Fifth Sunday in Lent
Service Date:
29 March, 2009
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Check on previous weeks: God's promise or covenant was given to Noah, rainbow, forever; Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, for everyone; Moses, burning bush, for freedom; Hosea, mother and child, for growth. Now we've got the final person telling us about God's covenant, and it's the prophet Jeremiah, talking about the human heart.
Did anyone have to learn things by heart when they were at school? What sort of things? Times tables, poetry, science formulae? Do you still remember them now? Did you enjoy learning things by heart? Not necessarily at the time, but afterwards it can really help not to have to think of things.
Think of first aid - I had to learn a checklist called ABC for airway, breathing, circulation. If those things are OK you can start checking for other injuries, but those are the most important things, and it's not something you want to be struggling to remember when someone's seriously ill.
Or think of remembered poetry, or songs, or Bible verses. Do you find sometimes that when you're least expecting it, a line you've learned by heart comes to mind, and it's just what you need to hear?
That's one way of thinking about our hearts, the most inward, most important part of us - but of course there are our real physical hearts too, pumping blood round our bodies day and night. If our heart ever stops, so do we - permanently. And the wonderful thing about our hearts is that we don't have to remember to make them beat - they just do it, whatever we're thinking about, whatever mood we're in, they just go on beating, carrying the blood round our bodies, doing what they're meant to do.
And that's what Jeremiah's looking forward to in God's covenant promise he gives us today. Jeremiah looks back at the covenant made with the people in the days of Moses, the Ten Commandments and all the laws given to help people live well with God - and all that wasn't enough. It couldn't have been enough, because Jeremiah is living through the last days of an independent Judah, just before and just after the Babylonian Empire would conquer the people and send them into exile, because they had forgotten God's love for all.
When you're an exile, you have to learn your most important values by heart, like a law inside you, and pass them on to your children that way. Because you've not got the outside things to remind you any more. The temple, the sacrifices, the land of promise - everything that once reminded people of God would go, and their priests would need to remind them how to please God, how to follow God's laws.
A promise of new relationship between God and people, known by heart, that no one would need to teach anyone else - how could that be? We Christians believe that new covenant, writing that new law of love Jeremiah speaks about on each of our hearts has come to each of us through Jesus, who kept God's law perfectly and never stopped loving, even when his own heart stopped beating. That new relationship with God is on offer for each of us, if we have enough faith in Jesus to try it for ourselves, and to go on with God till we have it by heart. So our symbol today is a heart, and God's promise is - for us.
Check on previous weeks: God's promise or covenant was given to Noah, rainbow, forever; Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, for everyone; Moses, burning bush, for freedom; Hosea, mother and child, for growth. Now we've got the final person telling us about God's covenant, and it's the prophet Jeremiah, talking about the human heart.
Did anyone have to learn things by heart when they were at school? What sort of things? Times tables, poetry, science formulae? Do you still remember them now? Did you enjoy learning things by heart? Not necessarily at the time, but afterwards it can really help not to have to think of things.
Think of first aid - I had to learn a checklist called ABC for airway, breathing, circulation. If those things are OK you can start checking for other injuries, but those are the most important things, and it's not something you want to be struggling to remember when someone's seriously ill.
Or think of remembered poetry, or songs, or Bible verses. Do you find sometimes that when you're least expecting it, a line you've learned by heart comes to mind, and it's just what you need to hear?
That's one way of thinking about our hearts, the most inward, most important part of us - but of course there are our real physical hearts too, pumping blood round our bodies day and night. If our heart ever stops, so do we - permanently. And the wonderful thing about our hearts is that we don't have to remember to make them beat - they just do it, whatever we're thinking about, whatever mood we're in, they just go on beating, carrying the blood round our bodies, doing what they're meant to do.
And that's what Jeremiah's looking forward to in God's covenant promise he gives us today. Jeremiah looks back at the covenant made with the people in the days of Moses, the Ten Commandments and all the laws given to help people live well with God - and all that wasn't enough. It couldn't have been enough, because Jeremiah is living through the last days of an independent Judah, just before and just after the Babylonian Empire would conquer the people and send them into exile, because they had forgotten God's love for all.
When you're an exile, you have to learn your most important values by heart, like a law inside you, and pass them on to your children that way. Because you've not got the outside things to remind you any more. The temple, the sacrifices, the land of promise - everything that once reminded people of God would go, and their priests would need to remind them how to please God, how to follow God's laws.
A promise of new relationship between God and people, known by heart, that no one would need to teach anyone else - how could that be? We Christians believe that new covenant, writing that new law of love Jeremiah speaks about on each of our hearts has come to each of us through Jesus, who kept God's law perfectly and never stopped loving, even when his own heart stopped beating. That new relationship with God is on offer for each of us, if we have enough faith in Jesus to try it for ourselves, and to go on with God till we have it by heart. So our symbol today is a heart, and God's promise is - for us.
