Relinquish Old Mistakes & Receive a New Law

27 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. 28 And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD. 29 In those days they shall no longer say:

“The parents have eaten sour grapes,

and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

30 But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.

A New Covenant

31 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

This is a message of hope — sowing new seeds in the houses of Israel and Judah.

Relinquish and Receive - the Prophet’s words

With each of the texts we will be studying together this month, we hear the way the prophets speak both truth and hope to God’s people. The prophets speak a word of truth about what the people must Relinquish, must let go of or turn from. If we fool ourselves into believing we have nothing we must turn from and relinquish, then I hope the truth-telling words of the prophets wake us up.

The prophets then speak a word of hope, for what comes after relinquishing is receiving. The truth-telling leads to hope-receiving. We receive promise of new life, a restored covenant, a promised land returned when we receive the word of God’s hope through the mouth of the prophets.

The people are in exile. The kingdoms remain divided. And yet the Prophet Jeremiah speaks words of truth and hope that set up a coming reality where The Lord will restore the promise to God’s people.

The problem, for the people in exile, is that they have “eaten sour grapes and their teeth are set on edge.”

I ran a trail race yesterday. At a couple of key junctures along the route, there are aid stations where you can get water, gatorade, and some snacks. I came upon the aid station at the top of the Blanchard Mountain Overlook (by the way, one of the most beautiful places in our county to look out on the islands and the bay). At the station, I grabbed a bunch of grapes and continued on.

And guess what? As I bit into the first handful of grapes — they were seedy and they were sour! Do you know that sensation when you chew through the seed of a grape and it gets all up in your teeth? Your mouth feels gritty, and it’s hard to get the little pieces out? While I appreciated the fruit and what it did to help my body at that point, I found myself spit spit spitting down the trail to get that gritty sensation out of my mouth!

My teeth were set on edge!

What a rich metaphor!? Because it’s applied to the negative feelings and sadness that the people experience in response to the breaking of covenant with God and the resulting exile. The idyllic life in the promised land doesn’t last, because covenant is broken.

My mind had made a covenant with the grapes — they looked good! But the covenant was broken when I found myself chewing on seeds.

Relinquishing Old Mistakes, Broken Covenants

So what must be relinquished in this passage? What is the prophet telling the people they must leave behind or let go of in order to receive God’s hope?

This text is hopeful, but throughout it, we hear the reminder of old mistakes made by God’s people, old covenants broken, like a marriage betrayal.

Consider how often we see covenants broken in our world today...

A marriage covenant undermined by infidelity.

A parenting covenant broken when a father doesn’t keep his promise.

A friendship covenant, broken when they don’t show up when you needed them.

We witness many broken covenants in our world.

The broken covenant of humanity with creation, where we have let our greed and quest for power overtake the call to steward and care for the environment. A broken covenant with our grandchildren and great grandchildren to steward a world for their future.

This week, we were reminded of broken covenants in our nation: We witnessed that tension between what was historically regarded as Columbus Day and the emerging celebrations of Indigenous People’s Day — marking the broken covenants of the colonizers with the people who occupied our land before we arrived.

Or how about the broken covenant that has been in the news so much the last couple of weeks: The US breaking covenant to the Kurdish people, leaving them to be slaughtered by the invading Turkish armies. A covenant that lasted only as long as it was in our best interest.

We see broken covenants on our streets as people of color have to question whether the police will protect or harm them.

Lord have mercy.

And to this, the prophet speaks a word of truth — people, you have broken your covenants with the Lord.

We break covenants. I’m certain, no matter the scale or magnitude, that each one of us has broken a covenant at one point or another, with each other, with God, with ourselves.

We must hear this truth.

We must acknowledge this truth. Or else we remain with the sour grapes and grit in our mouth, not receiving anything new, spitting and complaining.

But as I said at the beginning, ultimately, thanks be to God, this is a message of hope!

