“The Days Are Surely Coming...”

A sermon based upon Jeremiah 31: 27-34

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time,  August 5th, 2018 

(10-12) Sermon Series: Jeremiah: Prophet to the Nations

In his wonderful book, Open Secrets, Richard Lischer, a professor of ministry at Duke Divinity School, tells of a retired pastor who came to visit him shortly after his wife died. Throughout his whole ministry, he had prayed with countless people, providing a bridge between them and God. When it mattered the most though, he couldn't pray.

When his wife was dying, he couldn't pray with her. He didn't make a conscious decision not to pray with her, he just couldn't do it. He felt as though something had shut down inside of him, almost as though he had died spiritually. In an attempt to understand why his ability to pray had shut down, he went to visit Lischer, hoping that a fresh perspective could help him sort out his pain and his agonizing questions. He told the younger Lischer that trying to pray was like trying to touch something when your arms and hands are wrapped in gauze.  As he said in the conversation, "I couldn't break through to whatever it was that sustained Geneva and me for almost 43 years, and nothing could touch me either."  ( Richard Lischer, Open Secrets: A Spiritual Journey Through A Country Church (New York: Doubleday, 2001), p. 176.

The grieving pastor couldn't get through to God and couldn't feel God trying to get through to him.

A tragedy in our life can make us more aware of it, when sometimes, in our lives, God can seem far away, unapproachable, silent.  Especially when we are hurting, or going through a spiritual crisis, the distance between God and us seems greater and harder to understand and endure.

THEY SHALL NO LONGER SAY…. (29)

In our text from Jeremiah, the prophet speaks of the spiritual crisis Israel and Judah experienced because of the people’s sin against God.  It is this life-destroying sin that Jeremiah is referring to when says “the parents have eaten sour grapes, so that the childrens’ teeth are set on edge.”  “Sour grapes” is a most graphic way of saying the sin of the parents led to the failure and destruction their children endured.  Poor parental choices had made God’s help seem far away to God’s children.  Now, God’s people were living in spiritual, as well as, physical, exile.  They could not get through to God and they couldn't feel God in them.  God seemed so far away, that the ‘children’ did not even know what it was like to know God was near.

There are many reasons that people lose a sense of God’s presence.  As this text reminds us, it may not always be because of our own sin.  Too often, innocent people may suffer unjustly and undeservedly, without any fault of their own.  People can suffer the results of the sins of others too.  We see this in Israel’s story, not just here, but also in history, as in the Holacaust, when the Jews and German people suffered for the sins of Hitler and the Nazis.  We too, can suffer from the sins of our government, our communities and the sins of our society, just like children suffering from the sins of their parents.  But still, the question remains, what kind of sin was it, that was so destructive and so devastating that it could be carried down from one generation to the next, or passed over from one person to another?   

Earlier in Jeremiah’s writings, he names this most grievous sin against God, and it’s not what you might think.  The primary ‘sin’ the prophet contributes to causing their spiritual exile was not named as any specific breaking of the covenant or commandment, or any other specific moral failure.  Of course, specific sins were part of the equation, but Jeremiah mentions no specific sin leading to the break down of the old covenant. 

So, what was it?   What kind of ‘sour grapes’ did the parents eat that ‘put the children’s teeth on edge’?   Jeremiah says the old covenant was broken, not by one specific bad behavior, but it was broken by an unwillingness to hear and listen to God’s voice (Read Jeremiah 5-6).  When the true prophets spoke, people wouldn’t listen (Jer. 25: 3-9).  When the truth was declared, people ignored (Jer 29:19).   The prophet Jeremiah named this problem early on, as the people having ‘uncircumcised ears’ (KJV, Jeremiah 6:10).  The Revised Version translates this as the people having their ‘ears closed’ to God’s truth (NRSV). 

So, what did the people do when they ‘closed’ their ears to God’s truth? They invited and listened to False Prophets, who told the people what they wanted to hear (See Jer. 14, 23).  These prophets neither lived God’s truth, nor did they speak God’s truth (Jer. 23:14ff).  The more the false prophets preached, the further and further away the people were led away from God’s truth and God’s presence.  As Jeremiah said, they ‘caused’ God’s ‘people to forgot God’s name’ (23:27).