Hymns:
R&S 387: Great Shepherd of thy people, hearR&S 499: Have faith in God, my heart
R&S 483 (tune i): We are your people, Lord, by your grace
R&S 602: Forth in the peace of Christ we go (tune R&S 521, Angels' Song)
Sermon:
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 119:9-16; John 12:20-33; Hebrews 5:5-10Our readings aren't any too clear this morning - our Gospel reading from John, in particular. If you save your life, you'll lose it. If you lose your life, you'll save it. What's that all about?
Imagine for a moment - and some of us won't need to imagine - being a mother loving her child, or a husband loving his wife. There will be times when it looks from the outside as though we nobly choose to do what's best for the one we love, not for us; when we do the 3am feed, for example, or choose a particular job because it's near her aging father, even though it's a bad career move. From the outside, it looks like losing out. But from the inside, when there is love between parent and child or between partners or friends, we genuinely see the good of the other as our good; their happiness means that we are happy too. If on the other hand, things go wrong, if the child is left howling or the marriage begins to crack, choices that seemed to improve our life have actually hurt us, as well as the one we love.
It's the same with our relationship with Jesus, where our comfort and God's calling to us are often in tension. Any relationship between us and Jesus that is more than a formality, satisfying other people's expectations, is likely to involve suffering - after all, this is a man who ended up on a cross. Yet this is no masochistic ‘if it hurts, Jesus has to love me' arrangement - that could never work, as psychological blackmail never works in any relationship. Rather, this is a deliberately creative use of the inevitable pain of being human; let our suffering, if there must be suffering, lead us towards him, towards God. Jesus speaks of this fruitful choice when he describes a seed choosing to fall into the ground and die so a new plant can grow and bear seeds.
Of course, John's Gospel, as the last of the Gospels to be written, has had most time to come to terms with the indignity of God's leader, the Messiah, dying a criminal's death. Jesus in John's Gospel seems to almost relish the prospect of his coming ‘hour' of self-sacrificial death, and we need the picture in the letter to the Hebrews of Jesus' made perfect through suffering to counterbalance this.
The words we have heard this morning from Hebrews are shocking, if we really take them in. Listen: Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. So God, who was able to save Jesus from death, heard his prayers and supplications - yet didn't stop him dying. More surprising yet: Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. So we can't take Jesus' perfect obedience to God's laws for granted. He struggled through suffering to maintain that relationship with God that he had by heart. There is good news for us, of course, in the very next phrase: and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. Because Jesus could show us this new covenant between God and people, written on his heart, we, as part of his body, the church, can be healed, rescued, saved, transformed by him into living fruitfully. That is why Hebrews calls him a priest like Melchizedek, a mysterious man of Abraham's time who knew and served God outside any ordinary idea of priesthood.
I am not arguing, of course, that human suffering is always fruitful, even with Jesus' life as an example. Sometimes it just crumples the character, or turns into destructive anger and bitterness. Yet suffering undergone in following Jesus can lead to a renewed relationship with God written indelibly on our hearts, God's new covenant with us, and our greatest treasure. This conclusion is not staggeringly original; indeed, I hope it is not news to anyone sitting here this morning. And yet we can find it surprisingly hard to consider a relationship between God and us in these terms. God must love Mrs So-and-so - she's such a wonderful person. God may love Mr Thingummy, who's so difficult to get on with - we hope God does, because everyone else has such a hard time with him. But people like me? Who have had our dreams, but let go of some of them to get on with living, who have done stupid things we regret and been hurt by our lives too - does God love me, relate to me? Does God care about my suffering? Where's God's glory in it? What difference does God's offer of a new covenant written on my heart make in my life?
These are questions you will need to consider - for I cannot trust God's covenant love for you; this is always something personal between you and God. But though our relationship with God must always be personal, it can never be purely individual. Our anthem's words begin: It is a thing most wonderful, almost too wonderful to be, that God's own son should come from heaven and die to save a child like me. That level of love, written on our hearts, calls out our love in return. Yet that covenantal promise has come to us through God's relationship with a family, then a nation, then a mixed body of people called church. We cannot be Christians on our own; for it is together that we are being formed into the body of Christ in this place, together we learn by heart how to show God's love to our neighbours, believing and unbelieving. Of course this too involves suffering, as we get it wrong, offend each other, apologise to each other, forgive each other, learn from each other and grow together - but that very suffering brings God's transformation to us.
I have considered a few domestic and local ways that loving God more than our own lives may work out in practice; but of course the same dynamic is at work in a wider sphere when we recognise God in others to whom we appear not to be connected or whom we may not even know, and choose to love them rather than our lives. When we order our investments to avoid sales of arms or tobacco, though the financial return is less; when we budget so we can afford to buy more expensive fairly traded goods, to give the chance of health care and education to families around the world; when we spend our precious free time in writing letters on behalf of Zimbabwean asylum seekers we may never have met, or in caring for the children of broken families we know nothing about, love and justice combine to produce a rich harvest.
From next week we will be hearing again the old stories of Holy Week, the end of Jesus' life, stories most of us know by heart. As we follow his suffering and death two thousand years ago, see how you can link it with God's healing, rescue, salvation at work today, in us, our church and our world. For God's work of transformation continues even to this day, and we can be among its agents.
