Reading: Jeremiah 31:27-34
Jeremiah is known as the Weeping Prophet. He lived in the time of Israel’s Great Dismantling and Defeat. All the sins of the nation’s past are coming home to roost, and unlike others who still hope for the best, Jeremiah sees only total destruction coming. And he is right. He is a sensitive soul who feels within himself the anguish that God feels, and the pain flows freely in his words and his tears through the first 29 chapters of the book of his prophetic reflections.
Then in chapters 30-33 there is a shift. These chapters come late in Jeremiah’s life, when he and the rest of the upper levels of Israelite society have been taken to live in exile in Assyria. Everyone else now thinks that because of their nation’s unresolved sins over generations and centuries, they have lost their land and lost favour with God forever. Of all people, though, Jeremiah now offers words of promise and hope in the four chapters we call his Book of Consolation.
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will plant the house of Israel and the house of Judah with human offspring and the offspring of animals. Just as I watched over then to uproot and tear down, and to overthrow, destroy and bring disaster, so I will watch over them to build and to plant,” declares the Lord. “In those days people will no longer say.
‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’
Instead, everyone will be held accountable for their own sin; whoever eats sour grapes – their own teeth will be set on edge.”
“The time is coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their forebears,
when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God, and they will be my people.
No longer will any one each their neighbour,
or anyone their brother or sister, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they all will know me, from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
Meditation
A number of years ago my son Aaron and I were in Boston for a few days. It was a baseball road trip to see the Jays play the Red Sox at Fenway.
We arrived the day before the game to do a little sightseeing in downtown Boston. Leaving the motel, I let Aaron take the wheel so I could navigate. Sometime before, I had lived in Boston for a year to go to school, and had visited since. So, between the memory of the city in my head and the map I held in my hand, I figured me telling him where to go was the better way for us to get to where we wanted.
What I didn’t count on was the total reconstruction that year of the downtown Boston roadways.
Frantically I tried to connect the routes we were being forced onto, with the roadways on the map. It was hard to keep up with the changes.
I figured if I just kept focused on the map, I could anticipate and sketch out a new route as we went. The map would help me find a way for us through the mess of a maze that the city street system now was.
It didn’t work, though. The detours, the changes, the unexpected turns and blockages came too fast. I couldn’t keep up. I wanted Aaron to find a place to stop so I could figure something out.
He just kept driving, though. He asked which way in general was Faneuil Hall, where we wanted to get to. I pointed and said, “Kinda over there.”
He told me, as sternly as he allowed himself, to put the map away. And then for the next few minutes he just drove. This way and that. Fast and sure. Sometimes, in what the map would have said was the wrong direction. But he was unrattled by the maze he was negotiating, and in a matter of minutes he had us in front of Faneuil Hall looking for a place to park.
I was amazed. I had no idea how we got there. I couldn’t retrace the route we had taken if I tried.
“Once I knew where we wanted to get to, dad, I knew where we were, and it was easy to know how to get there.” He’s always had that kind of internal compass.
The past year has been kind of like that. The world and our life in it have been under reconstruction. The old maps and guidebooks just haven’t been very helpful or relevant. Almost everything has become a maze of detours, blockages, bumpy roads, and confusing directions.
And it’s the people with good internal moral compasses who have been the most helpful to us as leaders. People like Drs. Anthony Fauci and Bonnie Henry, and others like them have become like rock stars because of the way they so seamlessly embody commitment to good, strong science and equally good, strong care for people in need and compassion with those who are suffering. They speak, we listen, and we feel at least a little bit better, encouraged, and ready to commit to the cause ourselves because of their informed and moral leadership. They seem to have a good internal moral compass, and they help to activate ours.
And on other levels, in our neighbourhoods and communities, among friends and family, it’s been people who just seem to know the loving thing to do, who help us all get through. And there’s so many of them, who through the past year just naturally seemed to find ways to reach out, to care, to drop off little gifts, to embody concern for others, to offer a word or a gesture of encouragement or gratitude. People who when they could no longer volunteer, or help others, or do good for the world in one way because it was stopped for the pandemic, found another way to do it, because instead of just holding on to the map of how we used to do it, they have a heart that when it knows what actually needs to be done, helps them find a way to do it.
I mention this because spring is coming. And this year, it brings with it the hope sometime soon of re-opening a lot of what has been shuttered and locked down over the past year.
It won’t be an easy or an altogether happy re-opening. For instance, when we do regather at church, some of our friends and members of our spiritual family will be missing. When we drive downtown, we’ll notice some businesses gone. When we walk through our neighbourhood, we’ll meet – or maybe not meet anymore – families who have suffered deep losses that won’t be easy for them to recover from. Maybe we ourselves will emerge from the pandemic with emotional setbacks and spiritual scars that also will be hard to heal. And, when we read the news, we’ll see that we’re still in the same old normal more than we thought we’d be – with the rich still getting richer and the poor getting poorer with every crisis we face, and with all the other bad news, misdirection, abuse of power, injustice and on and on that the old road maps and guidebooks lead us into.
Thank God, though, that by the grace of God still at work in the world and in humanity, there will be people who offer the kind of leadership and the kinds of lives that will inspire and encourage. People who in the big and little ways they follow their internal moral compass, will help activate that same holy presence and purpose in others.
Karen took a picture in our church parking lot a few weeks ago. It was a picture of a few bright green crocus shoots coming up through the hard-packed gravel, just inches from a snowbank still remaining from the winter.
Thank God that new life and hope still come like that. That love and compassion still poke up their heads. That the promise of a good world for all still struggles to come into being, no matter how hard the world is, and how cold the reception.
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