When the people God created fell into wickedness and rebellion, God sent a flood to destroy all but Noah and the others aboard the ark.  Then God made a covenant with them and their descendants never to do that again.  God signed the covenant with a rainbow in the sky.  God hoped this covenant would inspire fidelity, trust, and renewal.

The creation began again.  As more generations walked upon the earth, the same old death-dealing ways returned.  The people worshipped many gods as they were driven by their desires and ambitions.  So God made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants forever.  God would be God to them, give them land, and make them numerous upon the earth.  All God demanded was that these descendants be faithful to God and trust in God.

God asked too much.  Even though, after the children of Israel became enslaved in Egypt, God saved them from their captors and brought them out of slavery, the people were not faithful.   They did not trust God.  So God called Moses up the mountain and gave Moses two tablets of stone, with commandments for the people to see and obey, written right there upon the rock.

The children of Israel were commanded to obey these rules in order to keep their side of the covenant with God.  God’s basic requirement was that God’s chosen people—the people God desired—would desire God in return, would desire God above all else.  In turning toward God with all their hearts and minds, God knew that the children of Israel would have abundant life.

Again the people turned away from God.  They sought their own will over the will of God.  The words written in stone did nothing to restrain their desire.  Their hearts turned away from God, and they did not trust God to care for them and protect them.

When they were on the border of the Promised Land, they chose the safety of the wilderness—the pain and hardship they knew—over risking their lives and trusting God to give something better—the abundance of the Promised Land.  Stuck in the wilderness they had chosen for themselves, they complained bitterly against God that they weren’t comfortable and would rather return to slavery in Egypt.

Generation after generation, God reached out God’s mighty hand in love to touch the hearts of the people, who hardened their hearts against God.  The people whose only source of life was in God, refused to follow the rules God laid out for them to help them live the lives God intended for them to live.

Covenants written in rainbow and stone clearly were not enough, so God sent judges, kings, and prophets to instruct the people about God’s law and turn their hearts back to God. 

One of these kings was Josiah of Judah.  His father and grandfather had been kings before him in the land of Judah, the southern kingdom of the Hebrew people.  Under their reign, the people of Judah were deeply unfaithful to the God of Abraham.  They worshipped foreign gods and built high altars to Baal in order to sacrifice their children as burnt offerings.  They broke God’s commandments and their covenant with God.

In the early 600s BC, King Josiah began to correct the idolatrous practices of his ancestors and return the people to faithful worship of God.  A few years into King Josiah’s reforms, God called Jeremiah, a Jewish priest, to become a prophet—to reveal the sins of the people and their worship of foreign gods.  Jeremiah warned them of the impending disaster they were bringing upon themselves by their breaking of the covenant commandments.

Jeremiah told the people of Judah what was coming: the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Babylonian army and captivity and exile in Babylon.  The prophecy of Jeremiah that we read this morning comes from this time of exile and captivity—a time of darkness, chaos, and destruction for the people of Judah.

It seems from Jeremiah’s words, that the tenacious hard-heartedness of God’s people is causing God to rethink this whole covenant-giving process.  Just as God decided to start fresh after the Flood, Jeremiah foretells a new day when God will have a new way of relating to God’s people—a new covenant with a radically different premise.

God has had the painful realization that despite God’s best efforts and God’s own tenacity in calling the children of Israel, they will not be faithful, nor will they obey any external law.  “I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, [but they broke] the covenant, though I was their husband.”

“Though I was their husband,” speaks to God’s intimate love for Israel—as a husband to a wife.  God took them by the hand—another sign of intimate love—and Israel refused God.  God’s bride was unfaithful.  Israel did not trust God to provide and protect—even though God had provided and protected at every turn.

The laws God gave to the people—written in stone for all to see—did not make the people obey.  The teachers God provided to offer instruction on the law were not respected.  So God will try another way, God announces through Jeremiah: “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.”

Perhaps God realized that God’s people could not wholeheartedly obey God because something else was already in the hearts of the people.  Some sort of law or power had hold of them, stronger than any external force.  So God will begin again.

God will reach deep inside and engrave God’s law on the heart of every person.  God promises that this tattoo will be on everyone’s heart—so marking each heart that there will be no need for one to instruct another on who God is or what God desires because all, equally, will share that knowledge—from the “least to the greatest.” 

