Reading: Jeremiah 31:31-34
Jeremiah was a member of a priestly family who lived just a short distance north of Jerusalem around the time of Israel’s final collapse as a kingdom. From his perspective as a priest he sees how the people fail to live as God intends, and he warns of what is to come – the military defeat of the kingdom, loss of their land to their enemies, and heart-breaking departure to generations of forced exile in Babylon.
But Jeremiah also has good news. Beyond the coming losses and pain, he speaks of spiritual renewal and the start of a new kind of relationship with God. Instead of having to study and obey a law written down on stone –never a very hopeful thing, the people will feel God’s law beating in their hearts, and they will live out what God wants as easily and naturally as breathing.
Jeremiah was a member of a priestly family who lived just a short distance north of Jerusalem around the time of Israel’s final collapse as a kingdom. From his perspective as a priest he sees how the people fail to live as God intends, and he warns of what is to come – the military defeat of the kingdom, loss of their land to their enemies, and heart-breaking departure to generations of forced exile in Babylon.
But Jeremiah also has good news. Beyond the coming losses and pain, he speaks of spiritual renewal and the start of a new kind of relationship with God. Instead of having to study and obey a law written down on stone –never a very hopeful thing, the people will feel God’s law beating in their hearts, and they will live out what God wants as easily and naturally as breathing.
Her
name was Helen Morgan.
Not the more famous Helen Morgan with a hundred links that come up when you google the name – an American jazz and blues singer and actress who was known in the Twenties for heart-breaking torch songs, who died at age 41 in 1941.
The less famous Helen Morgan – the one who died in 1996 at age 70 in Wilmington, North Carolina as an active member of the Wilmington Methodist Church – a woman who helped in the church’s programs to feed the poor and the hungry, also took care of her grandchildren, and late in life went to college, took some classes and got the degree she never got when she was young.
And who before that was the Helen Morgan who at the age of 46 shot and killed her 33-year-old common-law husband Lee – a brilliant but broken jazz musician whom Helen, herself a member of the seedy Manhattan nightclub scene, was helping to come back to life until she shot him point blank in a Manhattan night club called Slug’s (how ironic!) where he was playing.
Her conviction for murder was easy because there was a whole nightclub of witnesses. She went to prison, was paroled six years later, and shortly after that moved back to Wilmington, North Carolina where she became a member of Wilmington Methodist Church.
And I wonder how that happened. How that membership interview went. What they asked, and what she said. And what the good members of Wilmington Methodist felt about her becoming one of them?
Most churches, like ours, have ways of communicating to whoever comes through the door the Gospel message of “Let the love of God enfold you.” But most churches also have ways of looking for evidence of some kind of goodness and morality in the lives of those who come in, and some way of testing whether they really fit in with those already inside.
So I wonder. Did they know anything about Helen’s past?
Did her punishment and rehab in prison maybe change her enough from what she was, to be able to fit in with the members of Wilmington Methodist? Was she now enough like them to be one of them?
Or did the good folks of Wilmington Methodist also maybe see in her something that was there precisely because of her past? Because of her inescapable knowledge of the evil she was capable of, and had done? Because of how aware she was of her weakness, her capacity for sin, and the specifics of the ways she had hurt and could hurt others around her?
Did she seem, perhaps, especially able to understand and talk about forgiveness and love? Was she maybe more open to it than many, as a gift she needed herself in her life? Did they maybe notice that God’s love somehow flowed especially easily and naturally to others around her, especially to the most broken, unaccepted and unloved?
Jerome Ellison has written,
"The relief of being accepted by God as a sinner can never be known by one who never thought himself unaccepted or sinful. And yet today one is always hearing of “good Christians."
"There were no good Christians in the first church, only sinners. Peter never let himself or his hearers forget his betrayal in the hour of the cockcrow. James, stung by the memory of his years of stubborn resistance, warned the church members: “Confess your faults to one another.”
"Today the last place where one can be candid about one’s faults is in church. In a bar, yes; in a church, no. I know; I’ve tried both places."
And Jeremiah – a priest as well as a prophet, says that the new covenant between God and God’s people – the covenant in which the people just know God’s law in their hearts and intuitively live out God’s love for all things in a way that’s as natural as breathing, is based not on their keeping the law but on their knowing how forgiven they are for breaking it – how forgiven we all are for the ways we fail to live up to it.
Not the more famous Helen Morgan with a hundred links that come up when you google the name – an American jazz and blues singer and actress who was known in the Twenties for heart-breaking torch songs, who died at age 41 in 1941.
The less famous Helen Morgan – the one who died in 1996 at age 70 in Wilmington, North Carolina as an active member of the Wilmington Methodist Church – a woman who helped in the church’s programs to feed the poor and the hungry, also took care of her grandchildren, and late in life went to college, took some classes and got the degree she never got when she was young.
