The new covenant you won't believe

Jeremiah 31:31-34, 33:14-18

Two readings from Jeremiah today, three chapters apart, and both begin with the words “The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will… 1) make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah, and 2) fulfill my gracious promise.

            This gracious promise—this new covenant—will not be like the covenants of old… which is kind of weird if we’re being completely honest, because God makes these covenants with a people forever. God said to Noah, “I will never again destroy the world by flood, and here’s a rainbow as a sign of my covenant.” And God said to Abraham, “You will have descendants and land. This is my covenant.” These are supposed to be eternal promises, but these eternal promises are dependent on the people responding correctly. And there’s the really obvious flaw that Noah and Abraham and Moses seem to be missing: People absolutely never respond correctly. So, what good are these covenants, really?

            God makes a promise, says you get this nice thing as long as you obey, and about five minutes later people are like, “You know what would be really fun to worship? A golden cow!” A covenant that requires human beings to be something other than sinners is a worthless covenant, because we won’t be, we never been, and we never will be. Give us any length of rope whatsoever and we will manage to hang ourselves. Just because we have Jesus does not mean we have left this kind of thinking behind. The predominant view of God, even in Christian circles, is as one who gives us nice things when we obey him. Perhaps you’ve seen the Joel Osteen clip going around where he says, “When you are poor, broke, and defeated all that proves is that you are poor, broke, and defeated. It doesn’t bring any honor to God.”

            This, of course, is fundamentally opposed to everything Jesus said—blessed are the meek, become like children, etc—but it doesn’t matter. Osteen can get 40,000 people in a stadium to give him a standing ovation for saying it, because it is a sexy lie. We want to believe that we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps and earn the covenant, like the Israelites were supposed to keep up with their end of the bargain. We want to believe we are different despite the fact that the entire history of the human race is marked by the failure to be even halfway decent followers of God the moment we provided with even a single alternative thing to worship. Osteen is low-hanging fruit, but he is a perfect example because the prosperity Gospel would be the best possible Gospel if it were possible.

            The problem is sin. The problem is us. God tried this prosperity business. That was essentially what happened with Noah and Abraham, with Moses and eventually with David. God tried to give us the possibility of living up to the expectations. Just be good, said God a hundred times, like the parent who feels obligated to parent in this way even when we know deep down that our children are going to not be the perfect little angels we expect them to be.

            So, when we come to Jeremiah, God has reached the stage of parenting where he throws up his hands and says, “Fine! Don’t be good then! See if I care!”

            But on the other side of this despairing over the behavior of God’s children—on the other side of exile and lots of death—comes this:

³¹ The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. ³² It won’t be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant with me even though I was their husband, declares the Lord. ³³ No, this is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. ³⁴ They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord; for I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins.

           I love the line that goes “It won’t be like the covenant I made with their ancestors…” The rules of the game are changing. Well, at least they are for God. This concept of grace is still mostly foreign to us. We don’t buy it. Sure, we say we do, because that’s the kind of thing a Christian says, but if we truly believed it, we would live differently. If we truly believed that the new covenant whispered by Jeremiah and one day embodied by Jesus Christ truly did what the Bible says it does, then we would stop being so hard on ourselves, and we would stop pretending we have our acts together, and we would honestly, actually begin to explain the actions of others in the kindest way, and we would call out the hypocrites who preach that we can be better people and that God will bless us for it.

            If we truly believed in grace, we would live differently. We would value other people as children of God, even as we hold those in power accountable for abusing it. If we truly believed in grace, we wouldn’t need to be right, it would be enough to be faithful. If we truly believed in grace, we wouldn’t equate money with success and we wouldn’t judge those who are rich either. Instead, the only judgment we would have is one based on how faithfully we give it all away. If we truly believed in grace, our response would not be colored by the non-response of others.

