Jeremiah: The Covenant of the Heart
Lenten Sermon Series
(based on Susan Robb’s Remember: God’s Covenant’s and the Cross)
Jeremiah 31.31-34
Lent 5B
March 17, 2024
In our Lenten Study, Susan Robb recalls a moment of spiritual crisis that hit her almost four decades ago. In the midst of heavy traffic on the ten lane interstate that around Dallas, she suddenly knew something was wrong. She felt an “emptiness in [her] soul and an ache in [her] heart.” She recalls, “It had been gnawing at me for some time, but I just then [in that moment on the interstate] stopped to consider why, when everything seemed to be going so right in my life, my spirit seemed dull and lifeless.”
To be sure, by normal measures, everything was going very well. Robb, then in her mid-twenties, loved her job as a high school teacher. She even got to direct a 55-member dance team and delighted in the enthusiasm and creativity of the girls on the team. She was sharing an apartment with a close friend whom she had danced with in college. They had a great relationship; she says her friend would often help her choreograph dances in the apartment’s kitchen, an endeavor that often ended in the two of them collapsing in laughter. She had other close, caring friends and a loving and supportive family. So why the ache and the emptiness?
“Then it struck me,” Robb recalls. “Everything was as it should be—expect in my spiritual life. I began attending a wonderful church not long after moving to Dallas, but at some point, I had stopped going. I couldn’t even remember when….But I realized it had been a long time since my heart and soul felt full and satisfied. It had been far too long since I had participated in Communion, picked up a Bible, read any devotional material, or served others in the community [in the name of Christ]. I had been extremely disciplined about stretching and conditioning myself physically and intellectually but had spent zero time or effort tending my relationship with God and serving others.”
Robb continues, “In this moment on the freeway, I realized that I had forgotten about God. I had neglected the most important relationship in my life, and that neglect manifested itself in the depths of my heart and soul, and in the way I thought (or didn’t) about others. Thankfully, God hadn’t forgotten about me. God was present on that freeway, softly whispering into the depths of my heart, waiting patiently for me to return and tend the relationship with the One in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17.28). God was ready to reboot our relationship even when I had unconsciously turned away. And the reboot began on a freeway with God speaking to my heart.” [Robb, 77-79]
The heart figures prominently in two of today’s lectionary readings. In Psalm 51, David, confessing his own sinfulness, apparently after being confronted over his affair with Bathsheba, prays that God will transform him by “teaching [him] wisdom in [his] secret heart.” Knowing that his desires and motivations are seriously out of whack, he asks that God will create a clean heart in him, that God will change his heart, repairing his broken and contrite heart, cleaning it and redirecting it so that he might walk in right paths.
In the reading from Jeremiah, God declares through the prophet that God will renew the covenant with Israel and Judah. Though they failed to uphold their end of the covenant, God will not abandon them. Instead, God will renew the covenant by engraving the Law in the very core of their beings. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” God will act so that Jewish people can truly live as God’s covenant people. As my old ethics professor Samuel Roberts puts it, “God grants the people help from within to keep the covenant faithfully.” [“Fifth Sunday in Lent: Jeremiah 31.31-34: Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2, 124]
In both passages, there is the sense that God will do what humans cannot. We humans are finite and prone to sin. We cannot keep God’s commandments to love God with the totality of our beings and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We inevitably fall short. Sometimes we outright fail—sometimes, like David, spectacularly. But God promises to transform human hearts so that we can do God’s will, so that we can love God and neighbor.
It is important to remember that when Scripture refers to the heart, it refers not just to the seat of emotion, but also to the seat of the will. Much of the inner life of humans that we associate with the mind— “intellectual, ethical and moral activity”—was understood by the Biblical writers to take place in the heart. Thus, as John Kaltner observes, “the heart was central to the behavior and the mentality of a person.” [“Fifth Sunday in Lent: Jeremiah 31.31-34: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections, Year B, Volume 2, 91]
So, David is asking God to transform the very essence of who he is. And in Jeremiah, God is promising to embed God’s commandments in the very center, the core, of a person’s being.
This renewing of the heart draws one closer to God. It can fill the emptiness we may feel and soothe the ache of longing in our souls, as Susan Robb discovered. There is a passage in St. Augustine’s spiritual autobiography, Confessions, which eloquently makes this point. Addressing himself to God, Augustine declares, “You have made us for yourself [O God] and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” [Confessions 1.1] Tending to our relationship with God can bring us this rest, this strength, this hope, this peace, this wisdom for living.
According to UCC pastor J. Bennett Guess, the late preacher Fred Craddock had a lifelong habit of memorizing passages of scripture, stanzas of hymns, verses of poems, and lines from literature. They were a great resource on which he often drew, reminders of God’s goodness and grace. When he found himself “in the middle of a sleepless night or … sitting in the hospital waiting room or … pulling up the driveway of a friend who had suddenly passed away, he could pull out those reminders and repeat them to himself and, when necessary, share them with others. Not written on little slips of paper he carried in his pockets, but written in his memory, written on his heart.” [J. Bennett Guess (UCC), https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf2003b7e/written_within_you]
But God does not only renew our hearts so that we may trust in God. God also renews our hearts so that we may love one another by doing justice and showing mercy. Our reading from Jeremiah comes from what is often called the Book of Comfort. This is a four-chapter (30-33) respite in which the prophet speaks words of comfort and hope to the people after Jerusalem has been razed and the Babylonian Captivity has begun. The first 29 chapters of the book have been largely composed of words of judgment against the people and leaders of Judah for their failure to uphold their end of the covenant between them and God. As with most of the prophets, Jeremiah focuses on two primary violations of the covenant between God and Israel. One is idolatry, the failure to be faithful to God by worshipping other gods. Of course, in our day, it is not actually deities for which we are likely to abandon God. We are more likely to place our trust, our hope and even our love in material objects, money, status, power, political ideologies or leaders. Idolatry can take many forms, but they all involve giving our hearts to something other than God. Augustine calls this disordered love: we give to other things or people the highest level of devotion and adoration and faith, things which ought only to be given to God, our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, the One who is our one true Hope and the Source of all that is good and beautiful.
