Jeremiah is a prophet speaking the word of God to the people of Jerusalem in the year 588 BC, and if they have a siege mentality, it is because they are actually under siege by the invading Babylonians. Indeed, the city will fall in the next year, and many of the community’s leaders will be taken off to exile in Babylon.

And yet in this time of crisis, God sends a word of hope through Jeremiah…

To a people who knew that they had violated their covenant with their God, and who wondered if God was finished with them, given up on them, decided to pack in the whole project, to them Jeremiah announces that God has a new plan. At key points in their history together, often in times of crisis and transition, God and this people had made covenants with one another. In our reading for today Jeremiah reminds them of the covenant they made together on Mt. Sinai after the Exodus from Egypt, part of which you will recall included the giving of the law and, notably, the Ten Commandments engraved on tablets of stone. And yet the community had shown, time and time again, that it could not live up to its end of the bargain, could not live by the rules set out for them, could live neither by the letter nor the spirit of the law.

To their astonishment, Jeremiah brings words of hope. No, God had not abandoned them, and no, God did not have a plan for some new legislation that perhaps this time the people might actually live up to. No, God is making a new covenant with the people, one not written on tablets of stone, not printed in the Congressional Record, but a covenant that God would write on their hearts.

In a moment a word about this imagery of God writing on our hearts, but first a few words about another image in this passage. God says, “ I will make a covenant.” The literal translation is “I will cut a covenant”. In the ancient Middle East, when two parties, usually two tribes or clans, “cut a covenant”, they would have a ceremony in which the two parties to the agreement would walk together between two sacrificed animals, which of course had their throats cut. Something to think about the next time you use the phrase, “cut a deal.”

But think about the imagery – when God covenants with humanity, the image is one of God walking side by side with us. Like a couple walking down the aisle after the wedding ceremony.

But as intimate as this relationship is, now, God says, I am going even further. The day will surely come when this covenant will be written on your hearts. In other words, there will be an inward transformation of the human heart that will allow the people to know God intimately and therefore be able to obey God’s laws without even thinking about it, and at the same time God will forgive and forget people’s sins. In the old days, God’s people were responsible for fulfilling one-side of the covenant; that had just not worked out, so God is writing a new play book, and this time God will be responsible for fulfilling both sides of the bargain. No longer will God be “out there”; now God will be “in here.” No longer will we be at cross-purposes with God. Now we will live whole lives not because we adhere to written laws but because when we are fully whole our hearts and that of God will beat as one.

Can we imagine a community where God’s people know the promises of God deep in their hearts, where God’s people sense that the power of God’s saving love is at the very core of their identity? What would that look like for you?

May I tell you what that would like for me? I think this is something I have unconsciously gotten away from lately, aided I am sure by a natural shyness about talking about myself, but also compounded by a sense that with so much suffering in our community and the world of late, who am I to speak of contentment and happiness and a feeling of being so incredibly blessed, not only at home but at work? But first, a short story.

An Hassidic story tells of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, “Why on our hearts, and not in them?” The rabbi answered, “Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your heart breaks, the holy words will fall inside.”

I think this is very much part of my story. There are those in this world who will tell you that it was when they were most happy, when things were going well, when they were in the flush of youth and the blush of first love that they first knew, really knew, deep down in their heart, that God’s love was at the very core of their being. That was not, however, how it was for me.

For me, such times as those were times when I was very happily wrapped up in myself and my success and what I was doing. God was more theoretical for me, and being held as a theory, was more a matter for the head than the heart. And yet that all changed, not over night but over time, not in any orderly procession but more in fits and starts, when life turned upside down. After six years in the law, six years of hard work and I thought a fair amount of success, came the call to stop into the hiring partner’s office. I was not, he informed me, really partnership material, and my services were no longer required. My stomach still twists in knots when I recall that scene, the sense of being kicked in the gut, of wondering how I was going to find a new position, and where, and when, and what would this mean for me and my wife. And then, not long after, the news of breast cancer, then later, far too soon, its recurrence.

All this would likely cause someone else to be driven away from the theoretical God who I knew in my head, and yet through a mystery and miracle I have no words to accurately describe, when in my despair and desolation I was driven down to my very core I found not emptiness, but God written on my heart. Maybe it was like the old rabbi said – my heart had to be broken so that the word of God could fall in. And so I knew – I knew! – that I was not in this alone, that while watching my beloved wife struggle with and suffer from this horrible disease was worse than anything I could ever imagine or wish on most hated enemy, God was somehow in this, and with her, and with me, and would never let us go.

But more than that – while I expected that all I was experiencing would drive me to be more about me and my needs, I found myself compelled – happily compelled – to reach out to others, to strive to make a difference in the church and the world, to actually live in a more authentic and true way than had to that point appealed. My heart, strangely enough, had been opened, and I had been freed to live in a new and far more fulfilling way. This was not something I did, not something that would ever have even occurred to me I needed. It was something the Spirit of God did within me, and for me.

Author and theologian Marcus Borg (The Heart of Christianity – Rediscovering A Life of Faith) uses the metaphor of an egg shell to talk about this matter. He writes,

“When our hearts are closed, we live within a shell. To extend the egg metaphor: the shell needs to be broken open if the life within it is to enter into full life. What we need is a ‘hatching of the heart.’ …The hatching of the heart – the opening of the self to the sacred – is a comprehensive image for the individual dimension of the Christian life.” (p.154)

It will be different for everyone, this hatching of the heart. For some, it might be prompted by a crisis or a time of suffering and pain; for others it might come right here, in worship, perhaps as we sing a familiar hymn and all of a sudden you “get it”, and amazing grace are not just two words but a credo to live by; for some it might come out in the wilderness, in nature, when stunned by the natural creation something changes within you and you become filled with gratitude not only because creation is so unimaginably vast and beautiful, but also because you realize that you have been created to be part of it, with powers to apprehend and appreciate it; for others, that “hatching” might come through the arts, or through a person who is so clearly filled with God’s Spirit that you feel changed forever by the experience.

Friends, this is the Good News for us, this is the heart of the matter: that God has placed on your heart, at the very core of your being, at the center of your identity, this simple and unalterable and lasting love letter: “I am your God, and you are my people.”

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