How do people cease to hear God’s voice today?  Is it because we sin?  Sometimes, it is.  Is it because we suffer unjustly, perhaps also because of the sins of others?  Perhaps, that too.   It may also be that God’s voice is no longer heard because we have become distracted by the many noises in life, or we’ve distanced ourselves from God because some negative event has left us confused, hurt, and broken.  Sometimes God voice has gone silent because truth about this God who ‘is for us’ and not ‘against us’,  has gotten all twisted up inside.   Perhaps some well-meaning pastor, parent, or teacher, spoke in ways that have mislead us, but the end result is that we have become disconnected from hearing God’s voice and God’s loving, caring, and truth-filled voice can no longer be heard in our own hearts.  For some reason, either due to a fault of our own, or perhaps without any fault at all, we too have also developed, ‘uncircumcised ears’.

It can happen to anyone.  My wife reminds me too how sometimes, I too, develop an inability to hear.  When she has spoken to me about something I have overlooked, or need to do, instead of agreeing with her, I become defensive.  Because I ‘pride’ myself on doing it right, I can’t stand to have anyone tell me I’m doing it wrong.  Like one day, when she commented about me not emptying the coffee maker, so that the new coffee became mixed with the old, instead of hearing her, admitting my mistake, I answered with all kinds of defensive excuses, “I had a phone call, I got involved in a sermon, or some other lame excuse.”  Instead of hearing her, agreeing, I felt like she was on my ‘case’, like she was my mother getting on my case.  Instead of answering my wife like she was my wife, I answered like she was my mother still raising me, rather than hearing my loving wife who was only trying to ‘remind me’.

Too, often we don’t hear God’s voice, because of all the other ‘noise’ in our lives.  Some of these may even be well-meaning voices, like my mother’s voice was, but they are still not the voice and voices that we need to be hearing right now.   God’s people had listened to the wrong voices so long, that they not only gotten used to hearing the wrong things, they were not unable the true voice.  How could Judah overcome this deafness?  The sad truth was that there was nothing they could do to open up the line of communication again.  They had gone completely deaf.  Their ‘ears to ear’ where totally ‘uncircumcised’ and stopped up.  As Jeremiah declared: “See, their ears are closed, they cannot listen.  The word of the Lord is to them an object of scorn; they take no pleasure in it” (6:10).  God could not get through to them because there was nothing in them that even God could connect to.   There was no hope of change within the hearts of God’s people as things were.  God asked through Jeremiah, "Can Ethiopians change their skin, or leopards their spots?" (13:23). Jeremiah wonders, how can God’s people ever learn again to be responsive enough to God’s voice, so they can enter into a relationship with him.

I WILL MAKE A NEW COVENANT (31)

This impossible situation is why God’s judgment has come.  This is why God has ‘watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil’ even upon his own people (v. 28).   They are longer God’s people in how they live or hear, so judgment had to come. 

All of this sounds almost like a soap opera, or a bad, broken marriage.  The God who was against divorce, now wants to divorce his people.   God wants a relationship with his people, and the people want a relationship with God too, but they can’t get together because neither hears or understands the other. 

Isn’t that tragically how it often goes in human relationships; perhaps there have been bad words that can’t be taken back, perhaps, as it was in the case of Israel and Judah, there had been adultery, an affair, and the marriage vows have been broken?  It all sounds as the relationship can’t be repaired. The voice of hope becomes remote, just like the voice of God becomes remote, when God’s people are stuck the result of sins and their own sinfulness.  There was nothing left in God’s people for God to make contact with them.  There was no covenant or promise to renew, because everything had broken down, and there was no connection, no link, or no contact point for them to have or make a future together.     

However, what our text is about, is that at this very dark and impossible place, is where Jeremiah show the ‘way when there is no way’. It was a way, an offer, or a connection that only God can make.  Jeremiah tells how God will reach across the distance to re-establish the relationship that had been broken. God will remake the connection, and he will not just ‘renew’ but he will ‘make all things new’.  God will not only ‘change’ how judgment works for his people (holding individuals responsible for their own sins, v. 30), but God will make a ‘new covenant’ with the house of Israel (v. 31) which will extend out into the world too.  Even in a world where God’s voice is unheard, or not listened too because people have broken their promises to him and to each other, God promises a new day with a new covenant of promise that begins with his own people.  It will be a covenant that only comes on God’s terms, which will be one person at a time, enabling us as individuals to receive God’s promise of hope for a future based upon what only God can do.  “I will watch over them to build and to plants, says the LORD”(v. 28).  “I will make a new covenant….” (v. 31).  “It will not be like the old covenant that I made with their ancestors…a covenant that they broke.” (v. 32).  Again, this is a ‘new’ promise that God makes which is made possible by God alone.

