“The Liberal Church: Where We Are People of the New Covenant”

Jeremiah 31:27-34

Fifth Sunday in Lent + March 29, 2009 + Passion Sunday

Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ

400 Glenwood Drive

1Chattanooga, Tennessee 37404

Rev. David Brown

Here’s a common experience: when a bunch of seedless grapes comes home from the grocery store, the grapes that are sure to be left on the stem after a few days are the little tiny ones. If you like table grapes, you know the reason why. The little dwarf grapes are often the ones that the plant bypassed in its distribution of nutrients and the result is a tiny little grape which is extremely sour. Nothing is worse than munching away on some very satisfactory grapes, and then, inadvertently, plucking one of those sugar-starved sour grapes and biting into it. It – well – it sets your teeth on edge just to think about it, doesn’t it?

Like dragging fingernails across a blackboard, the taste of sour grapes is one of those little life experiences which can set your teeth on edge and make you break out in goose-bumps. It is that great image that is carried into today’s scripture reading. Clarence Darrow is reported to have uttered a cynical little proverb once to the effect that the first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. Jeremiah said that there was a generational proverb circulating in his time which suggested that children grow up to be so much like their parents, with so much commonality between them, that when a parent bites into a sour grape, the children feel the effect.

Today we say, “like father, like son,” and, an apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree.” In other words, in Israel as in our own day there was a certain fatalism about the fact that bad families tend to produce bad offspring. Not much seems to have been done about this fact in the intervening centuries.

I remember working with a disturbed young criminal in a state psychiatric hospital on the West Coast whose long “rap sheet” was the very carbon copy of his father’s except for the dates. It seems the heart of this proverbial wisdom that if parents have turned out badly, there can be little hope that the children will turn out much better. In our day there is similar proverbial wisdom about abusive homes: that abusive childhood environments produce people who will grow up one day to abuse their own children. It is often called the “cycle of abuse,” and much effort is spent trying to discover ways that the generational cycle can be broken.

But there is more to this passage in Jeremiah than a reflection on the sorry fact that parents can bend their children into misshapen beasts. “The point of the ‘sour grapes’ saying was not to express some principle of family responsibility, but rather to give voice to despair. It is the equivalent to ‘What is the use of trying. . ?’” (R.E. Clements, Jeremiah, John Knox Press: 1988, p. 189)

In other words, if the situation from which you suffer was set in motion long before you were born, then why bother trying to change anything? The generation of Jewish people who were living in Babylon in exile from their homeland reflected on the hopelessness of their situation and, as is often the tendency of one generation in regard to another, they were blaming their situation on their parents. They set up a loud, whining complaint: “What is the use of trying when our parents and grandparents were so disobedient that God has given up on all of us. Haven’t they ruined it for all time? They have eaten the sour grapes, and now our teeth are set on edge, now we suffer the consequences!”

This, then, is a proverb for those at the bottom of the barrel, for people who look around and see no hope for any future at all. It is in such a circumstance, when all human possibilities for redemption have run out, that God chooses to redeem that which we had relegated to hopelessness. In a situation totally void of any expectation for a good outcome, God intrudes with a word that saves the day, and does so in a way that is not only unexpected but magnanimous beyond all wild dreams. Just as the old covenant was totally crushed by willful and generations-long disobedience, crushed under the tramping boots of invading armies, just then, God reasserted God’s desire to be in relationship with God’s people.

Jeremiah spoke of this new covenant as something that was to emerge in the hearts of God’s people. It sounds so emotionally satisfying, to speak of a heart-felt turning to God. But Jeremiah had no romantic notion about the heart when he announced his prophecy. Remember, he was the prophet who had spoken in very direct language to a people who were reluctant to listen about the heart as the seat of wickedness, the heart as stubborn, weak, given to all manner of deception. The new covenant which was to emerge in the hearts of the people was not to arise from some heart-warming experience. Rather, it was to be placed there by God in the midst of wrenching change and dislocation.

Remember also that the people for whom Jeremiah prophesied were being carried off into exile. No doubt many were hot with cynicism about their God. The Holy City lay in ruins, the Great Temple defiled. They had awakened from dreams of an endless comfortable status quo to the bitter reality of devastation, of constant reminders that nothing would ever be the same again. Where was their God? Their hearts grew cold.

To these people, who never expected to have warm hearts again, came this word of a new covenant of the heart. It came not only when they least expected it, but also when they least believed in it. To these folks came Jeremiah’s words of profound hope in a God who was willing to do more for the people than they could do for themselves.

At the least-expected moment God announced through Jeremiah a new relationship, a new covenant, a new beginning God would make with the people. But this one would not be locked onto tables of stone like the one Moses brought down from the mountain. For this covenant God does open heart surgery, removing a heart of stone in order to re-lace it with a heart of flesh.

The question is what must we do to be recipients of this great gift of a new covenant written on our hearts?

Do you know the story of the late Harvey Penick? Harvey was a golf pro into his 90’s, and his biggest success came late in his career. His first golf book was called Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, and it sold more than a million copies. His second book sold over 750,000 copies. But Penick never wrote books to make money. In the 1920s he purchased a red spiral notebook to use in noting his golf observations. 70 years later, in 1991, he showed his notebook to a local writer, the first person to see it other than Harvey and his son. Penick asked if he thought it was worth publishing. The writer reviewed the book and told Harvey he believed it could be published. He left word with Harvey that Simon and Schuster agreed to an advance of $90,000. When the local writer saw Harvey later, Harvey seemed troubled. Harvey told him that with all his medical bills there was no way he could advance the publishing house that much money. The writer had to explain to Harvey that it was he who would be receiving the $90,000.

Israel had Harvey Penick’s reaction to the gift of the new covenant which God extended in Jeremiah 31: “What must we do?” And they found themselves asking it at just the time in their history when it appeared there was no use in trying to do anything, when they had given in to hopelessness. But God responded to them, as God responds to us in Jesus Christ: “Just receive.”

Isn’t it ironic that today many people feel exactly the same way as the people in Jeremiah’s day? What’s the use of trying? Give up on the church. Give up on religion. Give up on God. Give up on ourselves. And to that kind of cynicism and despair, the Liberal Church has the same message as Jeremiah: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” While we may have given up, God never gives up. While the world may have foreclosed on us, God never does. A new contract is being written on our hearts and the great good news is that all we have to do is to believe it and begin living as people of hope.

But let’s let our great U.C.C. biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann  have the last word. In his book “Praying the Psalms,” he reflects on Psalm 51 with this prayer poem:

“We move, in our faithful lives,

From secure orientation,

To painful disorientation,

To surprising reorientation.”

That is what God does for us, that is the source of our hope, and that is the good news we are privileged to share with others. Let’s start now.