Sermon Lent 5 March 22, 2015

Transcription

1 Sermon Lent 5 March 22, 2015 Jeremiah 31: Sermon Title: The spark of the Divine 31 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. 32 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. 33 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. 34 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.

2 I think Lent is our season of honesty. It is a time when we may break out of our illusions to face the reality of our life in preparation for Easter, a radical new beginning. All this work, these prayers during children s time, these candles & knots, dramatic readings, these 6 weeks of anticipation and giving things up it is all a time of preparation for Easter. And so not to jump ahead too much, but Easter is a season of new life and new beginnings in the resurrection. God s great new beginning. And of course before new life can spring forward whether in our lives, in our world, in our families, in our congregation we usually have to go through a time of transition. A time of being in between. That space when the old thing seems to not be working any longer when we know that something is not quite right in the system. This is often a difficult time. A painful time. It is a time when, if change is to occur, we have to do away with the illusion that all is fine; that all is okay we have to do away with those illusions and enter into the discomfort. We have to be honest with it. Some call this luminal space, for the word luminal which means threshold (a place between two rooms). Richard Rohr, who has probably done the most work around this idea in the Christian tradition says that, Luminal space is a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. This space where we hate to go because it is such a place of discomfort and uncertainty. The place where the God of transformation is always leading us. Being in this place requires patience. It requires waiting on the Spirit of God to reveal a new thing to us. It requires trust, that new life will emerge in time. It requires honesty, removing the illusion that all is still good and right in our world. Because sometimes it

3 is not, sometime we are in luminal places where the old is no longer comfortable, no longer working. This is luminal space. This is the season of Lent, preparation for Easter homework for a radial, inexplicable new beginning. (Walter Brueggemann) This prophetic oracle in Jeremiah 31 that is our scripture text for this morning, this is exactly a text for such an honesty that strips away self-denial and prepares us for the radical new beginning of Easter. In this poem from Jeremiah, there is the promise of a new covenant that God will be doing something new, something different. But first there is an honest admission of failure, that the old way of life is so broken that it can not longer work. It s this admission of brokenness, says Walter Brueggemann, that permits the poet to anticipate this new covenant, a new historical possibility, a new beginning. This scripture is situated in a time of failure in ancient Israel. The city of Jerusalem has been conquered and burned, the temple has been destroyed, their line of kings has been terminated, and their best and brightest citizens have been deported into exile. And this all came about, says the poet, because Israel broke the old covenant. It happened because their old way of living failed it was no longer working. It happened because Israel refused to internalize the law that God gave to them at Mt Sinai. It happened because, as the prophets tell us, time and time again Israel did not take justice seriously, they did not care for the orphan, the foreigner, or the widow. They neglected the God of the Exodus, the God who liberated them from slavery. And so, in covenant language came the judgment of God. There were moments of hope in this old way of being where they thought everything was going to be okay, where they thought they had learned enough learned from their mistakes. Times of crisis and they would cry out to God. And God would raise up a prophet or judge for

4 them. They would change their ways and be delivered for a time. But then, things would get comfortable again life would get back to normal and they would fall back into their old habits. They ultimately trusted in the view that they were exceptional, that because they had this story in their past of God s deliverance that things would work out they believed that they were truly better, that they were truly more exceptional than the other nations of the world. And so, with that belief, they would fall back into the old patterns. Despite the cries and warnings of the prophets all around them, they would fall back into this way of thinking. Into this way of living. This illusion of their own exceptionalism, their inability to recognize a true need for change it ultimately led to their destruction. But now, in exile after they have lost everything the people have the ability to hear God speaking in a new way because they people are free of self-illusion. They can no longer pretend the old ways are working they know clearly that they have failed to keep their end of the covenant they have lost everything. They have hit rock bottom. They are ready to listen and learn in new ways they are ready to sit in that in-between space they are ready for transformation for something new. If we take an example from our own society and our own world, moments that help break the illusions that everything is okay, we might be able to move toward change. As ISIS has emerged, a far more violent and fundamentalist group than we went in to rid the world of, it should help remove the illusion of our military intervention and the path of peace being the way of bombs and armies. Or in the groans of creation, in the dramatic draughts happening, in the crazy winter out east and the lack of winter here in the west, more and more are starting to move beyond the

5 illusion that climate change is not real, or that it is not caused by humans. We must remove such an illusion to move toward change. I think that all that is swirling in regard to police violence toward unarmed black men in our nation, this is an example of removing an illusion. For those who lived under the illusion that we were in a post-racial America because we elected a black president, because we are 50 years past the civil rights movement with the growing number of deaths of unarmed black men, with Eric Garner and Michael Brown with the continued unrest in Ferguson, Missouri that illusion should be removed for us. We now see clearly that such a belief was just an illusion, that clearly we still have so far to go before we honor and value all lives in our nation, before black lives fully matter. But if we pretend that these are just a few small incidents, that they only reflect the actions of a few bad apples and refuse to think about the underlying root causes if we refuse to examine our own still buried fears and prejudices, then we will never enter into new life, into a new way of living and being together. Instead, we will just move from black death to black death, from riot to riot. Continuing to live under the illusion that all is okay, that we have solved the problem of racial oppression. Or, if we can enter the discomfort of our true reality. If we can recognize that this old way is still broken, that fundamental change is still needed if we can live in that in-between space then the possibility of new life exists. But it is uncomfortable. It is hard work. It is much easier to pretend that everything is okay. In that space of honesty that comes from an awareness that something is broken, that the old way is no longer working, then we have the opportunity to hear God in a new way to move into new life. But we can t just magically jump there. We can not skip the discomfort of the in-

6 between space. We cannot just jump from Christmas to Easter, we cannot jump from the high of Palm Sunday to the high of the resurrection. We have to travel through Lent, we have to do our homework before the test. Before we can get to the New Covenant, we have to acknowledge that the old covenant is broken and beyond repair. And so, in light of that, in continued recognition that we are here in Lent and trying to attend to our work of waiting and preparation, I want us to conclude this sermon time together with a short time of reflection, of us reflecting on three questions together. 1. What is an illusion that might be preventing you from facing your own reality? 2. What is your soul hungering for this week? Where do you feel God nudging you beyond these illusions and into a possible place of newness? What is your soul hungering for this week? 3. Is there a first step you don t want to take? A first step toward something new that you do not want to take? Is there a first step you don t want to take? Let us close this time in prayer: Prayer Hymnal 735 Transforming God, You come to us in expected and unexpected ways, Desiring to be known yet remaining a mystery. Make your presence known among us. Confront us. Wrestle with us. Change us, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.