Written On Your Heart

                                      Jeremiah 31:31-34

 

 

          It can’t be fifteen years, can it? As I wrote the date into this week’s bulletin, there it was. 9/11. Though a full fifteen years have passed, that day is scorched into my memory as I am sure it is yours. The news. The planes. The incredible reality that our own passenger jetliners had been hijacked to use as bombs. Those massive buildings collapsing in lower Manhattan in a heap of steel, concrete and humanity. Thousands of lives lost. For me, that may have been the day when I would have been just as happy with delayed news coverage. There was no time to process the images coming on the screen. It was a front row seat to death happening in real time. I will never forget. Where have fifteen years gone? What have we learned from that day as a country, as friends and neighbors, as Christians?

The lessons we have taken from that day are both good and not so good. I remember the president saying the next day that 9/11 had forever changed the course of his administration. I remember hurting personally, hurting for basically total strangers to me except that they, like me, were citizens of this country. I cried that day. I cried for strangers, for loss, for the futility of it all, to see people choosing to jump to their deaths rather than to burn to death.

You may be sitting there thinking that you wish I wouldn’t be so graphic, that it was fifteen years ago and you would rather forget. But how do we forget images so powerful, so charged with hate and spite and fear and so many more deep emotions? Maybe we should not forget. Maybe we should remember. Maybe in that remembering, we can search for ways to make such things go away forever. It seems to me that we have to try as Christians to understand why. Where did that hate come from? What can we do to neutralize it? Where is God in such times?

The prophet Jeremiah lived in some crazy times himself.  He started his career as a prophet while still a teenager. Josiah was king and a good king he was. Jeremiah would see little of that. Over his forty year career, his ministry survived at least four more, evil kings, being taken as a prisoner to Egypt, watching as Jerusalem fell to the Assyrians, and later the Babylonians, during which his beloved people were thrown into captivity. Jeremiah experienced his own 9/11 and so did his people, in a much worse way that Osama Bid Laden and company caused the United States to suffer.   The people of God would labor through a seventy year exile.

Jeremiah is so famous now that it’s hard to believe that he had only two conversions of which we know. In forty years of ministry, only two people, his scribe Baruch and an Ethiopian eunuch who served the king, responded favorably to his preaching. And yet Jeremiah persevered, prophesying a return to favor with God and redemption of his people.

If we mark such days or events as 9/11 as catastrophic, as game-changing, as horror and meanness in world-class proportion, even then we must realize that our 9/11 must take its place in a long line, from the flood of Noah’s time to the exile of God’s people, to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, to the genocide of millions in Rwanda in 1998.  In the history of the world, there are many 9/11s. They all cause unimaginable hurt. They all germinate from hatred and misunderstanding and intolerance.

It was 7:59 a.m. when American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston’s Logan Airport, 8:14 when United Flight 175 took off, also from Boston, 8:20 a.m. when American Flight 77 took off from Dulles Airport in Washington, and 8:41 when United Flight 93 took off from Newark. By 10:07 a.m., barely two hours later, all four planes had been turned into missiles of destruction by the enemy. And who was the enemy? Men without a country, a flag, men without uniforms or an organized army or navy. But they were not men without a cause. And their cause was every bit as religious and just to them as the pledge of allegiance is to us.  

Fifteen years later, we have taken recrimination against those responsible for 9/11. Bin Laden is dead. So are many of his followers. A war was launched on Iraq. These things are the natural outgrowth of attacks on our country. They are understandable and expected. Our country is safer than it was on this day fifteen years ago, but what do we know?? What have we learned?

Today, in Europe and in the United States, many call for the closing of our borders. Many see that as making us safe and insulated from the terrors of the world. And yet, we do commerce with that world, from China to the Middle East to Mexico. We want what they make, but not who they are. Their presence threatens us. 9/11 is still fresh in our minds.

Last week, Cindy and I gathered with her sisters and their husbands for our annual pilgrimage to the mountains to celebrate the end of summer and the beginning of a new season. Like many American families, we live in three different states and have different ways of looking at the same thing. Because I am now in ministry, conversation invariably turns to religion at some point. In the den of that mountain home, our views shared Protestant, Roman Catholic and agnostic leanings. We range from convinced to questioning to skeptical.  One struggles with the pummeling of his youth by those who believed without question and stifled inquiry. The questions now come in a torrent. Why believe the Bible? It’s a book. We have millions of books. Why do three great world religions all come from the lap of Abraham and yet differ on the importance of Jesus Christ? How do you reconcile hard science with the story of creation found in the Bible? Why do the Catholics have a different Bible than the Protestants? Why do the Jews, the people of God, reject Jesus? The questions came hard and fast and angry because when a kid once wanted answers, someone told that kid over and over to quit asking questions. And yet they are all good questions that the best of Christians struggle with at some level.

Where is the failure? It’s not with that little kid so many years ago, or today for that matter. It’s not with God; that’s for sure. The failure, if that’s what it is, might be called intolerance. It might be called fear. It might be called a lot of things, but what we can’t call it is understanding, or empathy, or tolerance, or dialogue…or even just patience.

In the thirtieth chapter of Jeremiah, the prophet hears the word of God from God himself, and God commands Jeremiah to write it down. So what follows in chapters 30 and 31 is what is commonly called an oracle, a repetition of the words of God by the prophet. And God says for the people to settle down in their captivity, to build houses and assimilate into the population, for it will be seventy years before they are allowed to return to their homeland. No wonder Jeremiah never won any popularity contests!

But Jeremiah had much more to say on God’s behalf, for God made a promise in chapter 31. We call it the New Covenant. It is a huge insight into the heart of God.  Gods says through Jeremiah:

I will set my law within them

I will write it on their hearts

I will be their God

They shall be my people

They shall all know me

For I shall forgive their iniquities

I will remember their sin no more.

 

Think about it. God had made a covenant with his people at Mt. Sinai. Moses brought down the law in two stone tablets. That covenant required two sides. You do this and I’ll do that. You obey and I’ve got your back. This new covenant isn’t two way. It’s one way. God is going to do it for us. It isn’t carved into stone. It’s written on our hearts.

          So God reaches out to the exiled people of Israel and says I love you so much that I will not let you get away. I will forgive and forgive and forgive. I will forget what you have done to me and I will come into your hearts and you will know me. Hundreds of years later, God literally came down the back steps of Bethlehem and grew up as one of us in order to fulfill that New Covenant. Jesus became the agent of redemption in a covenant that was articulated through Jeremiah in the midst of the exile of God’s people. Doesn’t God speak in mysterious ways!

          When we talk about 9/11, we have nothing on God. He sent himself, God the Son, to a hill of death. Yes he was a man…but His divinity in all its perfection climbed up on that cross as well. If all the sin of mankind was to be hanging in the balance, then it had to be God alone who was big enough to pay that ransom. It has been said that God’s plan of salvation rested between two rough-hewn beams of wood.

          That plan worked. God was there then. God was there at 9/11, crying for us as he cried for his Son. God is here now. He will always be here. The question for us is when we will notice. When will we notice that God doesn’t make wounds—he heals them? When will we understand that the answer is not to retaliate, but instead to invite someone to dinner?

          Men are about nation building. God is about surrender. Men are about pride and independence. God is about peace and love. It may sound like a hippie slogan from the 1960’s, but it still is true. We cannot get our world neighbors to understand us while we are killing them, or undermining their centuries old religious practices. We cannot get safe by isolation. How will they know God if they can’t see God in what we do, in who we are?

          I think that in this world in which we now live, there are no more Christian nations, if there ever were. But there are Christians within every nation. We need to stand up and show what is written on our hearts.