"Antici...pation"
April 2, 2006: 5th Sunday in Lent, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org
Scripture:
Jeremiah 31:31-34
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. 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 spouse, says the Lord. 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. 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.
May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen.
Sermon:
What are we to make of these words we hear from Jeremiah? The prophet speaks of a time when the broken relationship between God and the people will be mended. And not just mended, but made new. And not just made new, but made unbreakable, eternal. "The days are surely coming," he says, when our relationship with God will no longer be something external to us, something we have to work at maintaining, in constant danger of falling apart or falling away, but will be quite simply who we are, as much a part of us as the heart that beats in our chest, the breath that fills our lungs. "I will be their God," says the Lord, "and they shall be my people." No ifs, ands, or buts.
Ok, great. But when? When, Lord, will this marvelous transformation be accomplished? Because it sure wasn't in Jeremiah's day. While he was writing these words in the 6th Century before the common era, the walls of Jerusalem were being pulled down and her people deported to Babylon. And it wasn't when they returned from exile, only to be overrun by the armies of Alexander, invading from Greece. And it wasn't when after Alexander came the Romans and their soldiers and bureaucrats and economic agents of empire.
Then along came Jesus. And Jesus came bearing the same promise of God's saving presence with and for the people. As Emmanuel, that is, "God with us," Jesus himself was the sign of this new covenant made flesh and blood. In prayer Jesus reaffirmed the divine intention of establishing an intimate, mutually in-dwelling relationship with God's people, "The glory that you have given me, O God, I have given to them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one" (John 17:22-3). Creation's restored relationship with our Creator, which he called the "kingdom of God" or the "kingdom of heaven," had drawn near, he said (Mark 1:15); in fact, it existed already among his First Century hearers (Luke 17:21).
But Jesus died on the cross, and though the community gathered in his name continued to feel his resurrected presence with them, with us, the dream of restoration kept getting put off into the future. Oh, it'll happen, the church declared, when Jesus returns in a few years' time... in the next generation... when the empire falls... when the millennium turns... when the second millennium turns.
With the centuries and centuries of the church's waiting for the not yet to come true now, it's easy to see how some would lose faith and fall away. I mean, just take a look around, read a paper, or watch the news. War and rumors of war, famine, greed, fear. At times, it seems we have fallen with no hope of getting up. We seem to be trapped in a world like that depicted with childlike clarity by C.S. Lewis in his The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where the magical land of Narnia is frozen in the grip of the White Witch, who ensures that it is always winter and never Christmas. Always winter, and never Christmas, and certainly never, ever Easter.
"'The days are surely coming,' says the Lord... 'The kingdom of God has drawn near'... 'It is among you.'"
When, Lord, when? Where, Lord, where? How, good Lord, how?
I remember my first year living in Connecticut, back when I was a freshman in college. Growing up in Texas, I had never known a real winter. I remember my mom and dad rushing me out onto the front lawn for photos before the half inch of snow melted away, not to return for another five or six years. Oh, but I was brought up the learning curve here swiftly, and with a vengeance. Months... and months... of freezing cold and ice and snow. The sick squish of slush slurping into my shoes on the sidewalk. Rising in darkness only to return again in darkness at day's end. The rat trap of cabin fever.
But then, one day, a chink appears in the armor. Something has changed, something tiny, maybe one infinitely small green leaf lifting the tiny white head of a snowdrop, or an impossibly purple crocus daring to surface on a south-facing slope. But there it is, as startling as a trumpet blast on yet another gray morning. And with its appearance, the world is transformed. Suddenly, this is not long yet another gray morning, but one of the last gray mornings. It is the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. Something is happening, something new. Something spring.
And though it was still really too cold, though the sun was still as pale as our fishy legs, we students couldn't wait any longer. At fifty-nine and one-half degrees, we took a page from Yale president Bart Giamatti's playbook and declared "evil...abolished," "paradise restored" (memo, July 1, 1978) and winter over and done. We doffed our duffels for as-yet unseasonable short pants, over the pink and purple protests of goose-pimpled skin. Chattering teeth be damned, we played Frisbee. Though it was not yet spring, not by the calendar, not really, we named it and claimed it springtime because we needed it now.
