GeeDubya's Sermon Site: Jeremiah 31: 27-34

a sermon preached by Rev. Greg Wooley at a joint communion service and picnic of the Osoyoos-Oliver United Church pastoral charge

This morning we embody our connection with one another as people of faith: coming together from Oliver and Osoyoos for worship, sharing communion to recall the life-force of God coming alive in Jesus, and enjoying one another’s company through the shared picnic to follow. It fits, then, to conclude our three-week mini series on the prophet Jeremiah, with a scripture that speaks of our commitment to God not just being a string of meaningless words, but something embodied: written on our hearts.

Without getting into the fine points of who was conquering whom at the time of Jeremiah, his nation, the land of Judah, was on the verge of falling; it was so bad that some of his people were already being exiled. Within these profound hardships, Jeremiah saw transitions they needed to make, for as he looked at his people, he saw them focusing on the minutiae, the specifics of the 613 commandments of the Torah, while missing the main thrust of what God intended. While the people saw embraced the letter of the law, Jeremiah noted that in their hearts the spirit of the law, that is, God’s urgent desire for justice-infused love, was not embraced very much at all.

The prophet saw few signs of hope in the actions of his people and distrusted the guidance offered by their so-called leaders. But while he did not hold out much hope, God was still hopeful, as God always is. And God, through Jeremiah, promised the people that following all the trials they were presently going through, there would be a new day, shaped by a new covenant, a law written, not on scrolls but on their hearts. A day would come, when the Divine principles of power-filled love that gave coherence to the Torah would become second-nature to the people; and the heart of God would be as close as the blood pumping through their arteries and veins. Each breath, each moment, would be infused by the gracious love of God, each choice they made, each loving action undertaken, would be evidence of God. The old hierarchical, xenophobic, male-dominated, rule-bound ways would be replaced by new ways of being that would bring hope to everyone, most especially who had been judged or excluded by the old ways.

Many Christians see a prefiguring of what God would later do in Jesus Christ in these words shared by Jeremiah. Jeremiah wouldn’t have seen it that way, as he was in a crisis at that moment, and God needed him to speak to what was happening right in front of him, but God is capable of doing two things at once. People were being sent off – deported to a land other than their own, if you will – and God needed Jeremiah to engender hope for the day when the people could come back to Jerusalem, perhaps even within their own lifetimes. One chapter later, in the book of Jeremiah chapter 32, the prophet buys a plot of land in the midst of all this commotion, as a symbol of hope, a promise that the people would have a place to dwell on their return. Jeremiah, understandably, has a shorter and more local horizon, but I do believe that it is legitimate for Christians to hear the hope spoken here through Jeremiah, as something God wishes not just for the people of Judah 2600 years ago, but for the world and its people in 2025. For in Christ, we experience covenant, embodied.

The first covenant, between God and the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, did not need replacing; but the way it got put into practice sure needed to change. And I find the words spoken by Jeremiah so rich and deep here: in a new way, God’s commandments would be written on the heart of all who love God, and the profound love and justice of God would be lived out in all its fullness. In his time and place, Jeremiah needed the people to start seeing the forest of God’s holy intent instead of just focusing on the trees of each individual rule; he needed them to trust the core of scripture, the call to love and justice, rather than nitpicking the fine points.

And what about for us, in our day? What it would mean to have the law of love really written upon our hearts?... and how might this happen? A plain-spoken American professor of Christian Ethics named Stanley Hauerwas has written extensively on this. Stanley has described as a left-leaning evangelical, which in these divided days strikes me as a really good voice to be heard. His basic idea is that the process of making good, ethical Christian decisions is not a matter of memorizing all the rules so you don’t goof up, nor is it even having a principled, well defined decision-making process. For him, the key to Christian decision making is the development of good old-fashioned Christian Character. Rather than some mechanistic process of decision making, he calls for something that is in the bones: you learn about the love of God, preferably when you are a child, you keep checking your life against the measuring stick of the great commandment – love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself – and don’t sweat the details. For me, that’s very much what “a law written on the heart” is all about: having the love of God “in our bones” as it were, not external to us but as close as our next breath.