In New Testament language, which is also ‘new covenant’ language, this is what the word “Testament” means: the new covenant of promise.  In this ‘new’ promise, God does what only God can do.  God will extend his grace and his mercy upon God’s people to give birth to a future for them, which is based on God’s terms alone. 

This ‘new’ covenant or promise is based upon the powerful, miraculous, act of grace which God has done in Jesus Christ.   As Jesus said at the Last Supper, ‘This is my blood of the covenant poured out for many’ (Mark 14:24).  Interestingly, in the Greek, Jesus does not use the word ‘new’ like the King James does.  Jesus emphasizes that this promise is being made in his, that is, in ‘my blood’.    It is a promise of life, based on the giving of his life to sinners (Rom. 6:8), which is offered to all, but given only on God’s terms of grace, promised to the ‘many’ who will individually respond to God’s love, grace and promise so that ‘all things new’ can become the miracle in their own lives (2 Cor 5:17). 

Again, let me be clear, the ‘terms’ of this new covenant is very different.  “It is not” as Jeremiah says, ‘like the covenant…made with their ancestors’ who were just ‘out of Egypt’ (Jer. 31:32).  What’s the difference?  This new covenant is made based upon what only on what God can do, and what God has done in Jesus Christ.  Whereas the Old Covenant was dependent upon the commandments and laws Israel agreed to follow and obey, this new covenant will be based upon what God has done in Jesus, who actually did obey ‘even unto death on a cross’.  It is an act of sheer grace, based on Jesus’ own righteousness, which invites sinners likw us to follow Jesus and find God’s future in him.

What Jeremiah is describing here, is something we should already know in words, but need to be reminded in our own reality.  There is often no way forward on our own in life and in our relationships with God and with others.  Sometimes we have broken our promises to God or to each other, or others have broken their promises to us in ways that can’t be repaired in human terms.  But here is where ‘grace’, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘compassionate love’ comes into play.  “Even while we were still sinners,” Paul writes, in Romans, “Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8).  Even when our spouse, our partner, or our friend, has let us down, we can find a way to forgive.  Even when someone else has injured us, hurt us, used us, we can still turn to them and love them, now, even if they have, at least for now, become our ‘enemy’ that we are called to love.   How can we do this?  It’s doesn’t come from our own strength, or from what we can do alone, but it comes from what God can do in us, because of what he has done for us, in Jesus Christ.

William Barber has worked with North Carolina in helping restore race relations, and he also been a pastor in Goldsboro.  While, back in the 1990’s, he was working for Governor Hunt in helping to bring racial and social justice, he got a call to become pastor in Goldsboro.  Not long after answering the call, he woke up one morning and couldn’t move.  He was paralyzed all over his body.  He thought he was dying and the doctors, at first didn’t know what was happening, and told him he’d probably never walk again. 

While he was in the hospital, still trying to understand what was happening, a woman amputee came to his room and told him that she was praying for him.  She said, “Now, I’m about to go to heaven and get my new legs, but God is going to restore you, because he’s got more work for you to do.”  After a long conversation together,  the woman left.  The next morning, they came and asked Rev. Barber if he wanted to go down stairs to the church service.  “I will, if that amputee lady will go with me!”  He answered.  They never found her.  Today, after his recovery,  Barber calls her his ‘amputee angel’.  She was the ‘angel’ sent to tell him that God was going to work in him some things that only God can do.  Rev Barber went on to establish and lead the ‘Moral Monday’ movement for social justice in North Carolina (“The Third Reconstruction, Beacon Press, 2016, pp 32-33)

“I WILL WRITE MY LAW IN THEIR HEARTS” (33)

It is one of the grandest statements in all the Old Testament, that Jeremiah tells us how this new covenant of love, grace, and forgiveness will be realized in God’s people through God alone, not by human strength or will.  Instead of writing the covenant promise down on stone tablets or parchment as laws and rules, God now promises to write the law directly into the human hearts.

