The 1st United Methodist Church of Napa

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.

²⁰Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. ²¹They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” ²²Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. ²³Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. ²⁴Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ²⁵Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.

Like millions of people, I've had to turn to eyeglasses to help me focus and to see things at certain distances. At some point every day I reach for my glasses, a reminder that in order for me to see clearly, I've got to have help – I've got to have the right lens. Those of you engaged in our Lenten study on The Heart of Christianity might have heard the story that Marcus Borg tells about one of his graduate students. Borg had been trying to explain that the Bible wasn't written by God, but was a product of two ancient communities: Israel and the early Christian movement. To which one of his students finally responded by asking if he meant that the Bible was like a lens through which we've been invited to see God, but that some people have ended up worshiping the lens instead of worshiping God. Yes, that's exactly the kind of idolatry that's happened, Borg said. The Bible tells us about how those people saw things; it's not necessarily how God sees things.^³ The trouble comes in our being able to sort out the difference.

With all of this talk about the "search for the historical Jesus" – of the Jesus of history vs. the Christ of our faith^⁴ – these unknown Greeks in our gospel reading speak to our own longing: "We would like to see Jesus!" To be able to do that, though, we've got to spend a whole lot of time with him: to read, yet again, the story of his life, to listen to what he has to say, and to follow wherever it is that he would lead us, to do what he would do. This kind of being with Jesus is not like a pair of glasses that we put on and take off whenever we feel like it. To experience the world as Jesus did – as it really is – we've got to look with his eyes and feel what he felt. In that sense Lent not only gives us an opportunity to have our vision checked, but to have our hearts monitored as well, to determine which direction our passions seem to be taking us.

Study, prayer, worship, and just walking alongside of Jesus through these forty days, can do a lot to clear up our ability to see and put us in touch with the most heartfelt moments of our lives. As the poet, William Blake has put it:

I've discovered that holding our new little granddaughter, Lauren, is just like that.

So there is a sense of awe in today's scripture readings that a process has been set in motion to create a completely new way of being in relationship – with our Creator and with each other. Jeremiah prophesies that this day is coming, and even though it will follow years of exile and captivity, something sacred will be planted within the people of Israel, something new will be written on their hearts.^⁶ The Law that they'd attempted to follow, but failed, was one written on stone tablets and kept in the Ark of the Covenant housed in the Temple in Jerusalem. After the destruction of the Temple and the disappearance of the Ark, though, Jeremiah is saying that every single person in that scattered community is to now become an Ark, a vessel in which to hold the sacred will of God. Couldn't it be so for us?

This new kind of inner law is descriptive of some of the rule found in historic monastic communities, as well as in a lot of people who are simply trying to live a truly Christian life. In a text written for the cover of a book entitled Rule for a New Brother, the Roman Catholic theologian, Henri Nouwen says of this law written upon one's inner being:

This Rule is written from the heart to the heart. It does not prescribe but invites, it does not force but guides. It does not threaten but warns, it does not instill fear but points to love. It presents a demanding way of life, but the demands do not come from an outside power that wants to control but from an inside voice that calls to freedom.^⁷

Instead of giving us methods to control, direct and determine our own life, a spiritual rule wants to offer an open and free space within and among us where God can touch us with God's loving presence. It wants to make it possible for us not so much to find God as to be found by God, not so much to know God as to be known by God, not so much to direct our life towards God, as to be directed by God, not so much to love God as to be loved by God.^⁸

This might sound quite passive. But the contrary is true. It requires active spiritual work to keep space for God.^⁹

During this particular journey through Lent we're being invited to consider whether or not our hearts beat with the same rhythms of the heart of Christianity. How's your pulse? Whose message wells up from our hearts to shape the path that we walk along from Monday through Saturday of every week? In Jeremiah's terms, whose word is "written" on our hearts? Think about it: the will of God has the capacity to be embodied – in us! It certainly was embodied in the flesh and blood of one Jesus of Nazareth; and I believe that it came to be embodied – resurrected – in the community that grew up after him. Why not in us, too?

I don't think that it's trivial to make note of the fact that reading a guidebook about Jerusalem is not the same thing as taking your body there, walking through the spice markets, standing under the shade of fragrant olive trees while watching the sun go down over the glistening gold of the Dome of the Rock. Nor is reading a book about the issues of welfare reform the same thing as taking tuna fish sandwiches to the homeless at the Sullivan Center as our children did a week ago.

The words that we use over and over in this season of journeying toward Easter – discipline, obedience, suffering, death – aren't the kinds of words that would compel most of us to get out of bed every morning and approach the day with creativity and hope! But something "written on our hearts" might get us there. To claim, as we do in the Eucharist – Holy Communion – that we ingest "the body of Christ" is really also another way of saying "church." It means that you and I not only embody the life of Jesus here in our community, but we walk around with his very heart beating inside of us. As Marcus Borg has said, the "heart" of any religion is "the experience of the sacred, 'the real,' 'the More'"^¹⁰ And while Jesus might not be the only way, his way has become our way.

One reason that we have to keep re-living this story, year after year, is that living completely this embodiment as a child of God is not something that we accomplish the first time that we try it. Like playing a Bach fugue or dancing Swan Lake, it takes practice – in our case, a lifetime of practice. Jesus knew this would be hard for us. If he had to learn it, how much more will we have to? With the psalmist of our Call to Worship this morning, though, we are promised that our mistakes and our failures will be wiped away, that we'll be given "clean hearts"^¹¹ and that "a new and right spirit" could be placed inside of us. And yet, as always, we can refuse the offering. Whose word, then, will we allow to be written there?

1 Today we're deep into Lent – all the way in. There's no turning back, "The hour has come," says Jesus. The words are mysterious, but we know what they mean. The event that's about to happen will happen. Like a child nine months in the womb, we've stirred and stretched and groped for the Passover to life in a new world. But the time will come when it will, and it feels like sheer disaster.

The pronouncement from our Hebrew Scripture this morning, Jeremiah, most likely dates after 587 BCE, when Jerusalem had been utterly destroyed by the Babylonian armies and the second deportation from Judah has already begun. During this time of the people's most profound despair, Jeremiah's words bring a calm assurance of God's abiding presence and faithfulness. Oddly enough it's these verses that are the source of the phrase "New Testament."

2 Here in John's version of the "good news," the covenant written upon our hearts becomes clear in two incidents: the desire of some Greeks (Gentiles or Greek-speaking Jews, we don't know which) who "wish to see Jesus," and then the somewhat cryptic response from Jesus himself.

It's important for us to recognize that John's use of the word "glorified," here, is very significant – a version of that word appears in one form or another thirty-seven times in this Gospel. It's meant to convey to the reader a sense of the numinous presence of God, but more importantly, John is claiming that that presence is uniquely manifested in this man, Jesus of Nazareth.

3 Borg has mentioned this story more than once, but this metaphor is most thoroughly presented in the first three chapters ("Reading Lenses") of his book entitled Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally (Harper- Collins Publishers, New York, NY, 2001), pp. 3-53.

4 See Marcus Borg's treatment of this in The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, 2003), pp. 82-83.

5 William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence," in The Complete Poetry of William Blake, intro. Robert S. Hillyer (New York: Modern Library, 1941), p. 597.

7 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Blessed Sacrament Fathers, Brakkenstein Community, Rule for a New Brother (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), pp. viii-ix, 20.