And so when I think of God’s law written on our hearts in the year 2025, I can picture the word LOVE being so deeply held and boldly displayed in our collective character, that it has the power to over-write everything else that tries to say that it is closest to the heart. (And here, I mean the full, Shalom-style love, a love that insists on justice and inclusion, a love that breaks down barriers so that all may have full opportunity, full and equal access to the things that make life delightful.)

· Imagine with me, then, the lies we hear constantly, from the present regime in the US but not just from there, calling people to be selfish in all the worst ways, and imagine that getting over-written by LOVE, so you can barely even see the word “selfish”.

· Imagine a world where hatred of “the other” and fear of “the other” got over-written by LOVE, so you couldn’t even make out where hatred and fear had previously been.

· Imagine a world where all those simplistic black-and-white dualities could get overwritten by love: imagine if we could take the present white-supremacist narrative being sold by governments as if it’s “common sense”, and defuse it, along with all its sub-points, that there’s only one allowable way to understand things politically, only one allowable way to embrace and express one’s sexual personhood, only one preferred colour of skin, only one legitimate way to worship God. Imagine over-writing all of those either-ors with both-ands, overwrite the black and white binary with the exquisite colour pallette of God’s extraordinary world, take all of those no’s and overwrite them with the great big YES of God’s love.

· In the world of today, Empire is trying its best to divide us, to get us angry at one another rather than angry at injustice, and in this glorious prophecy of Jeremiah we are given the gift of resisting this, in the name and power of love. We can as individuals, as people of faith, as citizens of the world, focus our efforts on ending war, at restoring dignity, at doing the hard work of building justice when Empire wants us to be distracted. We can, by the power of the Holy Spirit, paint the world LOVE on top of all the miserable, soul-eroding things that empire would want us to do. And that, to me, is the essence of a heart that bears the imprint of God.

God’s hopes for the world, written on the heart, applies to our life as a pastoral charge, our life as The United Church of Canada, and our life as believers. All people – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, people who carry Indigenous sacred teachings, secular folks who just want the best for their neighbour – all are called to participate in doing what we can to make the world a better place. Our task, as Christians of (mostly) somewhat advanced years, is to trust and live into Christ’s vision of a world where the poor, the humble, the meek, the persecuted, will be restored and honoured. Our calling, in the way we are right now and in the transitions we will be making as congregations in the coming months, is to have God’s word shape our hearts and actions… and to prepare to work hand-in-hand with other people of good will, as they seek that too. That vision, of God’s powerful love written on our hearts and our lives, is a bigger and stronger source of hope, than all of the demoralizing messaging that pummel us each day. The more we trust that love, the more we will realize that the messages designed to build hopelessness and fear are authored by those who are scared silly of what things would look like if God’s law of love were actually written on our hearts and expressed repeatedly in our actions.

On this day when we celebrate communion, and enjoy one another’s companionship, we recall Jeremiah’s longing for a day when God’s intention for love will live, not just in words but in hearts that have been changed. We give thanks for the way that the words and teachings and ongoing presence of Christ answer these hopes, at the same time acknowledging that the world we live in falls well short of this goal over and over again. And we accept the responsibility for opening our hearts to this path of love and justice, as people of faith striving for greater inclusiveness, as citizens of the world concerned for a sustainable future. May love, written on our hearts, make all the difference. In the name of God, Creator, Christ and Spirit, may this be so. Amen.

References consulted and/or cited:

https://bibleproject.com/guides/book-of-jeremiah/

Hauerwas, Stanley. http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape10/PQDD_0026/MQ52032.pdf

Mang, Shannon.“Jeremiah 32”
https://gwsermonsite.blogspot.com/2024/11/jeremiah-32-october-27-2024-and.html

Wines, Alphonetta. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3017