Presented April 2nd, 2006, by Jim Lehman
Jeremiah has been called the “weeping prophet.” He was angry. He was full of woe. He was in agony and grief. He loved his people. But he spoke God’s judgment against them. He was one of those characters, you know! A royal pain in the—neck. And “royal” is an apt term. He was privy to the royal household. He spoke directly to the kings—several of them.
The popular prophets of the day told the kings and the people what they wanted to hear—that the future was bright, that they were on the right track. Jeremiah told them they were in deep trouble. (Does that sound familiar!)
Jeremiah had grown up hearing about the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. And for 40 years—his entire career as a prophet—he watched the slow collapse of the Southern Kingdom—Judah. He was there at its horrific end. He saw his people dragged off into exile.
In one of the worst moments—when Jerusalem was under siege; when the desperate people were turning to cannibalism to survive—Jeremiah bought a field. This angry, whining prophet performed an act of hope.
It was in this spirit that he wrote the words that are in our Old Testament lesson. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors…a covenant that they broke…But this is the covenant that I will make…I will put my law within them, and will write it on their hearts.
We know more about Jeremiah than any other Old Testament figure except David. And in one important way the two men were alike. They acted and lived from the “heart.” David did everything with passion for God and for his people. Despite his violence, his ambition, his philandering, his inability to govern his own family, God loved him. God chose this flawed man to lead the people of Israel at their highest and most glorious moment. And God chose Jeremiah, this prophet of turbulent, angry feeling, to speak to the nation at it lowest moment. It seems at extraordinary times a person of “heart” is needed.
We live in a world that values the brain. I’ve been reading an article about how college seniors—it’s springtime—are trying to get into the prestigious schools. These schools build their reputation on brainpower. Students hope to get some of that and the other kinds of power associated with it. The various rating systems that tell us which are the best universities and colleges measure academic excellence. When was the last time U.S. News & World Report rated schools according to which produced students with good hearts!
Yet, we know there is something important about “heart.” Even the great universities know it takes heart, not just brains, to survive the rigors of a graduate program. Even great intellectuals know that when they have an intimate dinner with a close friend they are having a “heart to heart” not a “brain to brain.” Do you remember that old song?
Oh, you gotta have heart.
Miles and miles and miles of heart!
Oh, it’s fine to be a genius, of course!
But keep that ol’ horse before the cart!
First you gotta have heart!
Well, we use the word “heart” many ways. We get to the “heart” of something. We say he or she doesn’t have the “heart” for it. There is that wonderful passage in Luke where Mary “ponders” things in her heart. We say he has a hard heart. Or she has a heart filled with love. This, of course, is the most profound and frequent association—love. You can’t write a love song without the word.
At the very least we mean two different things with the word. We speak of “the heart” and mean the physical organ. But “heart” is something else, something not physical. When we begin to talk this way, we find ourselves wandering around in a fog of confusing non-physical realities that seem to blend together and yet be different: mind, soul, spirit, emotions, heart. I’m not going to try to try to clarify these philosophical enigmas. But there is something about “heart.” It is physical. And it is something more.
The physical heart is the most powerful organ in the body, far more powerful than the brain. Here are some facts according to Paul Pearsall in a book called The Heart’s Code. The heart beats approximately 100,000 times a day or 40,000,000 times a year. That means, over a life of seventy years, nearly three billion pulsations propel 100 gallons of blood per hour through a huge system of vessels. If you stretched out all the arteries, veins, and capillaries, they would circle the earth two and a half times. Think of the energy that takes! The body can live without a brain, but not without a heart!
But recent research reported by Pearsall is beginning to indicate that the heart sends out more than gallons of blood. It is also sending out information in this incredible energy it is pumping through the body. This research is just beginning. It’s still mostly guesses and hunches, relying on indirect evidence. But it makes one think.
Pearsall reports that heart transplant patients sometimes experience some of the realities of the heart donor—thoughts, anxieties, even vague memories, and oddly enough tastes in foods. In one remarkable story a young Hispanic man after receiving a transplant began to use an unusual word he had never used before, one not at all typical of his culture—the word “copacetic.” He later learned that this was the word the man who had given him his new heart would use to tell his wife everything was okay.
This begins to suggest that the heart carries its own intelligence even its own memory. We know researchers think cells carry memory. Certainly DNA is a kind of memory. Let’s return to one of those confusing words. Maybe the “mind” does not live only in the brain. Maybe it lives throughout the body. Maybe in some sense we really can think with our heart.
Jeremiah would not have had trouble understanding this idea. For the ancient Hebrew the center of the person was not up here (the brain) but here (in the middle of the body. And despite our emphasis on intelligence and science and technology, I think most of us if asked—where’s your center?—would point here.