            The new covenant is so foreign to us, because it is a covenant that doesn’t require anything of us and we don’t trust that. Not at all. We expect Christianity to be hard, but Christianity is passive. It’s just God writing God’s name on your heart, and you don’t have to do a single stinking thing to earn it; heck, you don’t even really need to accept it, because who of us really does?

But how to respond to a promise like this? I’m not even sure, because I don’t think any of us really believe it. If we did, as Jesus suggested, we would move mountains. As it is, we can’t even tear ourselves away from opinion pieces on news channels.

            This advent we need to break free from the old thinking. You need to know this: God’s love of you is not dependent on how you respond. There is absolutely no need to worry. You can’t mess up your salvation by being a bad Christian, because there is no such thing as a good Christian, not really—not on this side of Jesus.

            You need to break free from the old thinking, because the old thinking only ever reminds you that you are not enough. It will make you despise your neighbor. It will tell that you need to defend every inch. It will whisper, “Somebody’s wrong on the internet again. Better start typing.” Or “That uncle at Thanksgiving—you know the one, who you know will somehow bring up politics, and religion, and generational warfare in the same sentence somehow—you need to defend yourself against him.” But you don’t. You don’t need to defend where you stand at all, because you don’t stand on anything but the cross. You have no ground on which to defend yourself, no matter how sweet and wonderful you are in life.

            We need the new covenant language, because we need Jesus, and we need Jesus because the old rules only lead us to resent one another and to feel the crushing weight of anxiety, and they leave us cold. The old rules only ever seem to benefit the people who are in power. Shockingly, the people telling us that wealth is earned by good works are always wealthy and seem to do fewer good works than most of the poorest people I know. We trust the wealthy for the same reason we like all the old covenants—they suggest that we can be in control. Just be good. That’s within your control, right?

            When we talk about sin and salvation in Confirmation I like to use an example that I first heard from Dr. Chris Croghan at Augustana, which is a variation of something said by Luther. You think you can be good? Well, imagine you have $100. What does a good Christian do with that $100? Well, give it to the church, of course! Surely, that’s the right answer, we might imagine.

But then God asks, ‘Why did you give that to the church? Why not to the homeless?’

“OK, the homeless, then,” we say, only wanting to do what God wants of us after all.

‘No,’ God says, ‘You must not do both.”

“OK, God, fifty-fifty then.”

‘No,’ says God again. ‘If you go fifty-fifty, then you will have forgotten the hundreds of other charities, not to mention your neighbor closer to home, and the starving child in Sudan. What about them?’

“OK, God, I will split my $100 between all of them,” you might say, exasperated.

‘Not split,’ says God. ‘All of it. All of them require all of it.’

‘But God! Seriously! What you are asking is impossible!’

This is the fundamental truth about goodness. To be good you must give everybody everything, up to and including your life. “Be perfect, like your father in heaven is perfect,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (5:48). So, it’s not enough to give away all your money, you must give away all your money to everybody.

But, geez, pastor, lay off!

After all, this is the season of charity when one of the reasons we give is to feel better about ourselves! We give out of obligation and duty, and, yes, even to feel good about ourselves, but we never give enough, because the only amount that is enough is everything. This is why Luther said that gifts of charity—even to the church—are also sinful, because your gift to one charity denies another. You can’t be everything to everybody.

We all recognize this in one sense, because it’s the excuse we use when somebody comes calling asking us to donate to charity A. We feel guilty, even though we know we can’t do it all. What’s less obvious is how Jesus Christ frees us from these games. If you hear nothing else today, hear this: You are not being judged by how you give or don’t give. You are not being judged by whether you are good or bad. God is not Santa, checking off if you are naughty or nice. If you are being good to try to please God, stop it. Instead, know that God’s name was written on your heart apart from anything you do. It is a new covenant—not like the ones given to Noah or Abraham.

The astounding good news of the Gospel is that God actually knows you—the real you, not the you you play for everybody else—and God loves that you, and God has chosen that you, and God saves that you. That’s the good news. The new covenant.