The other primary violation of the covenant repeatedly cited by the prophets is injustice—the failure to care for the widow, the orphan and the resident alien living in the community and the perversion of legal justice so as to exploit the poor and the vulnerable. Jeremiah himself emphasizes the importance of this aspect of the covenant back in chapter seven: “...[I]f you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I [the Lord] will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever.” [Jer 7:5-7]
How we treat others, both as individuals and as a society, is intimately connected to our relationship to God. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the influential Peruvian theologian, emphasizes that our knowledge of God, our closeness to God is indicated by concrete acts of justice and mercy. He says, “To know Yahweh...is to establish just relationships among persons, it is to recognize the rights of the poor. The God of Biblical revelation is known through interhuman justice. When justice does not exist, God is not known; God is absent.” [Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, tr. Sr. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (New York: Maryknoll: 1988, revised ed.), p. 110-111] God is absent, not because God has left us, but because we have turned away from God, as Robb realized she had done that day on the freeway.
Yet, as we’ve already said, we cannot achieve this renewing of our hearts on our own; we cannot achieve or even grow in love of God and neighbor by ourselves. We need God’s help. And God, being gracious and merciful, acts to provide that help. God promises to renew our hearts; to teach us wisdom so that our hearts are more like God’s heart; to inscribe the law, God’s commandments, on our hearts so that we will truly be God’s people in both word and deed, in both thought and action.
Even with God’s help, this is not easy and it may not be painless. James Knight illustrated this point with a story he told at a recent continuing education event for pastors. He told us about this guy at his church who was impressed with the shape that Knight is in and wanted to go work out with him. So, the two of them went to the gym and started to warm up on the treadmill. After about five minutes the guy says, “Wow! I’m done! I can’t go on.” Knight asked, “What do you mean? We haven’t even gone a mile yet.” “I know,” the guy replies, “but it hurts.” “Of course it hurts,” said Knight. “It’s supposed to hurt.” You see, there’s an abundance of research that shows you must push past your physical comfort level to build muscle and endurance. Without discomfort, there will be no development, no strengthening, no growth. [Dr. James Knight, presenter, “Cultural Sensitivity, Humility and Awareness;” A Healthy Practices for Ministry seminar presented by the Living Water Association, Ohio Northeast, United Church of Christ; March 5, 2024]
God wants to change our hearts, to expand them and renew them. As Susan Robb learned, that won’t be comfortable. It may well hurt. It may well push us into situations and even actions that go against our normal inclinations. But, in the end, our faith will grow stronger; we will become more empathetic and compassionate; we will grow in love; we will become more like Jesus.
In another book, Robb tells a story that illustrates this truth. Corrie ten Boom was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. Her family, Dutch Christians, had hidden Jews in their home to protect them from the Nazis. They were caught in 1944. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to Ravensbrück. Betsie died there and Corrie only survived because of a clerical error that resulted in her release a mere 10 days before the other women of her age were all murdered.
Just a few years after the war, in 1947, Corrie was speaking at a church in Germany. She told the congregation, “When we confess our sins, God casts them into the deepest ocean. Gone forever.” As folks were leaving the church, she was approached by a man who extended his hand to her and said, “How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”
Then, to her horror, he said, “I was a guard [at Ravensbrück], but since that time I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well.” He again extended his hand to her and asked, “Will you forgive me?”
Corrie ten Boom said that responding to his request was the hardest thing she had ever done. She did not feel like forgiving the man. A part of her didn’t want to do so. She had suffered greatly at the camp and her sister and many others had died. But she prayed silently, “Jesus, help me. I can lift my hand…You supply the feeling.”
Though it was forced, as she reached out her hand toward the guard’s, and as they touched, she said something remarkable happened. A healing warmth raced down her arm and flooded her entire being, bringing her to tears. “I forgive you, brother! With all my heart!” Corrie said she had never experienced God’s love so intensely as she did in that moment. [Susan Robb, Seven Words: Listening to Christ from the Cross, 15; Robb is relating a story told by ten Boom in a 1972 issue of Guideposts, https://www.guideposts.org/better-living/positive-living/guideposts-classics-corrie-ten-boom-on-forgiveness]
God, who declares, “I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more,” enabled Corrie ten Boom to do what she could not do on her own. God was at work renewing her heart. This is what God does for us finite, fallible, sinful humans: God renews God’s covenant with us, inscribing God’s law on our hearts so that we may live as God’s people, keep God’s commandments, and walk in the way of Jesus. If we will only open our hearts and let the Holy Spirit in, God will transform us.
I’m reminded of a couple lines from a favorite U2 song. These lyrics are quite appropriate for this day, as they seem to envision a birth or a baptism, and at the same time echo our scriptures. “As you enter this life / I pray you depart / With a wrinkled face / And a brand-new heart.” [U2, “Love and Peace or Else,” from the 2004 album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb]
May it be so for all of us. No matter how many or few wrinkles we have on our faces, may we, by the grace of God, depart this life with a brand-new heart. And may that transformation, that renewal, begin today, so that we might truly live out God’s covenant of love. Amen.