The Once and Future Covenant (16th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 31:27-34; September 4, 2016)

Exile and Homecoming: The Once and Future Covenant

16th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 31:27-34
September 4, 2016

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

Exiles dream of homecoming. They tell stories about what life was like before, before the disaster, before the defeat, before the foreclosure, before the diagnosis. They remember.

But memory, especially the memory of how things were before, plays tricks on us. It polishes, it amends, it edits, it Photoshops our memories until the past becomes a Golden Age. Memory becomes nostalgia; the past becomes a fantasy, anesthesia against present pain. We can project our hopes for the future into the past and they can become, in Walter Brueggemann's words "a subversive memory of the future."

When the survivors of the siege of Jerusalem went to Babylon as exiles, they were forced to leave behind much of what had defined them as a people. But they didn't leave everything behind. They took their stories and, above all, they took the scrolls. While in exile the scribes who were the guardians of those scrolls gave a final shape to most of what we now call the Old Testament. They brought together the traditions, written and unwritten, and wove them together into a single story. They reflected on their experience as the covenant people of God. They thought deeply about the meaning of the exile in the light of their status as God's covenant people. Or maybe they thought deeply about their status as God's covenant people in light of the exile. They told stories and they debated. They recorded these stories and debates and those writings eventually became what is called the Talmud, a vast encyclopedia of Jewish thought, experience, and sensibility.

When--after "seventy" years--Babylon fell to the Persians and there was a change of policy that allowed the exiles to return to Jerusalem, there were some who decided to stay in Babylon. They had made a place for themselves there as a community within the Babylonian culture. They were prosperous and saw no reason to take the risks of going home to a place they had never seen. The others, the ones who decided to return, quickly discovered that Jerusalem was not the place they had heard their grandparents talk about wistfully when people got to telling stories in the evenings after their work was done.Jerusalem was a mess and they was no homecoming welcome waiting for them.

The reality is that there is no going "home" from exile. If exile is when we can no longer live in the place that we call home, then homecoming is complicated by the fact that nothing stays the same. The home that we knew changes when we are gone. We change when we are gone. When we who have been changed return to the homes that have been changed, that's when we find out that exile has become our home. Exile is permanent. We cannot go home. We can only go on.

At the beginning of all this exilic messiness, Jeremiah had thought deeply about the covenant and exile and the future. Of course, the future that Jeremiah saw coming was mostly about digging up and pulling down, about destruction and demolition. The old covenant was not working. The people of Jerusalem, the elite of Judah, were simply failing to do what they were called to do. They undermined the life of the people of the land for their own gain; they subverted God's justice for their own convenience. They even worshiped other gods whose characters seemed more in line with the interests of the one percent. Jeremiah and other prophets railed against them in God's name, but the elite would not listen. And, even more to the point, they would not change the practices and the institutions that promoted their power and wealth. They were unteachable, unreachable.

Of course it was their fault, in a sense, since they refused to listen, refused to learn. But when the student does not learn perhaps there is something wrong with the curriculum. Perhaps it was the covenant itself that was at fault. Perhaps the covenant expected impossible things.

Jeremiah had thought deeply about the covenant and had come to the conclusion that something had to change. He imagined a future in which God would write the covenant on the heart of Judah and even on the heart of Israel that had ceased to be a nation and whose people were scattered across the ancient world. In that future keeping the covenant would be like breathing; it would be reflexive. From the youngest of them to the oldest they would know God without having to be taught or reminded. What was needed was a New Covenant.

We Christians have imagined for centuries that we belong to that New Covenant. At the start of what we call the New Testament in many translations there are even words like: "The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." We look into this text and see our own reflection. It is not unlike looking into a fun-house mirror, only our reflection in this case is an improvement on reality and we see ourselves as better than we really are.

The covenant under which we live with God as the followers of Jesus is not, I repeat, not, the New Covenant that Jeremiah speaks about. "How can you say that?" you ask. I'm glad you asked! I say that because when we read closely we see that under the covenant that Jeremiah is talking about there is no need for anyone to be taught to know God because everyone just will. But that isn't how things are with us. We need to be taught; we need to learn and teach how to know God. If we were living in Jeremiah's New Covenant we wouldn't have a Sunday School or a Wednesday After School Program or a Vacation Bible School or an Adult Forum. We wouldn't need directors of Christian education or preachers or Sunday School teachers (and we can always use a few more of those). Parents wouldn't need to answer their children's questions about God, because the kids would already know.

We are not living under the New Covenant. We are still waiting for it, longing for it, and praying for it ("...hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done..."). We are waiting for it just like our Jewish friends. It still lies in our future.

In the meantime? In the meantime, we still live in exile, making our lives in a place that in an ultimate sense we cannot call home, waiting for a summons to pack our things. We built houses and live in them; we planted gardens and eat what they produce; we prayed for the place where we have been sent. But we are not at home here. We are citizens of a different commonwealth. We reject calls for us to give our full allegiance to anything and anyone but God and God's dream. The rhythms of our life are out of sync with the calendars of our culture. We are the people of God in exile and we will remain in exile. We are the people of God who have found the desert of our exile to be a place where God meets us and where God leads and sustains us. Poised between a past of covenant failure and a future of new covenant hope we are still God's people and exile is our home.

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