This is how ‘grace’ and forgiving love works.  God works within us to heal our disobedience and end the division between us. As the Psalmist said, God will: "Put a new and right spirit within me" (Psalm 51:10b). Or, as Paul wrote to the Philippians, "I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6). By establishing a new ‘promise’, which begins in our acknowledgement of Jesus Christ’, God has begun a good work among us. God will give us the wisdom, the maturity, the loving attitude, the energy to do God's will. God will write the law on our hearts, will work within us in such a way that we are healed and given hope. 

But the only condition of this new promise, is that our freedom is always preserved so that, the promise only keeps working, as long as we keep living and loving in God’s forgiveness, grace and purpose and keeping our ‘eyes fixed on him’. God will not force his law on us, but as we continually turn toward God’s love, God’s Spirit remakes, reshapes, and changes our hearts to be like the heart of our Lord who saves us as we keep our eyes focused on him.

For when we keep seeing, knowing, and believing what God has done for us, we hear and see everything in life differently.  A story is told about a teenage virtuoso pianist who played his heart out to a large audience. At the end, as he walked off the stage, the audience stood and applauded. The man behind the curtain told the boy to go out and take a bow.

"No," the boy replied, "I can't."

"Why not?" asked the man. "They are all standing and applauding."

"Not all of them," the young pianist replied. "The man in the back row in the balcony is still sitting."

"That's only one," the man said. "What's so important about him?"

"He's my teacher," the boy meekly replied as he watched from behind the curtain. "I was playing for him."

Just then the man in the back row stood up and joined in the standing ovation.

Isn't that what life is all about? Keeping our eyes fixed on the one we call our Lord, our leader, our teacher?  Think of the end of your life and imagine the Lord giving you a standing ovation and saying, "Enter into the joy of your master."  Isn't that the most important thing of all?

Pastor Lischer's last word to the retired pastor who came to see him because he could not pray with his wife was all based on this kind of grace that says look at how much God loves you, no matter what else you experience in life.  This is the kind of grace helps us all keep faith in the God who can do what we cannot do. "It's when you can't do anything,  that God does it all.”   Like Pastor Lischer told his pastor, we must keep our eyes on the God who can do what we can’t do.  When we can’t break through to God,  God can still break through to us. (Richard Lischer, Ibid, p. 1770.

God is indeed still breaking through to us in God’s love through Jesus Christ. God is writing the law on our hearts even now, if we turn our faith toward Christ’s love and grace.   The separation between God and us will not be forever. Because we know that God is working to write the law on our hearts, to end the separation, to forgive our sins, we should rejoice, and receive his gift of grace and extend it to others in our lives too.

If we are confused about God, or we don't know how to solve the big disputes of the relationships at home, in the church, or in the world, we can rejoice, because God is at work, writing the law on hearts of those who will respond to his offer of grace.   Even if we can’t experience God close to us,  we can ‘draw near to him’ and know’ that he ‘will draw near to us’.  God is at work, even now, leading those who receive his grace toward a world that is based on what only God can do.  

If we struggle to overcome temptation and find ourselves too weak to do what we believe we should, we can rejoice too, because God is, even though our failures, if will see, admit and give them to God,  God is writing the law on our hearts, and someday we will triumph over our weakness and sinfulness, if we will continue to stay connected to him.

If we are battered by the grief and pain of life and wonder if we can keep going and living by faith, we can rejoice because God is still writing his law of hope and love on our hearts, and someday we can put away our grief, because in the end every loss will be answered by the faithfulness of God’s promise  (This reminder comes from Rev. Charles Aaron, who inspired this angle on Jeremiah’s text, in his sermon,  “Writing His Law On Our Hearts” CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Sermons for Sundays after Pentecost (Last Third): View from the Mountaintop, by Charles L. Aaron).

‘The days are surely coming’ when God will draw us close and we will feel God's love without any interference. The days are surely coming when we will experience God's forgiveness and feel the weight of guilt, failure and frustration fall off our backs. The days are surely coming when God will write the law on our hearts; God will be our God, and we will be God's people, as every sin is erased, and ever ‘tear is wiped from our eyes.  It is not all here now, but ‘the days are surely coming.’  Amen.