In our life of faith, we would be foolish to believe that evil has been abolished and paradise restored. The facts simply don't bear out that claim. Clearly, the days described by Jeremiah and announced by Jesus have not yet come to pass. Creation and our relationship with our Creator are still very much broken. To say otherwise is not only untrue but unkind, and people who daily bear the aches and pains of the wintry world know the truth in their bones. We don't want to be the kind of false-hearted spiritual leaders Jeremiah criticized as treating the wounds of God's people carelessly, crying "Peace, peace," when there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14); after all, we are called to be priests and prophets, not Pollyannas.
Nevertheless, we believe that the sign and seal that the redemption of which Jeremiah spoke will indeed come is Christ, who appears in the muddy mess of history like a rose—in the words of the old German carol, "a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter... to show God's love aright." Christ is not only the "image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation," but also, we hear, "the firstborn from the dead" (Colossians 1:15, 18), the first flowering of God's new covenant, new creation, new season of resurrection in the body and spirit among us here and now. The promise of God is guaranteed to us because in Christ, the fierce, bright love of God is on the move.
Now, at this point, those of you with a pragmatic bent and an eye on the calendar may say, "But wait, John. That"s Easter talk, and we've a couple more weeks yet to Easter. And between here and there lies Holy Week, the cross and the grave, when that fine flower you're talking about is cut down and plowed under. What are we to make of that?" And you'd be right to ask. I don't believe that every day, in every way since Jesus things are getting better and better. History gives that platitude the lie. Truth is, between here and the consummation of God's purposes of justice, peace, and compassion on earth likely lie a great many crosses, a great many graves.
But just as there are signs of spring in the world, there are also signs of hope. The kingdom of heaven is breaking the chill grip of despair one slender green shoot at a time. Despite the continuing specter of divorce and the passage of anti-marriage legislation designed to discourage the commitment of loving persons, God is bringing together families of all kinds. Despite paralyzing fear over the world situation, children are being born, and despite laws designed to keep them orphaned, children are being adopted by loving parents. Despite stifling bureaucracy and policies that inhibit, rather than expedite aid and reinforce, rather than break down economic barriers, neighbors are helping neighbors rebuild along the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast. Despite the full weight of a war machine hell-bent on continuing our failed military occupation of Iraq and calling it "peace-making," real peacemakers like Tom Fox are pursuing a just and sustainable peace on the ground, even at the cost of their lives.
And despite the history of the Church, all our failures down through the ages, all the ways we have missed and messed the message, God is still speaking a gospel word to the world through us, and people are listening. People are coming. All over the world, women and men like us are just sitting around waiting for God to do something, but trusting in the promises of God, we are anticipating the redemption of the world. We know that the now is not yet the not yet, but we are laying claim to the gifts of the Spirit ahead of time because, well, because we need them now, the world needs them now.
I know I've shared this story with you before, and Louise before me, but it speaks so strongly to this point, it bears repeating. So I'll close with it. Writer E.B. White tells a story about his wife, Katherine, also an author, in his introduction to her book, Onward and Upward in the Garden. It's a wonderful illustration of the foolish work of anticipation. He says:
Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katherine would get into a shabby old brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes and proceed to the director's chair—a folding canvas thing—that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry Allen produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment. As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion—the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.
Friends, we don't have to plot the resurrection, we know that. God has accomplished this for us already in Christ. This is not our first Easter. But as members of Christ's church, we have the inelegant job of working that resurrection out through the world, of spreading it around, and getting it down around the roots where it will do some good. We are called to apply the gospel in our lives and our communities, so that in time the seed planted in Christ may bear beautiful and satisfying fruit and the promise of God come to fulfillment. For in faith, we can say, The days are surely coming, when all people, from the least to the greatest, will know the loving presence of God in their lives in relationships of justice, peace, and compassion.