Jeremiah names the broken covenant of God’s people after they came out of Egypt.

We name the places where we witness and are perpetrators of covenants broken.

This is the space for confession — we tell the truth, we hear the truth, about what is…and then, we receive grace.

Receiving the new law

Here we make the turn. Covenants are broken, yes, but confession and grace open up a whole new world of possibility and promise.

From the beginning of this passage, we have heard that God is up to something, sowing new seeds of humanity and seeds of animals. Pause there for a moment to recognize something — in a culture that understood its strength to come from their collective numbers and the wealth of animal property, it would sure be good news to hear that their might be new sprouts coming up out of the proverbial ground, sowing new life in the form of humans and animals.

And, especially exciting that this new ground would be sown in the houses of Israel and Judah. There is not a promise to return to the land (as we remember last week, the instruction is to make homes and plant gardens while in exile). The hope is rising up right where they are, new lines from the houses of Israel and Judah.

No longer is the law going to be situated in the central place of worship, Jerusalem, but instead there is a new hope and new law that will be internalized by the people.

So what is being received here? What, once we’ve confessed to the breaking of covenants, what fills the space that has opened up in letting that weight go?

The covenant, the agreement with God, something externalized and related to the place they live (the promised land) — this is broken down.

Exile to the members of the house of Israel, meant being cut off from the central site of your worship, your meaning making, the law and ordering of your society.

It would be similar for Americans to see the Constitution torn up and our leaders and lawmakers flagrantly ignoring the social contracts and covenants and laws that have upheld the structure of our country through its history.

Can you imagine how jarring that would be? Can you imagine the feeling of betrayal and confusion that would cause? Can you imagine what it would be like to feel the core place of your common, shared life with others undermined, destroyed, ignored, desecrated?

And so for the people in exile — the message of hope they receive is that the Law is going to come to rest upon them.

The law, which so intimately binds together the whole social fabric of Jewish society — the covenant that had been broken when they entered exile — it would now be growing up within them. They would “know the Lord” intimately in their own hearts.

The covenant would no longer need to be an external document, carved in stones, but an ethic they abided by and committed to from within their being.

So what does this mean for us?

It is very safe to say that all covenants and agreements in our society are being questioned, undermined, ignored and defamed.

For the people of Jesus, though, we are invited to share an ethic, to share a life together, to find our hope not in external social contracts, but shared in the living presence of God in our hearts, our being, our souls.

The new covenant given to us and the good news for all the world is that the glory of the Lord has now found its resting place in us — we are called and offered the capacity to be the place of God’s temple dwelling.

And so the external, broken covenants, they are simply markers, remnants, ruins of a way that we all acknowledge has, is, and will break down.

And we instead covenant with each other and with God to share in a more intimate presence. To harken back to last week, we make covenant with God to share and encounter and be haunted by the Holy Ghost, the one whose presence binds us together as we gather and dwells among us here and now.

Let’s bring this on home.

Friends, it is time to name the truth that we have broken covenants, relationships, with each other and with God. It is time for us to confess this. And to keep confessing it as we stumble our way together.

It is time to stop accepting the breaking of covenants, the defaming of laws, the shattering of treaties and to speak the truth about all of the ruin and harm this kind of covenant breaking causes. This way is mistaken. We have to speak up to say it is sinful, evil, wrong and harms the ways we share life together.

And then it is time to receive a new law upon our hearts, the presence of God’s spirit in us, shared and moving between us that inspires us to act in love, grace, mercy, kindness, joy, welcome, and peace.

It is time to let that law dwell not somewhere outside of us, in memorialized documents or in social agreements that others make on our behalf. It is time to let that law dwell on our hearts, forming us into the kind of people who do not break with one another; to the kind of people who find their home together, here, now; to the kind of people who experience God’s joy and goodness as their first love, their first breath, their first cry of hope.

That is who we are. That is who the prophet is saying will be planted and grow up. We are a people of this new covenant.