Written on Our Hearts

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when God will make a new covenant with humanity.  God’s Law of Love will be written on every heart in each breast.  The Lord will be our God and we will be God’s people.  God will create in every one of us a clean heart, and God’s Spirit will thrive in every breast!  What a glorious time this will be!

Will you pray with me?  “Teach us to turn back to you, O God.  Cleanse us, wash us, purge us, teach us wisdom in our secret hearts.  Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and remember our sins no more.  Amen.”

Well, everyone agreed.  Fred was a good man.  He was well-loved by those who were close to him, and even well-loved by those who barely knew him.  In his late 60’s, Fred’s family confided to me that Fred was very quickly losing touch with reality, and more and more he was occupying a place that no one else could see.  In one month Fred had gone from being bright and articulate to saying the same sentences over and over in a circle, as he struggled to make some sense of what he was trying to say.  It came on too fast to be Alzheimer’s the doctors said.  It wasn’t a brain tumor either; perhaps some complicated form of dementia.  The diagnosis didn’t really matter, Fred was daily changing before our eyes.  Sometimes people get angry as they sink into dementia, but Fred just got mellower.  Those who loved Fred now loved him even more.  And we cried a lot.

I have seen folks inhabit a new place as the world as we know fades from their reality.  Many times, once they are in the depths of dementia or Alzheimer’s, folks seem to finally be at peace, the frantic clinging finally gone; at peace in just “being.”  This is where Fred was going, very quickly.  We all ached, but we also were thankful he did not seem distressed or troubled.  This man who never seemed to harbor a bad thought now appeared to be completely at peace. 

The last time I went to visit Fred while he could still talk, his wife introduced me, “Fred, look who is here!  It is Pastor Jeff.”  Fred looked over with a blank stare.  Then his eyes sharpened as I thought he recognized me, and he said.  “I don’t remember who you are, but I do remember I love you.”  I was stunned, and I had to leave the room and stand in the hall trying to gain my composure.  “I don’t remember who you are, but I do remember I love you.”  Fred’s brain did not recognize me.  But Fred’s heart knew me still.

And God said, “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

A few nights ago, I was watching TV as Bill prepared dinner, and they had a segment about people who had super face recognition.  These people, maybe one in many million, remember every face they have ever seen.  High school classmates.  Their grocery check-out clerk.  The bully on the playground back in grade school.  Can you imagine what it would be like to remember every person you have seen in your life?  But what about the person who hurt you and whom you would rather forget?  Isn’t it a blessing sometimes when time erases bad things and we remember no more.

And God said, “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Our passage from Jeremiah says God’s love someday will be written directly on everyone’s heart.  Someday we will not have to repent and turn back to God.  Instead, we will live with God’s love written on our hearts and we will never turn away.  We won’t have mean nasty politics, or rampant cultural greed or bullies on the schoolyard or even bullies as dictators.  Someday humans will stop forgetting God.  Someday we will live with God’s heart as our heart; no longer will we have to teach each other to “know the Lord,” for we will all always know God, from the least to the greatest, and God will forgive humanity’s iniquity, and remember our sins no more.

What if today we acknowledged our sin and turned back to God with our whole heart?  Could now be the time for each of us to begin to live into this promise of God’s love being written on our hearts? 

Our passage from Jeremiah takes place at an amazing point Jeremiah’s story.  As Jeremiah writes this chapter, some of the Jewish nobility have already been conquered and carried away to Babylon.  The Babylonians, called the Chaldeans by Jeremiah, have now placed Jerusalem under siege.  Jeremiah tells the Jewish King that he must surrender.  If the Israelites  continue to fight the Babylonians, Jeremiah says, they will all be destroyed.  King Je-hoi-a-kim scoffs at Jeremiah, places him under house arrest, and continues the battle.  Jeremiah says if we surrender we will be taken away, but we will eventually return, and then God will make Jerusalem even bigger and more prosperous.  But if we continue to fight here, we will all die.  And at this point, the prophecy in chapter 31 is inserted—Jeremiah prophecies the Israelites will lose everything now as they repent of their sins, but someday, God will no longer remember their iniquity; God will remember their sins no more.  This seems like crazy talk, even today.  Give up Jeremiah says, repent, and God will punish you in exile in Babylon.  But, God will then return you to Jerusalem and increase your blessings beyond your wildest dreams.  Even in the midst of human and worldly horror, God alone is our refuge, our rock, our strength and our redeemer.  God is our hope, not military might.

Jeremiah delivers a strange prophecy here.  Stop fighting he says.  Surrender to God and repent.   And then, God will make a covenant with all of humanity and God’s law of love will be written on all of our hearts.  Oh, how I long for that time, because right now is like the time Jeremiah writes about.  Only now, terrorism and economic strangulation hold us under siege.  In this current chaos, is it now time for us who are completely under siege by greed and violence to repent as a people?  Is it time for us to take Lent seriously, turning away from violence and war and oppression?  These are not the ways of God’s heart.  Is it time for us to stop the madness and repent and live lives that invite God to create in us a clean heart?  Is this now the time to turn back to God’s love instead of living in violence and greed and hate.  Is it time?

Is it time to forgive and forget, as God promises will be done in this passage?  How do we forgive and forget, and yet love as God loves beyond all boundaries?  Our passage about a new covenant with God is about beginning anew in hope—and this new hope is really the core of both the Jewish and Christian story.  God forgets and forgives and begins anew.  This was true in the sixth century BCE when our passage was written, and it is true now.  If God forgives and forgets, and yet loves us still, then are not we called to live in the same way?  Can we accept anything less from ourselves?

Lent is a journey of forgetting our old lives and asking God to forgive our old ways, remembering and claiming the unconditional love of God as it is dramatically lived out on the cross.  Our passage is pivotal to our faith tradition as we hear about God’s forgiving and forgetting in the story of Jesus.  But we must live this same story of forgetting and forgiving in our own lives, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”   Some in our culture and society yell with a shrill voice that they can never forgive and never forget, and they draw bright lines in the sand about what is wrong and what is right.  But this passage teaches us a new story of grace, a story of a righteous God who somehow graciously forgets and forgives our trespasses, and then remembers, just like Fred did, that love lives on.  But even greater than Fred, God still loves us even when we are un-loveable. 

How can God simultaneously have super face recognition, never forgetting any of us, and yet, forget our sins and simultaneously remember us in unconditional love?  How is this possible for God to remember all of us forever and yet, forget our iniquities, even while giving us a new covenant of love in our hearts forever?  How can all of these conflicting things be true?  It is a mystery called grace, the same grace that turns the reality of death into the mystery of life everlasting.  And how do we respond to this mystery called grace?  We are invited to repent, forgetting our old ways of being while embracing a new life in God’s unconditional eternal love.

Someday, God will remember our sins no more.  But now we must surrender like Jeremiah prophesied to the Israelites, and let God’s plan of love invade our lives.  God’s love transcends everything else, because God’s love is already written on our hearts.  When our mind turns to dust and we forget everything else, love remains.  When God forgets our sins, only love remains.  Love transcends life.  The Easter story teaches us that love transcends death.  We are Easter People because God’s love will be with us even beyond the horizon of death.  So now is the time.  This is the day of our salvation; a new life in God’s love.  Repent, and in this new day, God will forgive our iniquity, make a new covenant with all humanity, and, in grace, God will create in us a new clean heart and remember our sins no more.  The days are surely coming when God’s love will forever be written on your heart.  Amen.