And who before that was the Helen Morgan who at the age of 46 shot and killed her 33-year-old common-law husband Lee – a brilliant but broken jazz musician whom Helen, herself a member of the seedy Manhattan nightclub scene, was helping to come back to life until she shot him point blank in a Manhattan night club called Slug’s (how ironic!) where he was playing.
Her conviction for murder was easy because there was a whole nightclub of witnesses. She went to prison, was paroled six years later, and shortly after that moved back to Wilmington, North Carolina where she became a member of Wilmington Methodist Church.
And I wonder how that happened. How that membership interview went. What they asked, and what she said. And what the good members of Wilmington Methodist felt about her becoming one of them?
Most churches, like ours, have ways of communicating to whoever comes through the door the Gospel message of “Let the love of God enfold you.” But most churches also have ways of looking for evidence of some kind of goodness and morality in the lives of those who come in, and some way of testing whether they really fit in with those already inside.
So I wonder. Did they know anything about Helen’s past?
Did her punishment and rehab in prison maybe change her enough from what she was, to be able to fit in with the members of Wilmington Methodist? Was she now enough like them to be one of them?
Or did the good folks of Wilmington Methodist also maybe see in her something that was there precisely because of her past? Because of her inescapable knowledge of the evil she was capable of, and had done? Because of how aware she was of her weakness, her capacity for sin, and the specifics of the ways she had hurt and could hurt others around her?
Did she seem, perhaps, especially able to understand and talk about forgiveness and love? Was she maybe more open to it than many, as a gift she needed herself in her life? Did they maybe notice that God’s love somehow flowed especially easily and naturally to others around her, especially to the most broken, unaccepted and unloved?
Jerome Ellison has written,
"The relief of being accepted by God as a sinner can never be known by one who never thought himself unaccepted or sinful. And yet today one is always hearing of “good Christians."
"There were no good Christians in the first church, only sinners. Peter never let himself or his hearers forget his betrayal in the hour of the cockcrow. James, stung by the memory of his years of stubborn resistance, warned the church members: “Confess your faults to one another.”
"Today the last place where one can be candid about one’s faults is in church. In a bar, yes; in a church, no. I know; I’ve tried both places."
And Jeremiah – a priest as well as a prophet, says that the new covenant between God and God’s people – the covenant in which the people just know God’s law in their hearts and intuitively live out God’s love for all things in a way that’s as natural as breathing, is based not on their keeping the law but on their knowing how forgiven they are for breaking it – how forgiven we all are for the ways we fail to live up to it.
Her name is Maria. Raised German Catholic, in high school she attended a weekend youth retreat and when she came back she was ecstatic. Asked what was so great about the weekend, her answer was simple and joyful: “I had such a good confession!”
I’ve no idea what she confessed, or even had to confess. She was a good person. But over the course of the weekend she found herself able to penetrate at least some of the layers of her life and relationships, and see particular actions and larger patterns of behaviour that she could only confess as sin. And breaking herself open in that way to her priest and to God, the grace she received was a deeper experience of God’s love for her and for all the world around her than she had known before in all her goodness.
His name is Gord. A man of middle age, he’s been an evangelical minister for a while, spending his life telling others about God’s forgiving love. A few years ago he attended a week-long spiritual-growth workshop. Midway through the week in his personal prayer time he found himself reading the opening verses of Isaiah 40:
Comfort, O comfort
my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to
Jerusalem
and cry to her that
she has served her term,
that her penalty is
paid,
that she has
received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her
sins.
How many times had he read this passage? Studied it? Preached it? Recommended it to others in need of spiritual comfort and peace from guilt?
And this time it hit him like it never had before. Like a ton of bricks. Like a tidal wave of light. For years he had carried guilt and regret about things he had done in the past, hurt he had caused and could never undo. And he had learned simply to live with it as a private, hidden burden.
But now all of a sudden, he heard heaven’s voice saying, “Enough! You have made yourseld suffer enough and more than enough! Let it go. All is in my hands. And all whom you care about are in my hands. You can let it go.”
The light and the lightness he felt was something he had never known in all his years of being a Christian and of being a minister of the Gospel for others. And it changed him – changed his heart, his sense of himself, his experience of God, his ways of seeing and treating others around him.
The days are coming, Jeremiah says, when the people of God will have God’s law of love and of right and restored relations written on their hearts. They will know it from inside. Their own hearts will beat with the beat of God’s love for all things, and God’s love will flow out of them and be as natural in their living, as breathing.
And it will come not when they are good at keeping God’s law, but as they come to live in God’s forgiveness for the all the ways that they break it, and fail to live up it.
And the promise is there – it can be realized at all ages and stages of life. No one is excluded from it. And no one is exempt from the way it is fulfilled.
So when was the last time you were really aware not only of your sin and weakness, but also of God’s forgiveness of it? Of you? When was the last time you really and overwhelmingly knew the love of God for you in your brokenness?
Or maybe the question is also … when will be the next time we – either us as a church, or any of us individually , will offer that kind of forgiveness and love to someone else?
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