Holy Trinity Episcopal Church

 Fourth Sunday in Lent

Year B, RCL

March 21, 2021

North Fork Ministries

Hebrew Scripture:

Jeremiah 31:31-34

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.

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 In the passage from today’s Hebrew scriptures, the prophet Jeremiah says that God is going to do something new. The old covenant that God had made with the people of Israel, a covenant that the people had continually broken by disobeying God, was to be replaced with a new covenant.  This time, instead of putting the law upon the people, God says, “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.”

 My two older brothers, both more than a decade older than me, had a different kind of relationship with my father than I had.  My Dad was of the John Wayne generation, the strong silent type, and his early parenting style reflected what was expected of a father at the time. 

 He worked hard, provided adequately for the family, and commanded respect.  Working for 40 years as a locomotive engineer for the Santa Fe Railway, a high -status blue-collar job in a Texas railroad town, he thought he could run his household like he ran a locomotive.  At the head of a freight train, he would release the brakes, put the engine in motion, and expect every boxcar, hopper and caboose to follow his lead.  It took him awhile to discover that all children weren’t freight cars that could be counted on to willingly tag along behind a powerful locomotive.  My oldest brother, an eldest son like his father, didn’t find following his father’s lead to be particularly onerous.  But Dad’s second son, Robert, balked when the engine was set in motion. He wanted to roll when the other cars halted, and threatened to fly off the tracks with every turn the train took.  

 A small mahogany china cabinet set in the largely unused living room of our house. One of the lattice-fronted doors of the cabinet contained a thin sheet of glass.  The glass, once framed by the other door, was missing - having long ago been shattered in the midst of a passionate argument between a willful father and a disobedient son.  The unmended china cabinet, containing the memory of shattered glass, was allowed to stand in our living room for years as a silent tribute to a broken covenant.

 I’m not sure if it was merely the passage of time, a natural mellowing that comes with age, the sweet loving influence of my mother, or maybe learning something over the years about being a good father, but by the time my sister and I came along, Dad was a different kind of father than he had been with my older brothers.

 I was naturally adventurous and my adolescent behavior presented many opportunities for harsh discipline.  But Dad gave me the freedom to sometimes make mistakes, the freedom to be who I was.  I remember very few rules.  I do remember never wanting to disappoint him. He could still call up a stern look, if needed.  A row of irreverent high school football players, sitting in the pew behind us in church talked for years of having their horseplay brought to an abrupt halt, by my father’s steely over-the-shoulder gaze.  He had developed a commanding presence, without the need to issue commandments. 

 Like the new covenant that the Lord promised to the House of Israel, my father had learned to relate to his children in a different way.  The desire to obey was contained within me.  It wasn’t the threat of punishment or the hope of reward that motivated me to be a good son, but the love I felt from my father. 

 Fundamentalist Christians often rely on the threat of hell and the promise of heaven to motivate people to live a Godly and upright life.  The new covenant of which Jeremiah speaks says nothing about the promise of rewards or threats of punishment.  The promise is that the law will rest within the people and be written on their hearts.

 I’ve told some of you before about my first visit to the Sunday morning Christian Education class at the Episcopal church in Austin where I eventually became a member.  To my surprise one of the members of the class was my Master’s thesis advisor, from years earlier at the University of Texas.  My professor, one of the smartest people I had ever known, posed this question to the class, “Does God change his mind?” I was intrigued by the question, but shocked as well.  How could the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God I had been taught to believe in as a child in the Baptist church possibly change his mind?  I don’t remember if it was today’s passage from Jeremiah that prompted the exchange or one of the other instances in the Hebrew Bible where God gave into the pleadings of a prophet or altered the plan she had in mind for the children of Israel. 

 But the question appealed to my intellect and I realized that I had found a church where I was encouraged to ask questions about the nature of God that would have been considered blasphemous in the church of my youth. 

 But you know what really sealed the deal?  As appealing as I found the intellectual climate in that Sunday School class, I returned to church the next week because during the passing of the peace an elderly gentleman shook my hand warmly and looked me in the eye and conveyed to me with his presence the peace that I desired.  I returned the next Sunday because the strong communal singing of the hymns touched my heart. I came back to that church because during communion, in the body and blood of Christ, I had received the love and forgiveness that I needed so badly. 

 The Israelites, to whom Jeremiah’s missive was directed, kept imagining a God who was a law giver, a monarch, a king. And over and over again, the Lord kept reminding them that he was a God of love. 

 We Episcopalians rely a great deal on the intellect.  In determining how we are to live in the world, we often lean heavily on the third leg of the three-legged stool – on our God-given capacity to reason. 

It’s an important part of who we are and how we approach scripture and life. But we sometimes forget that we are included in the same new covenant that Jeremiah proclaimed.  “For they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest…”  We are called to know God, not just with our minds, but with our hearts.  We need to know that we are loved, not just through the neural pathways of the brain, but in the very fabric of our being.

 Allow God to make a new covenant with you, just as he made with the Israelites.  Allow God to do something different, to offer you a direct experience of the Divine.   May it be said of us as the Lord said of the Israelites, “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me...”

 In today’s gospel reading, we read of a group of Greeks who were attending the festival, who came to Phillip, Jesus’ disciple, and said, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” They weren’t there to inquire about the nature of Jesus’ theology, or to challenge his teachings about the law, or to engage in philosophical discourse.  Their desire echoes the desire of the millions of people who call themselves spiritual and not religious, and ultimately, I think, our desire, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”