On Our Hearts

Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 12:20-33

If you hear me – or another preacher, or some excerpt from the Bible – talking about a “covenant with God”, how many of you picture a visual image for that “covenant”?

If you do, is it a scroll, or some official-looking piece of paper?

(while God-covenants are definitely not the same as legal contracts, there are some ideas in common that might lead us to that kind of image)

 

Is it stone tablets?

This could be a common image – we do talk, in the church and the culture around us – about the “ten commandments” as a covenant from God. And those of us who grew up with Indiana Jones know that the “Ark of the Covenant” is the very fancy dangerous mysterious box in which the tablets of those commandments were kept. (Others might have learned that through non-Hollywood sources)

 

Do any of you, hearing or thinking about “covenants”, usually get a mental image of a beating human heart? 

Those four chambers of muscle, fleshy red, continuously pumping blood and life?

 

That’s not the image that usually floats in or out of my head when I hear, or talk, about God’s covenant with us.

But it might be the image in God’s mind when God thinks about covenant with us.

 

We heard this morning from the prophet Jeremiah that the days are surely coming when God will write God’s law, God’s covenant on the hearts of God’s people. 

 

Put your hand over your heart for a minute and think about this with me.

Right there, right in the physical center of life in our bodies, God’s law, God’s will, God’s way of living… almost the mind of God, the heart of God in your heart, in mine.

 

The idea of it feels a little overpowering. It might be a little too much closeness of God.

But – I don’t know about you, but I also find it beautifully attractive. 

I do kind of love the idea that, with God’s law, God’s love embedded in my heart, I wouldn’t have to struggle to figure out what’s the best thing to do, the God thing to do.
Being “good”, being holy, making peace, healing, forgiving, doing the right thing, the loving thing, would come naturally, would feel normal, even effortless.

It would be so nice, in this complicated world, not to have to wonder about the right thing, but just to do it directly from the heart. 

 

Is that attractive to anyone else here, or is it just me?

 

And then, what if our whole community lived that way? What if you and I could trust that the people we encounter every day – at the office (or school) or the store or the tax accountant’s and the car repair – had God’s law, God’s love, written in their hearts, too?
What if our whole community worked like the heart of God: generous, forgiving, joyful, thinking first of others; always, heartbeat by heartbeat,  attuned to the healing and wholeness of the world?

 

Honestly, that feels so radical I’m not sure I can imagine it.

But I think I like it.

 

And then,

well, then I get a little annoyed that we’re still waiting for this promise God offered to God’s people roughly twenty-six centuries ago.  The days are surely coming, says the Lord. But when?

 

I had a little conversation with some of you this week about whether God’s promises like this are reliable, or not.

The Bible is full of God’s promises of an eternal, secure homeland to God’s people…. and the news these days is full of how messily that idea is working out several thousand years later.

(For that matter, the Bible suggests it was also pretty messy for a lot of those ancient centuries, too.)

 

Then God promised that David’s line would rule Israel forever, secure in prosperity and God’s love. And the words of the prophet Jeremiah that we heard this morning are addressed to God’s people specifically after David’s line has been toppled and exiled, and the Temple they built in Jerusalem – the symbol of the permanence of God’s presence with the people – has been destroyed. 

Now God promises an exiled people, seems to promise us, that the days are surely coming when all God’s people will love God, and live God’s dream for the world from the center of our hearts.
Can we count on that, now or ever?

 

Welllll….

I think we can count on God’s intent – the core of every covenant God offers (stone tablet covenants or heart covenants or any other), the heart of all God’s promises.

The part where, over and over, we hear God say to us, “I will be your God, and you will be my people”

I believe you and I can count on a truth that, in every generation and every circumstance, God is claiming us, adopting us, making it personal that we belong – that we belong to God, that we belong to love, and home, and eternal glory.

 

I believe we can also count on the connecting thread of all God’s promises – that God is always bending the universe toward peace, and glory, and wholeness, and our being truly and lastingly at home in God’s home, in God’s heart.

 

The details of how that works are messy, incomplete, and – frankly – often disappointing.

But in those messy details, too, we can often find evidence of the keeping of God’s promises. 

 

Remember a few minutes ago when I asked you to put your hand on your heart and imagine what it would be like to have God’s law, God’s love embedded in your heart?

If, while we thought about that this morning, you had a bit of a yearning for that experience – if you wanted, hoped, just a bit, that that could be real, that God’s love would live deeply in your heart, naturally guide you in this complicated world…. Well, that yearning, that hoping, are, I think, the signs of God’s law, God’s love, being written into your heart.

Not fully bloomed for many of us, maybe, but a seed of that promise planted, taking root.

If you’ve ever had a longing to meet Jesus for yourself, to get close to the healing miracles, the inspiration, the sense of presence,

hoped for that in the Eucharist, in the bread of communion;

if you’ve gone looking for it in the Bible, or in a teacher or a friend,

like those “Greeks” in our gospel story today, coming to Philip and saying “we wish to see Jesus”,

maybe that’s what it’s like to feel God writing covenant on your heart.

Inscribing inside you the shape of the love that makes us close to God, makes us more like God. 

 

I don’t know exactly what God has in mind, for this writing in our hearts. I don’t know the certain answer to how God’s promises will be true. Some things remain above my pay grade.

But written deep in my heart there is a certainty that God is still writing love into us – “us” here together this morning, “us” the whole people of God in the world.

 

So maybe, in these last two weeks of Lent, as we get closer to the miracles of Easter, the invitation to impossible and invincible new life, maybe it’s worth paying attention to what God has written in our hearts already.

Maybe not the whole law, the whole of God’s love, the certainty that everything my heart suggests I do is the holy, life-giving, world-healing work of God, is inscribed within me, or you. 

But the moment of longing for that confident closeness to God might be the first letters of that love being written in us. 

The times when you notice the impulse of your heart to forgiveness, to generosity, to compassion and joy for the complicated people around you – that might be a phrase, a few key words of God written into you.

 

Watch for those with me, will you?

This week, this month, this whole life we share – watch for those longings, those moments, that love that does flow naturally from your heart, into which God’s heart is, even now, being written.