Still Waiting

Proper 24C
Jeremiah 31:27-34
October 17, 2010

Still Waiting

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

At last we are done with Jeremiah! Today the barbed wire can come down.

Jeremiah has not been an easy companion. His was not an easy time but then, neither is ours, though perhaps for quite different reasons. Jeremiah faced a terrifying time when all appeared to be well on the surface. But Jeremiah knew that—seen through God’s eyes—there was disaster looming on the horizon. Jeremiah knew—long before and with a greater intensity than others—that exile was coming, that the people would be forced away from their homeland to a place they did not want to go and could not call home. In that sense Jeremiah’s experience of exile began far earlier than that of his fellow countrymen. Long before his fellow Judeans became strangers in a strange land, Jeremiah was a stranger in his own country.

Like Jeremiah, we know that something is not quite right. The gap between the wealthiest people and the poorest, even in our own country, let alone throughout the world is larger than at any time in our history and it’s growing. Across the country unemployment hovers close to ten percent. For some groups it’s much higher than that. Unemployment among black men was 17.6 percent in September and among black teenagers, a staggering 49 percent.¹ But for most of us the bad news is about other people.

Our lives, on the whole, are pretty good. We enjoy comfort and ease but watch with unease and discomfort the anger and resentment of great portions of the world’s population directed at us. We revel in our freedoms but are uneasy about the ways in which freedom becomes license. We bask in our prosperity but find ourselves impoverished in other ways. We have things that our parents could only dream of but we lack the time to enjoy them and especially we lack the time to enjoy each other, the time to build community, the time to become deeper. Across our land the mainline churches have suffered decline and a loss of influence. There are now as many folks who call themselves “unaffiliated” as there are who call themselves mainline Protestants.² We may feel secure behind the limestone bluffs that surround Decorah, but I doubt as Jeremiah did that we can hold out long against the armies of Babylon.

So, we too, live in a time of exile of the same sort as Jeremiah’s and find ourselves strangers in our own country, out of step with the beat of our collective drum. We find ourselves in that most-to-be-pitied of all groups: the unfashionable, the out of touch, yesterday’s news.

So Jeremiah is, I think, a neglected guide for us who live in this internal exile. He hasn't been up-beat and there have been times when his shrill voice has grated on our ears. Still, for those of us who find that our path lies away from rather than toward what we want, Jeremiah is a reliable guide. He has mapped the territory well. We can find our way because he went ahead of us.

Last week we heard his advice to exiles: build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what grows; marry; have children; see that they do the same; pray for the shalôm of your captors. We must live because we are the bearers of a legacy that must not be lost. Someone must carry the memories, the hopes and the values that have shaped us. Someone must carry them so that they will be available to those who find in them something of value. We are the only ones who can do that. We live in exile by looking to preserve the best of the past.

But Jeremiah has one last gift to give us: the gift of the future, the gift of hope. The words of our lesson this morning are familiar. They speak of the coming of a new covenant. We hear these words with Christian ears, long accustomed to assuming he means the Christian covenant, long accustomed to assuming that they have been fulfilled.

The practice of assuming so began very early in the midst of a bitter struggle between the Jewish followers of Jesus and the Jewish non-followers of Jesus. It has left its traces in the gospels. In Luke’s description of the upper room meal and the institution of the Lord’s Supper Jesus says, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Paul has similar words in 1 Corinthians, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” Hebrews has a number of references to “a new covenant,” one that is better than the old.

The Christian church and the rabbinic Jewish synagogue both emerged as products of mutual rejection. They were deeply shaped by the division that produced them. The fight was over the resources of faith: Who would have the right to claim the Hebrew scriptures as theirs? Whose interpretation would govern the reading of these scriptures? Who could claim to be the heir to the tradition of faith?

The New Testament, as a consequence, bears the marks of angry division. The division continued into the early Church. Christian writers made the following assumptions:

1. The scriptures of the Hebrew Bible are entirely, completely, and exclusively fulfilled in the person of Jesus.

2. There is no room for any other reading of the Hebrew Bible than ours.

3. Jews are wrong in stubbornly clinging to their outdated and superseded religion.

4. Christians have inherited all of the promises made to God’s people, replacing the Jewish people in the sight of God and disinheriting the Jews.

