Sundays sermon: The Tipping Point of Grace Jeremiah 31:27-34 October 20, 2013 Rick Marson Union UMC Do you think there is a point where God will someday say, “That’s enough, I have had it with humanity. They never listen. I give up!” Is there a limit to God’s grace? Will there ever be another Noah’s ark? Lets see what the Good Book says. I call it a good book; actually it is a great book, in my mind the greatest book ever written. As Methodists, we believe that God inspired men of ancient times to record their thoughts in the form of what would become the Bible, that somehow God’s word came to us through human writers, that God’s thoughts and plans for us were written down in the language and the logic of the cultures of its human participants. Thus, it is a mixture of the mind of God and the influence of its human authors. So it contains the Word of God. And that is what we, as its readers, must search for and decipher when we read it. That is not a simple matter. For example we have what is known as the subject of covenant theology. There are many covenants referred to in the Bible, the most obvious of which are the Old and the New Covenants, or testaments. But there are many other important covenants as well: the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Davidic covenant, to name a few of the more prominent. The Scripture passage today references some of these. There are many others implied in the Scriptures as well: the Adamic covenant, the Noahic covenant, and I have charts delineating some of them. I could pass them out and, believe me, tears of boredom would readily flow from your eyes. Well meaning, serious people of faith have spent lifetimes documenting the promises of God contained in Scriptures, and turning nearly every promise into a covenant—their reasoning being that God is not human, and God cannot lie, thus every promise from God, no matter how obscure, is an unconditional truth, a contract, if you will, that God himself guarantees will come true. But, the totality of Scripture itself resists such interpretations. Take for example the words of the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah 31:27-34 27The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. 28And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. 29 In those days they shall no longer say: ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’. 30 But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge. This passage is a perfect example of the imprecise nature of covenant theology. The prophet Jeremiah wrote before and during the period of Babylonian captivity (roughly from 598 – 522 b.c.) when both the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel we invaded and exiled). This text speaks of the House of Israel (the northern kingdom) and the House of Judah (the southern kingdom) as what they were at the time, two separate kingdoms for several hundred years. And yet the main promise of the Davidic covenant, of which I have spoken many times, was the unconditional and eternal promise that a descendant of king David would always remain on the throne of Israel, that David’s kingdom would last forever. And yet the kingdom of Israel split in two, less than perhaps 100 years after David’s death, and taken over in captivity after that. So how do we account for this inconsistency? We spiritualize the covenant rather than literalize it. We now understand Jesus to be the descendant of David that inherits a throne that is eternal, that the David’s eternal kingdom is the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of Israel. I am completely comfortable with that position, although it is at odds with the literal reading that is required for a contract. We have to be careful how we read the Word of God. 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. 34 No 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. And that is the entirety of the reference to the New Covenant within the Old Testament. That’s it! The plain truth of covenant theology is that, throughout history, we have always been a people bathed in grace. I mentioned two week’s ago that God calls through prevenient grace, and forgives us through justifying grace, and improves and strengthens us through sanctifying grace. And this gift of grace has always been with us; we read from 2 Timothy 1:9, “This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus. Sometimes we try to contractualize our relationship with God. We say that God’s covenants are really contracts guaranteed by God. The problem lies is in fact that, if they are really contracts, we do not have the full text of them to study, we only have rather vague references to their existence. When we try to legalize them, we become like the Pharisees and Scribes, more interested in the letter of the law than the purpose of the law. God was not nearly as litigious as the Pharisees and Scribes thought God to be. Jesus insisted they choked on the finer points of the law while missing its very heart. The plain truth of the Bible is that humans have never been able to keep the commandments of God for very long. If you read from 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, and Judges, you see a continual cycle of repentance, forgiveness, and falling away, repentance, forgiveness, and falling away, ad infinitum; with grace throughout the process. Grace is what calls us back to repentance. Grace is what forgives our sins. Grace is what empowers us to be holy. And so are our lives today! Some of us think we have final knowledge of God; that our knowledge is sufficient, that our understanding of exactly what it takes to be saved is complete and final. Have we no understanding of history? Every covenant of God has been so salvaged by grace as to make God seem foolish for ever investing in humanity. God continually accommodates our weaknesses and fallibilities, and forgives us even though we remain undeserving of it. If God’s covenants are really contracts; then we are all in trouble. Sometimes we get so serious about God, we forget that God was human once too. Fredrick Buechner tells the following story. In Exodus 3:13-14 when Moses asks God his name, God says his name is Y H W H, which is apparently derived from the Hebrew verb “to be” and means something like I am what I am or I will be what I will be. The original text of the Old Testament didnt include vowels, so YHWH is all that appears. Since it was believed by some that Gods name was too holy to be used by just anybody, over the years it came to be used only by the high priest on special occasions. When other people ran across it in their reading, they simply substituted for it the title “Lord” in place of the name of God. The result of this pious practice was that, in time, no one knew any longer what vowels belonged in between the four consonants, and thus the proper pronunciation of Gods name was lost. The best guess is that it was something like Yahweh, but theres no way of being sure. [Buechner concludes] Like the bear in Thurbers fable, sometimes the pious lean so far over backward that they fall flat on their face. God is not defined by contracts and covenants—God is defined rather by grace. And history shows us there never has been a tipping point of grace, a place where God says, “Enough is enough, I no longer care about humans.” There never will be such a point; for God’s love is unconditional! No matter what you have done, no matter where you are, you cannot crawl out from under the spread of God’s grace, calling unto you, forgiving you, and strengthening you. All you have to do . . . all we have to do, is open up to it, accept God’s invitation, let God heal your soul and forgive your sins, and allow the warmth of the Holy Spirit to flow into your body, giving you strength, renewing you in the image of God. This is not a contract. It is an unconditional gift to all of us . . . a present. Shall we open the package . . . or just let it sit there under the tree . . . or maybe say it is for someone else instead? The Holy Spirit is knocking on your door. Grace is calling your name!
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 21:59:07 +0000
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