All you have to do is read the news to know that this prophecy is not yet fulfilled.  The law is not yet written on the hearts of the people—or at least not written so completely that we are all now faithful to God and living our lives the way God desires.

So much of the Christian story and the Christian journey lie in the realm of “already and not yet.”  Jesus has already come, but not yet come again.  The Kingdom of God is already among us, but not yet fulfilled.  The same could be said of this prophecy from Jeremiah about the new covenant—already begun, but not yet complete.

We could also see them, in the words of pastor and author Brian McLaren, as “God’s promise uttered to us from the future, toward which we reach an outstretched and hopeful hand.” Movement toward the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy is a prayer that God create in us new hearts and a new “way of being.”[1]

McLaren gives a vision of this transformation in which our souls are made “an orchard of trees bearing good fruit, rooted in who we are before God and who we are becoming in God…People in whom the deep orientation or attitudes of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control [that is, the fruits of the Holy Spirit] blossom and bear fruit.” [2]

This new covenant is already begun in Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus shows us a life lived with God’s law completely written on the heart.  Jesus was so animated by God’s Spirit that his every choice and word, his actions and prayers showed the will of God.  In God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to us, the Spirit of Christ lives within us to pierce our hearts and write God’s law upon our hearts, so that our lives may imitate the life of Christ.  But it’s a slow process, perhaps not slow in God’s good time, but surely in ours.

We may feel that our hearts are very far from being tattooed with the law of God, but we do see people from time to time who bear that writing—the saints and martyrs, the ones who sacrifice themselves for others, the ones who truly die to themselves so that God may live and work in them.  God says the day will come when all of us will bear those marks, so that we will not need to be instructed by another.  Until that time is fulfilled, however, we still need those people to teach us how to know the Lord.

In our own lives, the Holy Spirit’s writing on our hearts can feel unbearably slow.  Sometimes we put up barriers to the Holy Spirit or try to wrestle the pen right out of God’s hand rather than be inwardly transformed.  Sometimes we enjoy the darkness more than the light.  Like Augustine of Hippo we say, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” 

This may be because experience and heartache have scarred our hearts and written within us something far from God’s law of love.  Whatever it is that is already written on our hearts does not want to be displaced easily.  We are drawn to shallow pleasures and escapes to get us through another day.  This is neither abundant life nor true freedom.  Sometimes the work of removing what is already written on our hearts must come first and the greatest surrender is to let God heal what has already scarred us in order to make a whole and new surface for God’s engraving.

During these last two weeks of Lent, you might ask yourself:

What is already written on my heart?  Am I open to God’s Holy Spirit removing something imperfect in order that God’s perfect law of love might be written there?

Then dare to ask God:

What do you want to write on my heart?

See what God says, what you might already feel God writing on your heart.

You see, each time we become more welcoming, loving, or generous, God has written a bit more on our hearts.  Each time our clenched hands that usually grasp onto our lives and our possessions, relax and open up to give to another and receive from another, the Holy Spirit of God has written more.  When our arms that were once tightly crossed to protect ourselves open to embrace the other, open up even as Jesus’ arms were spread on the cross, we know the Holy Spirit’s engraving continues.

We say in the Collect for Peace in Morning Prayer, in words taken from St. Augustine—the same man who said he wanted a little more time to exercise his freedom—that to serve God is perfect freedom.  The law of God written on our hearts leads us into that perfect freedom because in service and faithfulness to God, we live the lives God made us to live.

God is always taking us by the hand to pull us closer to God, to lead us into joyful lives of hope and perfect freedom.  The Holy Spirit of God, dwelling within us takes us by the heart and little by little writes God’s law there, which is paradoxically a law of service to God and to one another that leads to the perfect freedom to live and love abundantly.

The church is a community where we help one another grow into God’s call on our lives, God’s law written on our hearts.  We encourage one another and learn from one another, helping each other drop the barriers we put up to God getting inside and writing on our hearts.  Above all we gather each week to be instructed by the life of the One whose heart was completely suffused with the law of God—whose heart was indeed the heart of God.  We come to be fed by the Body and Blood of the One whose death bore much fruit and in whose Resurrection is eternal life.

We come together finally so that we can go right back out again—into the world proclaiming the Good News of this new covenant, promised by Jeremiah, embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The new covenant that is slowly, slowly working within us, so that all may know God from the inside out.

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