Jeremiah 31:31-34 Covenant of the Heart 29 March 2009 John 12: st Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL Lent 5 J.

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1 Jeremiah 31:31-34 Covenant of the Heart 29 March 2009 John 12: st Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL Lent 5 J. Shannon Webster There is a lot written about why the Greeks wanted to see Jesus. We never learn from the story what that reason is. Preachers, especially, have been enamored of that line spoken to Philip by the Greeks: Sir, we would see Jesus. Phillips Brooks had it carved into the pulpit at Trinity Church in Boston. That seemed good to me so I taped the sentence onto the pulpit at my first church, in Wichita. The idea is that if you read it every time upon stepping into the pulpit Sir, we would see Jesus it will remind you of the basic task to tell the Good News of Jesus Christ. The problem is, that s not what this text is about. The Greeks reason for wanting to see Jesus is a MacGuffin. MacGuffin is a term from literary and film criticism. MacGuffins are plot devices that serve only to advance the story. A MacGuffin is usually an item that has no meaning in itself, but it motivates the characters, Some examples of MacGuffins are: The Maltese Falcon, the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, the Holy Grail, the Overthruster in Buckaroo Banzai, Brad Pitt s ancient pistol in the Mexican. The reasons of the Greeks are a MacGuffin. It doesn t matter, why they wanted to see Jesus. What matters, midway through John s Gospel, is simply that they were Greeks. My sermon theme throughout this Lenten season has centered around the covenants God has made with the people of faith, and how Jesus is revealed to us as the New Covenant, in the flesh. The text last week was: God so loved the world as to send God s only Son. Not God so loved just us and them what looks and thinks like us But the world. Τον Κοσμον. Salvation is cosmic. Now in John 12 we read that here came Greeks looking for Jesus. These were not Greekspeaking Jews. If they had been, old understandings of the covenant would have been left intact. These were pagan Greeks, the goyim, outside any previous circle of God s favor. The coming of the Greeks to Jesus shows that the covenant is a matter not of lineage or blood, but is somehow internalizing God s ways. It turns out that the faith that had been revealed to Moses, and thus to Israel, was not intended to be the possession of any one person or group. Indeed, perhaps the faith was kept precisely by giving it away. What happened was exactly what the Pharisees feared and warned would happen: If this keeps up, the whole world will follow him. Before we follow this train of thought further, let s acknowledge a danger in talking about Christ as the New Covenant. There is a false belief that the Jews belonged to an old covenant which was, with the advent of Christ, being nullified. That belief has a name supersessionism, which holds that the new covenant supercedes the old one so that the old one no longer exists. I saw this played out at a meeting of the General Assembly once, when some presbytery overtured the Assembly to declare that no one could be saved who did not make verbal confession of faith in Jesus as savior. As the committee debated this proposal, questions arose what about those who died as children?... was it necessary to evangelize and 1

2 convert the Jewish people?... wasn t it just possible that old Calvin was right in the first place, and that the question of salvation was not up to us but up to God? For at least once, the Assembly wisely chose not to know more than God did, and killed the proposal. They were helped by our Theology and Worship staff, who reminded us that we Presbyterians have always held to Covenant Theology. Calvin never saw need for conversion of the Jews: Since God was pleased to testify in ancient times by means of expiations and sacrifices that he was a Father, and to set apart for himself a chosen people, he was doubtless known even then in the same character in which he is now fully revealed to us. 1 The old covenant had never been abrogated. God doesn t break covenant, we are the ones who do that. So much for supersessionism. The radical notion of the new covenant is not in who is excluded, but who is included. God is no one s possession. Rather, the reverse is true all are God s. Long before we talked about a new covenant in the New Testament, the prophet Jeremiah promised a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Jeremiah said the new covenant would not be one they could break, like they did the old one, because God would put the Law within them, and write it on their hearts. In Hebrew, heart is not just the seat of emotion, but also of awareness and intention. Heart and mind, we might say. Other places in Scripture capture that sense of internalizing the true nature of God, into or very being. Create in me a clean heart, O God wrote the Psalmist (Psalm 51). And the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth: You are a letter that has come from Christ, given to us to deliver, a letter written not with ink but with the spirit of the Living God; written not on tablets of stone, but on the pages of the human heart. (2 Cor. 3:3) Biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman observes that Jeremiah is talking about the same covenant as the old one given at Sinai, but made anew, not an external rule which invites hostility, but now will be an embraced, internal identity-giving mark, so that obeying will be as normal and as readily accepted as breathing and eating. 2 Theologian Paul Tillich made the distinctions between heteronomy an external law that is over us and against us, autonomy self-rule and resistance to the norms that are over and against us, and pointed to theonomy the law of God written within us, internalized and made our own. 3 Thus Jeremiah No longer shall they teach one another and say Know the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least to the greatest. SO I confess that I get all of that, intellectually,.. But there are a lot of days (most days?) where I can t find where God s law is written in my heart. Maybe I m not looking in the right place. You may have internalized the nature of God better than I ve been able to do, and with most of you that wouldn t surprise me. But wouldn t it seem that we would know the will of God, if this were so? I would love to have the conviction that Jeremiah promises. But some of the people who seem to have that certitude are scary to me, and don t seem to be offering much grace. 2

