What God Really Wants from Us (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Last Wednesday, I shared with Kerry my idea for this sermon. Sometimes, I find chatting with my wife about various biblical passages in the lectionary to be quite helpful. I told her I would be preaching this Sunday from the greatest passage in the book of Jeremiah. Her response: “You’re preaching about Jeremiah running around in his underwear then hiding it under a rock?”

Not exactly what I had in mind....

The prophet Jeremiah is a strange figure, even in the midst of the many prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, the bit with the linen underwear, or loincloth, did happen. Read the thirteenth chapter of Jeremiah, and you will discover one of the many symbolic actions God called Jeremiah to undertake. Just as underwear worn for days, buried under a rock down by the river, then dug up later, so likewise ruined is the people’s relationship with God. God tells Jeremiah,

For as the loincloth clings to one’s loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the Lord, in order that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. But they would not listen. (13:11)

Though tongue-in-cheek, Kerry’s suggestion of “Jeremiah and the ruined underwear” makes a lot of sense. Read this strange little story, and you get a taste of the overall book of Jeremiah, as the prophet rails against a nation ever disinterested in the ways of God and yearns for his people to return to God. His prophetic calling casts him into the midst of the relationship between God and Israel, where God forges covenants that the people will break, where God provides and the people rebel.

How do we hear these words? Seeing the conflicted world around us, one might argue we are not that far removed since Jeremiah buried his underwear. We live in a sin-fractured world, bloated by its greed and thin in its grace. Just as ancient Israel in Jeremiah’s day, the commandments lie broken and discarded in our own day. Without a doubt, the prophetic denouncements of Jeremiah could be easily a word for our day, and likewise, “the people would not listen”.

For instance, read the book Losing Moses on the Freeway. New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges shares stories examining how the Ten Commandments play out in American culture. Idols and idolatry are alive and well as he interviews persons so caught up in following the band Phish around the country that they began losing touch with reality. Follow Hedges to a neighborhood in New York where two bitter business partners now run ruthlessly competitive and petty businesses across the street from one another, and the Ten Commandments’ admonishment not to covet or envy comes all too alive and relevant. Like it or not, we learn that we are the same people as those who danced around golden calves of their own making, prone to sin, formed by habits of exclusion, selfishness, and greed.

From time to time in this country, politicians and jurists suggest placement of the Ten Commandments on federal or state courtrooms. Jeremiah himself would laugh, for he saw firsthand how kings and kingdoms rarely are bothered with such things. Jeremiah operated in a time of national upheaval, where most everything was in flux, yet the Temple and the monarchy, two elements of ancient Israelite religion, were the least likely places to find authentic worship and attentiveness to God. This particular passage of Jeremiah asks for a deeper understanding of following God’s ways. Instead of tablets of stone, God shall write the law upon the hearts of the people.

Why does God choose the heart rather than yet another set of laws as God gave to Moses. God knows humanity sidetracks easily into legalism. The monarchy demanded by the people was like all other theocratic experiments in history: something that did not last, despite claims of being “God’s chosen people”. Add to this the reality of human existence, where like it or not, humans have a hit-and-miss approach resulting more in the day-to-day brokenness of the world. Whether long ago or today, a Far Side cartoon aptly describes humanity: God is in the kitchen pulling a planet out of the oven. The planet is quite obviously Earth, and God seems a bit frustrated. “Hmmm. It looks half-baked.”

Despite our failings, God does not fail us. Abraham Joshua Heschel claims that the book of Jeremiah reveals the deep love God has for these people, even though they disappoint and stray. In the book of Jeremiah, Heschel claims we learn “as great as God’s wrath is [God’s] anguish”. (The Prophets, Harper, 1964, 110) The story with the ruined underpants serves as a glimpse into the wounded heart of God. While broken by infidelity, God has compassion in abundance, offering redemptive opportunity to bring the beloved people back into the fold.

Now we turn to the text I suggest as the greatest text of Jeremiah. Hear it again, now with some of the background story of Jeremiah in your minds:

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 husband, 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.

In these verses, we learn of God’s great love for the people. Despite their complaining and their rebellious indifference, God will have the last word, and it is not one of dismissal. God will reorder things and bring peace to the restless heart of God’s people. There will be peace where otherwise strife would arise. There will be abiding love where otherwise distrust and worry would arise. There will be love where otherwise heartache would arise.

God promises there is something greater. Jeremiah does not speak “Surely the days are coming” wistfully. In the midst of proclaiming God’s anger and God’s anguish, Jeremiah speaks with certain tenderness and tender certainty. There will come a time where we will not need to hear or teach God’s ways, for they will be planted deep within us. We will not merely know what God wants. We will be who God wants us to be. No need to ask, second guess, or even interpret what God’s ways will be like. Grounded in God, we shall no longer need or want, worry or grasp for anything. Our vanities and anxieties shall go away, and we will be in God’s good hands.

While we wait that glorious day, we should take a cue from Jeremiah for how to live in the meantime. Jeremiah lived in the midst of the world, often in ways the world found perplexing. Persons who dare to take Jeremiah at his word find themselves seeing the world through different eyes, skeptical of the status quo and partisan agendas.

Seeing God’s hope for the world, Jeremiah claims the rich and the poor, the great and the least, the powerful and the powerless will have the same words of God inscribed upon their hearts. The left and the right will no longer scrabble over their turf wars, claiming to speak for God. God will have spoken, and for once, everyone shall know and not worry about “being right” when the dust settles. Jeremiah prophecies a world no longer prone to tearing itself apart. This is indeed good news!