God assure me that I was in the light of love – that all of us are – I thought back to Merton’s vision that each of us are shining like the sun.  And for that brief time, I had a glimpse of what is really, deeply, everlastingly true for each of us – that God is indeed written on our hearts. 

One of my favorite Christian writers, Frederick Buechner, talks about how what we need to know is not just that God exists but that God is “right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives.…  That is the miracle that we are really after.  And that is also,” he writes, “the miracle that we really get….  God speaks to us … much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize.  [God’s] message is not written out in starlight ... rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day ... Who knows what [God] will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment [God] will choose to say it.  Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery.”

Each day is a holy mystery, full of the possibility of a glimpse of Jeremiah’s promise alive and well within us.  Each day is a chance to know ourselves to be shining in the light of love, to see the light of Easter shining through the shadows.  Amen.