March 17, 2024 Sermon

Sermon title:  "The New Covenant"

Scripture:  Jeremiah 31:31-34 

(Other lectionary suggestions include Psalm 51:1-12, Hebrews 5:5-10, and John 12:20-33.)

Jeremiah 31:31-34

A New Covenant

31The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord:  I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

          The prophet Jeremiah has always been popular among Christians, partly because of what we heard in today's Scripture reading:  Jeremiah says God will make a NEW Covenant, and Christians have just automatically assumed he was talking about Jesus. Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Christians have also liked the bit about a new law that will be written on our hearts and not on tablets of stone. Sounds good! Does that mean we won't have to go to worship services anymore? I don't think so!

          When I say that Christians have loved this Scripture passage, I mean as early as the New Testament. II Corinthians 3 quotes this passage, and so does Hebrews 8 and Hebrews 10. So, we Christians have historically found a soft spot in our hearts for Jeremiah!

          Jeremiah lived in the early 600s BC. And he did not have an easy life. In fact, when he died in exile in Egypt, he probably thought he was a failure. (He had been taken to Egypt against his will by friends who were trying to save him from the turmoil that was going on in Jerusalem at the time.) Another reason Christians have historically liked Jeremiah is that he tells us his feelings, so we feel we know him. He had an unpopular message for his people because he felt they were not being obedient to God. So, while he doesn't want to preach an unpopular message, he feels that if he doesn't preach it, his bones will flame up inside him! Maybe some of us can identify. Have you ever felt you needed to say something to a friend, something that you knew the friend wouldn't like? And yet if you didn't say it, you felt miserable. That was what Jeremiah felt:  he needed to say something unpleasant, and he didn't want to. And yet if he didn't deliver the message that he felt God had given him, he felt all torn up inside.

          One more thing.......Jeremiah felt God called him at an early age. But he said to God, "I am only a youth!" But God's message to him was, "Do not say, 'I am only a youth'; for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and whatever I command you you shall speak."

          The sermon title is "The New Covenant". A covenant is an agreement between two parties, and the word "testament" is a synonym for "covenant". "Testament" is simply the Latin word for "covenant." So, when Christians call "their" scriptures the New Testament, they are sort of saying that God made a new covenant with us. But we had better be careful and not be too arrogant. As commentator Robert Davidson says, what if Jeremiah were in our midst today? What would he think? "(M)ight he not still be looking forward to a new covenant, for precisely the same reasons that led him to talk about the need for one in his own day? Is there any evidence that we in the Church today are any more obedient to God than Jeremiah was, or the people in his own day were? Perhaps instead of talking glibly as Christians, as we sometimes do, about the new covenant, we ought to take a long hard look at ourselves....and wonder."

          Backing up a bit, why was Jeremiah upset with his people? A covenant or agreement with God has two parts:  God's part, and Israel's response to what God has done. God acts first, and then the people respond to God's actions. In Jeremiah's view, his people had not responded with a whole heart. Says Robert Davidson, "It is Jeremiah's repeated complaint that the obligations of the covenant were ignored by the people. They were happy to bask in all that God had given them but unwilling to give the obedience for which he looked. It is Jeremiah's bitter experience that no attempt at reformation, however sincere, could remedy this situation. All broke down on the sheer cussedness of human nature. Between what God demanded and what the people could give, there was an unbridgeable gulf. Jeremiah knew that this fact had to be faced or all talk about a new future would end up under the shadow of the same disobedience which had ruined the past. The new covenant passage claims that the unbridgeable can be bridged, but only from God's side."

          You might be asking, What did Jeremiah's people do wrong? One answer might be that they put their trust in alliances with other nations and not with the Lord. Jeremiah lived at a time when Babylon was the big power, and the Temple was ultimately destroyed in 586 B.C. But Jeremiah thought the leaders he dealt with put more faith in Egypt or other powers than they did God Almighty. Jeremiah and the other prophets often consulted with their kings, and they gave them advice. Israel's kings didn't always listen to the advice they received, especially if they disagreed with what they were being told! So even if you were an advisor, you could still wind up in jail if the king didn't like what you said.....and that's what happened to Jeremiah. He did get out and he wasn't killed, but he also ended up in Egypt, as I said before.

          On the jacket of the book by commentator Robert Davidson is this phrase:  "More than any other prophet, Jeremiah struggled to understand God's will for him and for the people of God." Elsewhere it says that Jeremiah "was depicted as steadfastly clinging to his faith in God in the midst of doubt and despair." Also, Jeremiah had an "uncomfortable relationship with the political and religious establishments of his day." Those quotes sum up for me what I like about Jeremiah. Life for him was not a bowl of cherries. He had to struggle with his faith. And he had to confront those with whom he disagreed. In short, he lived a real life. The song "I never promised you a rose garden" could have been Jeremiah's theme song.

          Jeremiah never specifies when this New Covenant he mentions will happen. In a way, he places his faith in God's hands. Jeremiah throws "into the future for their solution all the problems and all the continuing wrong which he saw in the relationship between his people and God. Fundamental to everything is his conviction that the solution can only come from God." Amen.

Pastor Skip