A New Covenant: a sermon for the twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

...I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
---Deuteronomy 5:9-10

So here you are, raising your children in Babylon, where there's a different god on every corner, where your kids play with idol-worshippers all day and come home and ask why it is they can't go to temple with their friends, and why they can't eat the pork that smells so good in their friend's homes.

"Well, you see, honey, we live in covenant with our very special God, so we don't eat certain foods and we certainly don't worship any other gods but ours." And our kids, being the above-average young folks they are, are curious. "Well, what has our God done for us lately?"

"Well, honey, lately we had this wonderful fertile land God had given us, but we were disobedient, so God sent the Babylonians to conquer us and take us into exile."

"Well, I didn't live there and I didn't disobey, so why do I have to suffer?"

"Well, honey, back when our people were at Mount Sinai, God said he would punish to the third and fourth generation those who rejected him."

"That's not fair!"

The new covenant that Jeremiah announces this morning had to do with this experience of the children in Babylon, who suffered exile without enjoying the sins for which it was punishment. God was saying, "You will no longer suffer for what your parents and grandparents did; I will forget their sins and no longer charge them to your account. And out of this forgiveness I will build a different kind of relationship with my people than I had with them since Mount Sinai."

Now before we jump forward to Jesus, which we will certainly do, let's make sure we understand Jeremiah, who was not actually thinking of Jesus when he wrote this. Jeremiah was not outside of the realm of Judaism at all, as we see this morning in Psalm 119. God's goal had always been that God's people would gratefully embrace the way of life God offered them at Sinai, that they would love it and cherish it and chase after it with all the intensity and focus that most people chase after their own self-centered desires.

I have known some addicts who have gotten into recovery, who will tell you that they were always very determined and willful and persistent people when they were drinking or using. They would walk barefoot through a snow storm to get their drug. If they lost a dealer, they would get on the phone all day until they found another one. They would go to any lengths to get the money they needed to pay for the stuff. Some people think addicts are lazy, but they are in fact highly motivated, dedicated people.

In recovery, when they find themselves balking at the difficulty of something they must do to stay clean and sober, they often remind themselves of how dedicated they had been to their addiction. I've heard them say, "I need to work as hard at staying sober as I used to work at staying drunk."

What if we worked as hard on God's will as we have worked on our own goals throughout our lives? What if we applied the same creativity and focus and determination and willingness to learn that we applied to our own ambitions? What if we truly cared more about the kingdom of God than about ourselves and our immediate circle?

The first person to fully and truly model this kind of passionate obedience was our Savior, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, Jesus of Nazareth.

So when God is talking about a new covenant, I'm not sure how new it really is. I think it's new because people are never ready for it until they're ready for it, not because God just now thought it up. The new covenant is always new, because every generation starts off focused on self-centered interests, on me and mine. But from God's perspective this is not a new covenant at all; it's what God has always wanted.

We start off our relationship with God basing it on the "what have you done for me lately" model, and our relationship, like all our relationships, is governed by the desire for rewards and the fear of punishment. Some of us never leave that mode, and it is indeed a mode in which God relates to people.

But the new covenant, the one Jeremiah and David both dreamed about, the one that is in Jesus Christ, departs from the inheritance of tradition with its privileges and restrictions and opens itself to the newness of passionately loving God and God's will. What makes it new is not that it is a new list of requirements and rules. What makes it new is that the requirements and rules are no longer necessary to make it happen.

What does it benefit us to be generous? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to forgive those who wrong us? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to love our enemies? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to care about people who don't live near us, who aren't like us, who don't care about us? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to help some congregation we've never heard of? It doesn't. What does it benefit us to build a school we will never go to? It doesn't. But all these things please God. What if we so passionately loved God that we wanted to do these things for no other reason than that?

The things God wants, the things that please God, don't change and have never changed. But the difference between a covenant between two parties that are suspicious and distant and one between parties who love one another may be the same covenant in terms of the rules and regulations, but in the living out, the latter is utterly different from the former.

It's awfully hard to imagine. I was going to use the model of a family to talk about it, but my own experience and the experience of many others is that family members can and do walk away from each other, do abandon their covenants with each other. They do it all the time. And there are certainly families that stay together in ways that are deeply unhealthy. It's hard to imagine, yes, but we usually know it when we see it, strangely enough. It's as if we have some memory deep within us, even though we may never have actually experienced it, a memory of paradise.

The new covenant, the kingdom of God in which God's children know and love God from deep within their hearts out, is new because it is created anew with every generation, every individual. It is new because it is never a place we have been before.

Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." It's hard to give oneself to the newness of the new covenant, because there are by definition no promises or threats. It is a kind of relationship most of us have never had. We can't imagine it. We can't predict it. We can't depend on it to deliver what we think we want. The promise is that it will deliver to us benefits we could not have imagined, blessings beyond our wildest dreams, a land we have never been to, flowing with milk and honey.

Amen.