I am happy to extend a warm welcome to anyone who is here because of "Invite a Friend" Sunday, and to anyone who is here for any other reason—like wandering in off the street because you heard the choir rehearsing. That actually happened a couple of weeks ago, so all things are possible, especially when the music is as good as it is here.
In this church we follow a schedule of readings from the Bible, a schedule common to many Christian churches around the world. We have already heard verses from Psalm 119, a poem that praises what the poet calls the law, or the law of God, or synonyms like God's precepts or commandments. The reference is to the Mosaic law, epitomized in what we know as the Ten Commandments, but expanded to include several hundred rules and regulations. The Psalmist speaks of loving God's law.
Many Christians think of Judaism as a religion of Law—rules and regulations, as in the Biblical book of Leviticus. Such a perception is based on the Christian Gospels' record of Jesus' encounter with Jewish leaders of his time, who seemed to be obsessed with obeying rules and regulations as the way to lead a good or Godly life. A perception of contemporary Judaism as a religion of rules and regulations may well be inaccurate. But that's a subject for another occasion.
This morning I want to focus on our second reading, the one from the prophet Jeremiah, who lived and worked almost six hundred years before the time of Jesus. Jeremiah told his Jewish contemporaries that God was doing a new thing, and he was going to tell them about it. What Jeremiah wrote thirty-five or thirty-six hundred years ago shapes what we believe and try to live by in Rutgers Presbyterian Church.
Jeremiah said several things in the verses we heard. He said, "A whole new way of understanding God is coming into existence. No longer do we need to think of God as punishing or disturbing. Instead we can think of God as creating or enhancing life." Jeremiah pictured God as repopulating areas that had become desolate because of warfare and imperial aggression. Animals and people would flourish where their numbers had been decimated by deprivation. Jeremiah reminds us that God's purpose for the world is shared abundance and universal satisfaction. God's intention is fullness of life, not sterile repression. God offers opportunity, not a dead-end street. Jeremiah introduced a new way of understanding God. What is your understanding of God this morning?
Did you catch that interesting figure of speech about sour grapes? Jeremiah said, "People used to believe that if the parents ate sour grapes, then their children's teeth would be set on edge." In other words, guilt or pathology gets passed down from generation to generation, and we can't do anything about it. Jeremiah said, That's not true in our fresh understanding, in this new thing God is doing. Now everyone is responsible for his or her own mess. We can throw away the old tapes we've been hearing in our heads for so many years and have a new beginning. We don't have to carry the guilt loads our parents or our religious leaders laid on us way back when. We can break any chains of negativity passed down through the generations of our families and communities.
What kind of negativity? Some people were told as adolescents that they would never amount to anything. That message is in their brain, and they set themselves up for failure rather than success. They sabotage themselves when things go well. Some people were told their bodies were bad and sex was dirty, so they struggle to enjoy one of God's greatest gifts. Some people were taught that giving is always better than receiving, so they can never accept gifts with graciousness—gifts of money, time, or praise. Jeremiah said we don't have to listen to those negative tapes forever. We can change them.
That's pretty good stuff. Just as good is what Jeremiah said about seeing Gods' Law in a new way. Jeremiah portrayed God as saying, "No longer is religious law something out there—a list of commandments people need to worry about breaking." One commandment emphasized to me growing up was Thou shalt not go to the movies on Sunday. Saturday was okay for movies, but Sunday wasn't. I remember feeling wary when I went to the movies on a Sunday night away from home in my second year of college. Now it can be a nice way of unwinding after a busy Sunday at church. Were there religious rules in your family growing up, rules you've outgrown or modified as you've moved on?
Jeremiah says that God is writing "the law" within people, writing it on the human heart. In other words, Godly living, or good living, is a matter of the heart, something we perceive on the inside and practice on the outside.
Jeremiah was pretty close to what Jesus said six hundred years later. Jesus said the core of religion is summed up in two laws or commandments: Love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself. True spirituality, then, is a matter of the heart. In saying that, Jeremiah and Jesus were not subscribing to the heart/mind split we live with in western civilization. For Jeremiah and Jesus the heart was where thoughts and feelings came together and shaped an integrated way of living.
This morning's lessons remind us that you and I are designed in such a way that we feel best, we function best, when we are unified rather than split, integrated rather than torn apart. On this journey we call life, we lose our way from time to time. Getting lost is inevitable. It feels like being pulled in different directions. And when that happens, we experience a yearning, a longing for what brings us back into harmony. What restores us is connecting with God, with a reality beyond ourselves, with a higher power, if you will.
As I have said in this pulpit many, many times, for me brokenness is the starting point of all spirituality—the awareness that we don't possess what we need for fullness of life. Something essential is missing. What we need is to be in a healthy relationship with God, with other people, and with ourselves. We need and we long to be connected, and when we are not, we are lonely, empty, and afraid. Isolation is an impediment to spiritual and emotional well-being. We try to fix our brokenness by buying things, by staying frantically busy, by living through our kids or our partners, by eating or drinking compulsively, by becoming recognized as important, or by escaping into fantasy.
None of those things makes us whole. In fact, nothing makes us whole. Accepting our imperfection as human beings sets us free from the struggle to be what we cannot be—perfect. For me the spiritual journey is one from brokenness toward wholeness, not to wholeness. We are works in progress for all of life. That is why the last sentence of the reading from Jeremiah is such good news. God says in this new understanding of spirituality, "I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more."
The doorway is open to a healthy relationship with God, with other people, and with ourselves. We just need to walk through it.
The story is told of a man and woman who were looking for a church where they would feel comfortable. They happened into one where the minister and people were offering a unison prayer of confession. "We have left undone those things we ought to have done, and we have done those things we ought not to have done." The man and woman looked at each other and said, "We've found our kind of people." Things got even better when they heard the Assurance of Pardon and they saw people hugging one another in the Passing of the Peace. They discovered that loving God, other people, and self are not abstractions. They are a way of being, a way of living—living in response to God's unconditional, forgiving, inclusive love for us and for the world.
Thanks be to God.