3 How often do we know the will of God? Maybe we do, on some of the big and momentous things. More often we don t know, or maybe don t want to know. What does Jesus say to us? Yesterday in Explorer Class we had a conversation that made me think that we have foot-washing Christians, Bible-reading Christians, prayer and meditation Christians, mission and service Christians, but not very many sell-all-you-have-and-give-to-the-poor Christians. I m not one either, so I m not picking on anybody. I m just wondering how selective we are in what we choose to know. Create a clean heart within me, O God Iowa songwriter Greg Brown may have written the most honestly on this, when he sang: Oh Lord, why does the Fall get colder each year? Lord, why can't I learn to love? Lord, if you made me, it's easy to see that you all make mistakes up above. But if I open the door, you will know I'm poor and my secrets are all that I own. Oh Lord, I have made you a place in my heart and I hope that you leave it alone. 4 When the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville visited our then-young nation in the 1830 s, he noted how the mores of the society were most powerful in shaping it, and called them habits of the heart notions, opinions and ideas that shape mental habits and the sum of moral and intellectual disposition. 5 Maybe that s what we are talking about here, replacing a forced obligation with habits of the heart. Those are created in us, the good habits, in our life together in community. There are things we develop in church together that are spiritual disciplines. Prayer, silence, worship, reading and study of the scripture, fellowship, worship, service, to name some. Those habits are created by the stories we tell and the vision that we hold in our hearts. Maybe it is sometimes as simple as living and working together often enough to love one another and know one another s stories. (Or maybe this sermon is a MacGuffin and we re really here for the singing!) And yet we must come back to the Greeks who came looking for Jesus, whose very presence in the story showed him to be the new covenant in the flesh. His response is startling. The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified unless a grain of seed falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit now my soul is troubled. Should I say Father, save me from this hour? No, this is the reason I have come to this hour. And the gospel-writer tells us he said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The presence of the Greeks, the Gentiles, was a sign this Jesus movement had gotten to the point where Jesus would be killed. It was not that God wanted a pound of flesh so Jesus must die, but rather the inevitability that the world would react violently to this new creation, this new covenant. It is in the cross that Jesus draws all, draws the world, to himself. Like a seed falls to the earth to fulfill its true purpose. 3

4 The German poet Rilke wrote: I find you, Lord, in all things, and in all my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life; as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small and in the vast you vastly yield yourself. The wondrous game that power plays with Things is to move in such submission through the world; groping in roots and growing thick in trunks and in treetops like a rising from the dead. 6 Here is the challenging line for us, in the John passage: Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there my servant will be also. That is still true. Any sort of ministry is a self-offering. Following Jesus is a life and death matter. We lose our lives to find it in service. Does that mean dying literally in that service? Probably not, for us, although there have been plenty of Christian martyrs. Perhaps we will be challenged on that front as we continue to grow and have to change the way we operate if we are to make the size transition we ve been talking about. Perhaps we will be challenged on that front as we work on where our next, new hands-on mission will be in our city. Our Presbyterian Book of Order says, in G , about our service to Christ: The Church is called to undertake this mission even at the risk of its own life. If you read back over the history of this congregation, this church has taken that risk a number of times in its history. The Lenten question today may be: where is the Lord sleeping in what is small (Rilke s words)? Where is Jesus in our city that we may be there also? God so loved the world, and our response must be to so love the world. You may not always feel it, know it, or be able to read it there, but the promise is that the new covenant, Paul calls it the letter come from Christ, is written on the pages of your heart. Some of God s saints are easier to read than others, true, but there you are every Christian life a translation of the Gospel. So many good and gracious stories, thanks be to God. 4

5 1 Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II Brueggeman, Walter. Exile and Homecoming. Eerdman s Press. Grand Rapids, p Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. University of Chicago Press, p Brown, Greg. Lord, I Have Made you a Place in My Heart, The Poet Game, Red House, Bellah, Robert et al. Habits of the Heart. University of California Press, p Rilke, Rainer Maria. from The Book of Hours, Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Random House, New York, p. 5.