Sermons

The Teaching of God on Our Hearts

Over the last weeks, I’ve had the privilege of leading some of our members in the Exploring the Bible class. And it turns out it’s a challenge to boil down everything I want to say about our sacred text in just four two-hour sessions. But it’s been a good challenge and we have some fun too. In our first class, we embarked on a challenge to name as many books of the Bible as we could. Each person wrote the name of each book we could remember on sticky notes, and then I tried to roughly put them in order.

I’d say we got maybe 60% which is not too bad. We had the gospels covered: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We had the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers.  But we missed a few completely, mostly the minor prophets and several of the lesser-known epistles. One book for which we had a surprising number of entries is Jeremiah. I take this as proof that the readings do break through to our consciousness outside of Sunday mornings. Because we have been hearing from Jeremiah for weeks and weeks in our Hebrew Scripture reading.

Last week, we actually heard a passage that I quoted in the e-newsletter right around this time of year last year. It was my message to you after the election, and I was taking heart in the exhortation of Jeremiah to a people in exile. He tells them to continue to live good lives, even during hard times, to build houses, plant crops, continue in forming marriages and in having children, and to take care of each other even in exile. 

Last Sunday evening, Michele and I gathered with the largely Spanish-speaking congregation for the evening service at St. Stephen and the Incarnation, an Episcopal Church in Columbia Heights. They were celebrating the end of Hispanic Heritage Month and invited those who had aided them over the past two months to join the party. In the last two months, the fear of ICE and the raids in the neighborhood have altered their community. 

 But still they celebrated with a beautiful bilingual liturgy, decorations, live music, including a baby with her own shaker. In the sermon, Anna Olson, the diocesan Canon for Faith, Leadership and Collaboration, talked about the need to celebrate along the way, that if we wait for everything to be settled and normal again, we might have to wait a long, long time for joy. But instead, we must celebrate the presence of God in our midst and the joy to be found in community. We don’t know what tomorrow will hold. After we celebrated the Eucharist, we each received heaping plates of homemade pupusas, tamales, and cake. I was struck by their sense of hospitality for guests and for each other. They are a community in a kind of exile in their own homes. But still, they find the strength to celebrate. 

This week, we hear another passage of Jeremiah. As a bit of an aside, these sections where a prophet embodies the persona of God and speaks in the first person are called oracles, which is how you get a passage like God saying, “I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.” In this oracle, God talks about renewing her covenant with her people who had turned away. The passage has strikingly beautiful imagery. The law, previously written on tablets, will now be written on the hearts of God’s people. “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.” God speaks to us with remarkable intimacy. Knowledge of God is not reserved for learning, but is possible to experience ourselves, in our lives, in our being. 

I want us to dwell together in this intimacy of God here in Jeremiah because it can be far too easy to dismiss the God of the Hebrew Scriptures as “angry” and “wrathful,” a stereotype that at best misinterprets scriptures and at worst has been used to dismiss and sometimes harm these scriptures and the Jewish people.

God is close to us. God’s teaching, another translation for the word Torah here, is written on the hearts of God’s people. As Paul explains in Romans 11, through Jesus, we are grafted into this covenant, allowing this passage to speak across time to us as Christians as well. 

This idea of inscribing the teaching on our hearts also reminds me of the instructions in Deuteronomy for the Shema, a central Jewish prayer. The prayer states, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” And then the passage goes on, “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Once again, we hear about that closeness, 

One thing I find intimidating about God being so close, as the text states, is that we don’t even need to learn about her from others, which necessitates the vulnerability that kind of closeness requires. Because we know from our relationships with other people that those to whom we are the closest are the same ones who can hurt us the most. And we can be afraid that intimacy with God could open the door to rejection and judgment. 

Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney writes that “in their original context, these words signified the promise of a faithful God to a devastated people for restoration.” The people to whom Jeremiah is writing have just endured the destruction of the First Temple and the exile to Babylon. If you know the line from the Psalms, “By the waters of Babylon, I sat down and wept,” it is in reference to this time. It’s in a context of brokenness and grief that God tells the people that she plans to renew the covenant, not destroy it. 

Many of us feel our own kind of exile from a country that is looking less like the one we pledged our lives to serve. I myself am part of what is often called either the Obama babies or the West Wing generation. I moved to Washington full of optimism, imagination, and Aaron Sorkin monologues. And just when I think that optimism has vanished, I experience a day like yesterday, where millions of people stood up for democracy and the rule of law. 

God, who seeks closeness with us, is calling us to return, calling us to renewal as God has done across time. The prominent theologian Verna Dozier, a Black laywoman who was for 50 years a member of this congregation, put it this way: we are “risking that God is worthy of trust.” We are risking that God is worthy of trust. It’s a scary proposition, a risky proposition, one where everything is on the line. 

But what if instead of fearing intimacy, we embraced it? We can decide that God is, in fact, worthy of trust. We can let God in, let ourselves be seen and known and held. What of God’s teachings would you want written on your heart?

Heal the sick.

Care for the widow.

Act justly.

Love mercy.

Feed the orphan.

God loves us. God cares for us.

May it be inscribed on our hearts.