February 4, 2008
Ya gotta have…
For Ash Wednesday or Lent or Valentine or Whatever…
From the prophet Jeremiah: “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” (Jer 31.31-33).
Only a few years after my seminary days, I had the privilege of serving on a conference staff with one of our church’s outstanding theologians by name of Norman Pittenger. Even more impudent then than now, I played a game of stump-the-professor with him. Never mind who won.
I asked him a question I was hearing more often than I could answer. “How does one ever know the will of God?Rather than stumble around, pondering and harrumphing, as I had hoped he might, he quipped instantly, “Just trust your hunches.”
That’s a hard charge for those of us “from Missouri,” who have to see the evidence, and who think intuition is for the birds. But it wasn’t for Jeremiah, the prophet whose words I’ve just read for us.
Jeremiah stood in the biblical tradition that one’s heart is the seat of knowledge, the place where the hard choices are made, that one’s heart is the source of spiritual energy and courage and the ultimate storehouse where fundamental allegiances are kept. And he was apparently giving this tradition a lot of thought.*
But be that as it may and rather like today, alongside that notion was this other tradition that gave immutable certitude, as well, to an external law of life and covenant given by God to Moses and developed over the centuries, both literally and virtually graven in stone.
On the other hand, Jeremiah’s hunches about God’s will were keeping him up at night. He was already convinced that nobody ever invites a prophet home to dinner more than once. And he knew full well that the old legal, hard-nosed approach never did much good, anyway, and that God was suggesting a radical change as is often said about God, making all things new, if only he’d listen. So he stood up in the marketplace, took the risk to threaten his already shaky reputation, and shouted…
“Behold, the days are coming, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant… not like the covenant which I made with (your) fathers… my covenant which they broke… ” But now, “I will put my law within (you), and I will write it upon (your) hearts; and I will be (your) God, and (you) shall be my people” (Jer 31.31,33b).
Well, we apparently got the word.
On Ash Wednesday in every Lent, the special collect asks God to “create in us new and contrite hearts” (BCP p 267).
And Matthew’s gospel reminds us that where our treasure is, there will our heart be also (Mt 6.21). And as if all that is not enough, one of our Lenten collects prays that “our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found” (BCP 219).
In this wartime Lent, we are called once again as followers of the Way and reminded to search even more deeply into our hearts where love and God’s law are inseparable, into our hearts where love is commitment, not mere disposition, and into our hearts where love is a deliberate act of the will, a choice, not a mere responsive feeling. And where most importantly — if Jeremiah is to be believed — God’s covenant with us is written and can nourish and grow.
In these same hearts, we all pray fervently for peace. Some, not without considerable risk, march and demonstrate for peace. The covenant God makes with us, together with the Incarnation that brought that covenant to fulfillment in his son, not only calls for peace on earth, but in its shocking scheme of things, asks us, as well, both to love and to pray for our enemies — one thing in peacetime when our enemies may sort of come and go, quite another in wartime when they may be wearing a dynamite corset with their finger on the trigger.
I thought, how refreshing to be reminded in a time of so much ill will that we truly are called to be people of good will who strive for a government of good will, and how it dare us not to take notice of the irony that these enemies for whom we now pray, together with so many of us, are also children of Abraham, and that we are systematically killing each other and decimating the very spiritual homeland that God gave to us all.
After 9/11, the mystic Thomas Keating spoke of an “ocean of grief” that swelled out in its wake. And what is grief, but a broken heart, not broken only over our loss, but even more deeply perhaps broken over the covenant which God writes inside us in our very being. On the death of John F Kennedy, Senator Pat Moynihan spoke of the Irish words that apply, as well, to us Christians. “There’s probably not any point in being (a Christian),” he said, “if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.”
All this fear and grief only heightens our sensitivity to the horror and the hunger and the pain and the injustice that go on somewhere in our world every moment of every day. It only intensifies the need for what we do as the church all the time. If what we are doing here day by day is not relevant, even more relevant now, then it is never relevant at all.
We are people living in this covenant community trying to discern and to do God’s will. We are not of one mind. We have not a common understanding of these complex issues. Nevertheless, we come here again and again to be shaped by the gentle touch of God’s peace.
Let us, then, realize that our hunches and our hearts are often one and the same. Therefore, let us remember that in every choice we face we must steadfastly will the good as we understand it and put ourselves into the hands of God to be shapen at God’s pleasure, then doing that it is altogether likely that trusting our hunches will indeed open our hearts and reveal God’s will. Then will we know a peace that is not the mere absence of war, but rather the presence of love. And like Jesus said, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6.21b). After all, what is Lent but an affair of the heart?
*In both Old and New Testament, the heart is the seat of wisdom (1 Kgs 3.12) and thought and reflection (Jer 24.7, Lk 2.19), the instrument of belief (Rms 10.10) and of will, the principle of action (Ex 35.21) which may be hardened so that it resists God (Dt 15.7; Mk 16.14). Heart is the principle both of virtues and vices, of humility (Mt 11.29) and pride (Dt 17.20), of good thoughts (Lk 6.45) and evil (Mt 15.19).
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