If Christianity had remained a minor sect of Judaism as it began, perhaps little harm would have been done by these assumptions. But Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and of its successor states, clear into the twentieth century. These assumptions became public policy and provided the ideology that led to two thousand years of persecutions and ultimately to the Holocaust. This alone is a good reason for removing our Christian glasses for just a moment to let Jeremiah be heard.

And when we do that a curious thing happens. We realize that the promised new covenant remains just that: a promise. Listen to Jeremiah describe the new covenant: It will be unlike the previous one. It won't be breakable. The law of this covenant will come from the inside out. It will not require any sort of instruction (so religious educators will be out of their jobs.). This new covenant will involve the forgiveness of sins.

When we look at the Christian covenant, the one we enter at baptism, we find that there are indeed some similarities with the one promised through Jeremiah. It is not like the earlier covenant in several ways. It is based on conversion, conviction and commitment, rather than inheritance. Forgiveness of sins is central.

But there are striking differences, too. People may indeed no longer remind each other to “know the Lord.” But as I see it, that’s not because such reminders are unneeded. And the Christian covenant seems to be just as breakable as the Jewish covenant. We still need to teach each other. We still need to struggle to be faithful. We still await the writing of the law on our hearts.

In other words, this promise has not been fulfilled in the Christian faith in spite of the anti-Jewish language in the New Testament and throughout church history. In other words, we are still waiting.

But we are waiting in hope. And it is a hope that is uttered in exile, not in the safety of our homes. God did not abandon God’s people in exile. God went with them. God continued to work among them in new and entirely unexpected ways, making bold new promises.

The exile became for Judah (and it can become for us) a place and way of life. No longer able to provide for themselves in a land of their own God’s people had to look to God for survival, sustenance and support. This total dependency reminded people of Israel’s time in the desert, a period the prophets of the exile came to think of as a honeymoon when God and God’s people lived in deep intimacy. So exile became for Judah a place of hope, a hope that escaped them in Judah. In Judah they ran around on God with the Ba’als. They maneuvered among the nations to build and maintain a power base. They ignored the covenant’s call for a just and humane society. In exile, stripped of those games, they found themselves once more completely dependent on God. They found the freedom to hope. They found they could trust the future, but not as the result of their own anxious scheming and toil. Those schemes, as we have discovered, could be spoiled with any downturn of the marketplace. No, they could trust the future because it would come to them as a gift from someone they could trust, the covenant God who had not abandoned them, the covenant God who still claimed them as God’s own people.

We, too, as a congregation of God’s people live in exile. We can come to the realization that we are completely dependent on God, that our future lies in God’s hands, and that God still has a new thing to do among us. We can find the freedom that comes from not having to do it bigger, or faster, or more profitably than someone else. We can find the freedom of not having to be fashionable, the freedom of being yesterday’s news and tomorrow’s hope. We can quit trying to succeed in a world that does not value what God values. We can tell our stories. We can live out our peculiar vision of the world. We can create a zone of contagion where people can catch our strange disease, the healthy, holy wholeness that is born out of memory and meaning and hope.

And we can live right now in the gift of hope that God gives us. There will come a day when Christian discipleship won’t be so much work. There will come a day when the struggle to be faithful as God’s people will be replaced by effortless delight. There will come a day when fulfilling God’s desires will come to us as naturally as swimming comes to fish, as flying comes to birds. In the meantime we live as the people of memory; we live as the people of hope. And as long as we cherish that memory and harbor that hope, there will be a future for us. God is not finished here. God still has a great work to accomplish among us. God is not done. And neither are we.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1 US Department of Labor, “Employment status of the civilian population by race, sex, and age,” October 08, 2010, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm.

2 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. "U.S. Religions Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation: Diverse and Dynamic." (2008), http://religions.pewforum.org/reports.