I Promise

Lent 5B, 3/22/15
Jeremiah 31:31-34

Glorify your name, God. Draw us close to you. Help us to follow the leadership of Jesus. Keep us faithful in our covenant with you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Why do you come to church?

Lately you can go to the religion section of any news outlet and read about the decline of the church.

Mainline Christianity doesn’t matter any more, according to some experts.

Membership is shrinking, giving is down, and congregations are closing their doors.

Depending on who is doing the writing or the talking, they’ll attribute the decline of the church to ordination of women or failing to ordain women, to acceptance of gay people to failing to accept them completely. Mainline Christianity is too political, too hypocritical, too traditional, too wishy-washy.

Some people claim that the church is shrinking simply because it is irrelevant. In today’s society, people make their own meaning. They don’t need an institution like the church to help give meaning to their lives.

And yet, here we are.

For some reason, each one of us decided to roll out of bed this morning and come to worship with this community.

What led you here?

I don’t need you to shout out answers, but that’s not intended to be a rhetorical question.

Answer the question for yourself… What motivated you to make the effort to come to worship this morning?

Do you know?

[pause]

I can’t tell you why you, specifically, came to church this morning.

But I do think that Jeremiah can tell us something about the importance of coming to church in general.

In today’s reading from Jeremiah, we heard about God making a new covenant with the people of Israel.

God promises some pretty awesome things to the people, regardless of whether they actually follow God’s law or do what God asks of them.

I think that that is why we come to worship.

We come to hear the good news of God’s promise of grace and forgiveness.

Church is a place where we know that we are accepted and welcomed and received as beloved children of God.

If that weren’t the case, I don’t think that any of us would be here today.

Let me explain a little bit more about this promise from God, as described in today’s reading from the book of Jeremiah.

Now, if you’ve gotten to know me at all over the past several weeks, you’ve probably learned that sometimes the way that I make a point, or give an explanation, is by telling a story.

So, allow me to tell you a story about one of my spiritual practices.

As part of the requirements for ordination, I spent a year doing a full-time internship in Eugene, Oregon.

It was a great internship, but one thing that was challenging for me was to actually take a day off every week. You see, I didn’t have any other friends in Eugene, or even on the West Coast, so it was easy to become a workaholic.

But I made myself take the day off.

Here’s how it worked.

I had Fridays off each week.

I made sure that I could get home every Thursday by 9pm to watch CSI.

You know the show CSI?

This was well before the days of TiVos, and I didn’t know how to set a VCR to record something while I was out, so if I wanted to see the show, I had to be home in time.

It worked surprisingly well.

I lived right next door to the church, so even when we had meetings on Thursday nights, as long as I could get out of there by 8:59, I would be home in time to catch the opening credits of the show.

CSI was the beginning of my Sabbath time each week.

And I still watch CSI for Sabbath time.

There’s something about that TV show that, for me, has become connected to truly taking time off.

I don’t know what I’ll do if they cancel the show some day.

Having said all of that, there’s also something about CSI that bugs me sometimes.

When the characters are working on a case, and they’re talking to a victim who is afraid for their life, or to the family members who are grieving the loss of a loved one, sometimes they’ll say something like:

                  We’ll get the guy who did this. I promise.

Now, why in the world would someone promise that?

The investigators don’t know for sure that they’ll be able to find the perpetrator of a crime and bring him to justice.

Why would they give their word to a victim when they don’t have the power to follow through on the promise?

It’s a very human thing to do. We want to see something happen so we believe that we have the power to make it so. Have you ever made a promise like that?

I’m guessing that most of us here today have either made a promise, or had a promise made to us, that ended up being broken. We may have tried our hardest, but we just don’t have the power to do everything that we would really like to see done.

You know what, though?

God is pretty amazing.

Unlike you or me or the characters on CSI, God can promise ridiculous things and will actually have the ability to follow through on them.

We call a promise from God a covenant.

It’s more certain and more meaningful than a promise between humans, especially considering that some of our promises are ones that we may not have the power to keep.

Let’s consider a couple of the covenants that God has made with humankind.

In the Old Testament, God keeps offering covenants to the people of Israel, even though the people never seem to be able to fulfill their side of the promise.

In the time of Noah, God makes a covenant with the people never again to destroy the world by a flood.

With Sarah and Abraham, God makes a covenant with their offspring forever. In the words of a confirmation lesson I used to teach, this covenant was for a people, a place, and a purpose.

After rescuing the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, God makes several covenants with them in the wilderness. This includes the giving of the law, and the Ten Commandments. It also includes the promise of health, if people look up at bronze image of a snake, God will save them from poisonous snakebites.

If you have been here for worship each of the past four weeks, you’ve heard these stories read in worship.

During the season of Lent, we hear a lot about the covenants that God has made with the people over the ages.

Today we get another one.

Jeremiah writes: 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.

Previously the law had been written on stone tablets, but now it’s going to be written on the hearts of the people.

The promise continues: 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.

Previously, God had spoken directly with Noah and Sarah and Abraham and Moses, and sometimes with the priests or the prophets. But now, God is going to get up close and personal with all the people, not just a chosen few.

The promise concludes: For I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

Previously, God had punished the people when they didn’t follow the law. When Jeremiah was writing, the people were in exile, living in a foreign land, because they had been unfaithful to God.

With this covenant, God says, your actions don’t matter any more.

I’ll forgive you no matter what.

The covenant of Jeremiah 31 – the promise that God makes to the people – is that when the day of the Lord comes, it won’t be full of judgment and fear, like the prophets have been telling the people for a couple hundred years.

The Day of the Lord, according to this passage, is a time when God will forgive the sins of all the people, and when everyone will know God, and be in relationship with God forever.

That’s why we come to church.

No matter what the statistics say about growth numbers or lack thereof, no matter how relevant the Christian message is to popular culture or not, there is a piece of Christianity that will always resonate with us.

That piece is God’s covenant.

As Jeremiah tells us today, God forgives all our sins.

And unlike you or me or the characters in CSI, God really has the authority to make this forgiveness happen.

We come to church to be reminded of that covenant.

We come to church to renew that covenant.

Because, you know, even though God’s forgiveness is not conditional on our behavior, God still likes it when we follow the commandments and seek to live in close relationship with one another and with the divine.

And so, in worship, we refresh the covenant.

We remember all the promises that God has made to humanity over the generations, and we show our thanks by trying our very hardest to uphold our end of the promise.

And yet, we know, that even when we fail, God’s faithfulness endures.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.