When God writes the new covenant on our heart, God writes it in our very center—the center of mind and body.
Mind and body! We hear these two words a lot these days. We’re finally figuring out that they’re connected! The medical profession is actually beginning to see this! Major medical centers and university teaching hospitals are offering something they call “Complimentary” or “Integrative” medicine. You can find them offering acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal medicine, Reiki, Shiatsu, massage, osteopathy, homeopathy, even aromatherapy—things that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago.
Theories suggest that our mental and emotional experience actually imprint themselves on the body, and that the chemistry of our bodies affects our mind and emotions. Really the miracle here is that it took so long to figure this out. Ordinary people have always known that stress and trauma makes you sick. Or that worry produces wrinkles. Or that heavy responsibility causes you to stoop. Or that the things you eat affect the way you feel and your ability to think. Every intellectual know you don’t think well after a heavy dinner of roast beef, potatoes, and gravy.
So if the mind and body are a whole, then the physical heart and the brain are more deeply connected that we thought. Maybe there is a larger intelligence of the whole. Maybe God always intended the heart to be the center of this. Maybe part of the trouble of our present world is that we let the brain do the talking rather than the heart.
Also maybe the wrong things are often written on the heart. In chapter 17, Jeremiah writes, “The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts…”
Think of that. It reminds me of the scene in the fifth book of the Harry Potter series where the terrible professor Umbridge forces Harry to write with an inkless quill. As it moves across the paper bloods flows from its tip and the words are cut into the flesh on the back of his hand. Harry is in agony. When he raises the quill, the skin heals over the cuts. When he writes again, the cuts are made again. The professor makes him do this over and over, a torture he endures with angry, but silent courage.
Some experiences lacerate the heart just like this. The song Peg sang tells us that the heart is “soft and tractable.” This larger-than-body reality we call “heart” is tough and strong and enduring. It also soft and tender and easily written upon.
So this is serious business—writing on the heart! In the Mosaic covenant God’s law was written in stone and it did not take. It never fully sank in. People broke that covenant. This new covenant is written inside. It does not have to do with laws, which can be measured and defined by the brain. It has to do with the heart, which is strong, full of energy, capable of endurance and most importantly the seat of love. We don’t love with our brains. We love with our hearts. When you write it on the heart, you write it on the whole being. It is here, in our deepest center, that we are connected with God.
When the early Christians compiled our scriptures, they called them the New Testament, which means the new covenant, and they had this passage from Jeremiah in mind. They called the Hebrew scriptures the Old Testament or Old Covenant. In both Luke and Corinthians the communion cup symbolizing the blood of Christ is called the cup of the new covenant. The writer of Hebrews quotes this Jeremiah passage twice to say that in Christ this new covenant became a historical reality.
In choosing the New Testament scripture for today, I departed from the lectionary and I also leaped ahead a few Sundays and selected an Easter passage. I love this story. The two followers of Jesus are trudging to Emmaus. They’re worn out. Bummed out! Excuse the slang. The man they were following is dead—tortured, mocked, and executed in the worst possible way. They just want to go home and forget about it. A man catches up with them. He surprises them. He listens their tale of woe. More than that he tells them why these things happened, what it all means. He even tells them they are “slow of heart” to understand. They’re intrigued. They invite him home. They break bread with him. Suddenly their eyes are opened. They see who it is. And he disappears!
Then they remember. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking…?”
God has been reaching out to people since the creation—walking with Adam and Eve, making the promise to Noah, calling Abraham, then looking out for Isaac and Jacob, bringing their descendants out of Egypt, giving them the Ten Commandments, giving them a king, sending the prophets. And when none of those things worked. God came in Christ. God gave up trying to reach us from outside. God came inside. By entering into our very humanity, God came fully into our hearts. This is highly symbolic language, but it means simply that God forgives us and loves us in our deepest parts.
There’s one more thing God says through Jeremiah. “And I will be their God and they shall be my people…They will know me from the least of them to the greatest…I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.” This is what God has done and is doing in Christ. And this creates not just individuals who know God deeply. It creates a people who do. Yes, God comes to individuals. Jeremiah was one of the most individualistic prophets. But God comes to and on behalf of all humanity. When God writes the law of love, it makes not just new persons, but a new community. We find God in our deepest heart, but we find all God’s people there too. That is the great hope—that one day everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know God and thereby know one another. This inward heart with its own intelligence is where it will happen.
We split ourselves apart. God intends for us to be whole. God does not want us to obey laws. God wants us to live in love, let it rise in us—these waters of life, this life that is really life. Then we will follow God’s laws, but they will no longer be laws; they will be God’s ways. We will follow them not in obedience, but in freedom and joy—because we can do no other. They will be written on our hearts, and our hearts will burn with recognition.