God’s Always-New Covenant
Rev. Rachel Cooley Shawler
Kensington Community Church UCC, San Diego CA
24 November 2024
Scripture: Jeremiah 36:1-8; 21-23; 27-27; 31-34
36 In the fourth year of Judah’s King Jehoiakim, Josiah’s son, this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2 Take a scroll and write in it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel, Judah, and all the nations from the time of Josiah until today. 3 Perhaps when the people of Judah hear about every disaster I intend to bring upon them, they will turn from their evil ways, and I will forgive their wrongdoing and sins. 4 So Jeremiah sent for Baruch, Neriah’s son. As Jeremiah dictated all the words that the Lord had spoken to him, Baruch wrote them in the scroll. 5 Then Jeremiah told Baruch, “I’m confined here and can’t go to the Lord’s temple. 6 So you go to the temple on the next day of fasting, and read the Lord’s words from the scroll that I have dictated to you. Read them so that all the people in the temple can hear them, as well as all the Judeans who have come from their towns. 7 If they turn from their evil ways, perhaps the Lord will hear their prayers. The Lord has threatened them with fierce anger.” 8 Baruch, Neriah’s son, did everything the prophet Jeremiah instructed him: he read all the Lord’s words from the scroll in the temple.
21 The king sent Jehudi to take the scroll, and he retrieved it from the room of Elishama the scribe. Then Jehudi read it to the king and all his royal officials who were standing next to the king. 22 Now it was the ninth month,[a] and the king was staying in the winterized part of the palace with the firepot burning near him. 23 And whenever Jehudi read three or four columns of the scroll, the king would cut them off with a scribe’s knife and throw them into the firepot until the whole scroll was burned up.
27 The Lord’s word came to Jeremiah after the king had burned the scroll containing the words written by Baruch at Jeremiah’s dictation: 28 Get another scroll and write in it all the words that were in the first scroll that Judah’s King Jehoiakim burned.
31 The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. 32 It won’t be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant with me even though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 No, this is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34 They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord; for I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins.
Will you pray with me?
Merciful, all-loving God, We turn once more to you this day, giving thanks for all you bless us with, and wondering at your message for us, right here, right now. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing to you, our rock & redeemer. May we walk away more assured of your love, and more clear what your invitation for each of us is this week. In your loving son’s name we pray, Amen.
Is it shocking, this morning, to read of the Israelite king literally burning up the word of God? – not only ignoring it, that would be too respectful, but turning it to dust, which is just enough spiteful. Maybe it seemed ridiculous to him, and he pompously scoffed at the thought of consequences for his people’s actions or the possibility that his nation could be conquered and his people would need to make the best of subjugation. Jeremiah had been preaching, you see, of coming destruction for the Israelites at the hands of the Babylonians, sharing a message that surely sounded dire & unpatriotic when folks would rather promote themselves as mighty & superior. It is true the people didn’t know for certain if Jeremiah was a true prophet. In fact there’s a moment in chapter 28 where a prophet at the time called Hannaniah predicts that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzer will lose the control he’s held over other nations in the region in the next 2 years. So the people and King Jehoiakim do have to discern which prediction they believe – and the one from Hannaniah is certainly what they’d rather believe.
Perhaps they should ask what else Jeremiah has been saying, and how it squares with what they know of God. Pastor Iona Dickinson of University City UC in our partnership & I recently taught the youth in confirmation about the Weslyan Quadrilateral, by John Wesley, founder of Methodism which invites us to intentionally bring different aspects to a particular question of faith: our reason, our experience, scripture, and our tradition. So what would those four things say about what Jeremiah had been preaching: about helping the widow & the orphan, about ignoring idols & only worshipping the one true God? The Israelites would have heard these commandments & stories about them in their scripture & tradition, they might have experiences of worship & service that ground them, they might reason that they seem the right things to do. That maybe their society would be stronger if they invested in one another, including those on the margins.
But why bother with all that pausing & thinking when you can run away – and quickly - into pridefulness instead. Doing so can become a habit we’re taught again & again throughout our lives, when friends question us when we’re young, when we question our abilities, when we encounter difference & want to say our way is better. Self-righteousness & ego-promotion become balms of comfort when we feel uncertain or like we’re not enough. But I think we’ve all seen folks for whom all the self-promotion is covering up for insecurity. And the truth is that balm doesn’t last, even for us, or change the fear of not-enough-ness. We may just bounce back & forth from one to the other.
But God through Jeremiah invites the people to slow down & consider what balm & comfort might really last, the one thing that will be there for them even if the Babylonians do come for conquest. God says turn back to me, I am always here, I am the one who loves & comforts. I just want to make my love known to you, and I want you to respond.
Now I know that in the prophetic texts, God can sometimes seem like a despot dictator who wants to punish the people for their failings, for their humanity, even. And that can feel uncomfortable & wrong, as well it should because we know God in our lives to be invitational & loving. I think because the world can feel so big & scary, if we’re honest, we just hear the messages of the prophets & jump straight to fear. And because we may have been taught by other churches or people that we are shameful, & shame makes us feel helpless, we hear the word of God through the prophet as shaming & condemning. And we want to say “hey, I’m not so bad, I’m really excellent, actually!” And so we oscillate between fear & prideful superiority once more.
But if we can pause & soothe ourselves, remind our bodies & minds that we are safe & loved, in this moment—which is not an easy task in our frantic days & among so many messages of not-enough-ness. If we can pause & get grounded, what might we see instead in God’s words?
We might see an invitation to avoid that fall from pride & feelings of helplessness. We might see God inviting a change in that back and forth cycle, and an assurance that’s outside of it. God never wants the ill to befall the people, God is always trying to say “let’s avoid this!” “turn to a different way & you will see.” J. Clinton McCann, Jr., Evangelical Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Eden Seminary, a UCC seminary in St. Louis says: “Punishment is never what God wants to do or what God wills to happen. Rather, punishment is what results when God’s will is not done”
God’s will is to be in loving relationship with the people, whereby the people pray and worship, they do justice, they love kindness, and they walk humbly with their God as the prophet Micha reminds us.
I know the question of “is God still allowing the calamity to befall the people” is still there, and is something that we may wrestle with throughout our lives. I don’t believe that God is allowing the calamity to come, or causing it to come. If I look at my Weslyan Quadrilateral – the four pieces -- I would point to folks in the Christian tradition who say that God is in process, God cannot choose & control all those things, and people have free will.
Knowing that things may change though, the God we know to be loving from our experience says even when things change in the monarchies around you, in your life fortunes & misfortunes, I will love you & my call will be true. You can do justice & love kindness wherever you are, and if you do, none of you will be truly hungry or destitute. None of you will ever be alone.
You cannot put your faith in fleeting things like power or your own rightness or ego because they will inevitably falter. My love for you, though, will never falter – God says.
It may seem impossible, and it may indeed be a lifelong journey, but God’s promise here is to always find new ways and that we will come to a time when we will know our role as beloveds of God’s as intimately as we know our own hearts.
I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts – God says. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34 They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, and I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins. Never again remember that back and forth of pridefulness and fear. Seeing that back and forth, but loving us still, always through it, and calling us to something else. Surely it takes practice. But God’s promise is that the New Covenant will find a way to right itself within itself.
So how will you in this week of Thanksgiving, and maybe of rest, where we have to acknowledge that we don’t make the Sun come up when we get up and be productive all day. It doesn’t mean the Sun is going to come up or not come up – God’s doing that, God promises.
Seek and we will find love and peace along the journey.
May it be so.
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