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From
April 2, 2006 A number of years ago I came across a brochure advertising nutritional supplements. Across the top in bright bold writing it asked: Would you like to lose weight while you sleep? Would you like to lose weight while you sleep? I answer with a question of my own: Who wouldn't? The idea is every bit as tempting as a chocolate bar. Imagine losing weight without having to do anything but snooze. No counting calories. No sweaty exercise. No struggles with willpower. No need to talk yourself into believing that celery is as satisfying as chips. Lose weight while sleeping - how could it get any easier? Or more seductive? Isn't this the allure of shows like "Wheel of Fortune" or "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" It's tremendously appealing, don't you think, this notion that the desirable thing (whatever it might be) will just float into our lives, like a golden raft riding a river's current while we wait downstream? All we need do is stand on the riverbank and reach over to catch it as it drifts by. Lose weight while we sleep, get rich while we brush our teeth, advance our careers while we watch TV, earn a master's degree while we wait in line at McDonalds. What could be easier? * * * * * * * * * * * * * "I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts," God proclaims to the people of Israel as they languish in exile. God speaks through his prophet Jeremiah. God's people had lost while they slept... but what they lost was not weight . What they lost was a passionate, fulfilling relationship with Yahweh. God's people lost this not because God took it away. They lost their relationship with Yahweh because they had gone to sleep spiritually. Over the course of generations, their sense of being in covenant with Yahweh had dissipated. Without even noticing it, meaningful rituals and rich worship experiences became hollow gestures. Some of God's people had even gone back to dabbling in the worship of other gods. Fewer and fewer saw the connection between faithfulness to God and attending to the needs of the community's most vulnerable. Laws that God had asked the people to live by, ones intended to give them the fullness of life, gradually went by the wayside. The people had gone to sleep and, without even realizing it, lost. The prophet Jeremiah was witness to the painful descent of his people. The hefty nations surrounding little Judah and tiny Israel had increasingly pushed their weight around. With very little spiritual strength to call upon, Jeremiah's people were no match for Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. Despite his prophet's efforts, Jeremiah was unsuccessful in rousing his people from their spiritual slumber. All that was left for him to do was watch and grieve as God's nation was defeated and many were forced to leave their homeland to live in humiliating exile in Babylon. But Jeremiah wasn't the only one watching. Nor was he the only one grieving. God, too, watched and grieved. Watched and grieved--and reached out to God's suffering people. For always this is God's nature, to reach out to us when our own efforts lead us horribly astray. God reached out to this nation in exile and through the mouth of the prophet said to these beloved people the last thing they expected to hear: "I am making a new covenant with you. One that will better express the relationship I am seeking with you, my people." How supremely gracious of God. How telling of God's unbounded love. And how utterly merciful, for common among the exiles was the belief that they had completely failed. They were certain that the covenant God had made with their ancestors at Mt. Sinai, one borne of mutual love and faithfulness, was a covenant completely beyond repair. But through Jeremiah, God said otherwise. Only this time God would do more than merely repair the covenant; God would thoroughly revise it. Instead of stone tablets, this time the covenant would be written where it couldn't be so easily lost, set aside, or forgotten. "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." Don't you wonder what it would be like to have God's law written on the heart? Would it be like a spiritual tattoo? Something indelible that was there every time you closed your eyes? Or might that heart-law be something more dynamic than words inscribed inside? Given that Utah has the highest per capita consumption of ice cream in the nation, it shouldn't have surprised me to find a Cold Stone Creamery in just about every strip mall in the Salt Lake area. Cold Stone - the first time I saw one of their signs, I imagined a waffle cone piled high with frozen bits of rock. Curiosity got the best of me of day and I ventured inside to see what everyone was raving about. Instead of chunks of granite, I discovered a sweeping counter with countless wonderful temptations in glass jars--pieces of Snicker bars, chopped walnuts, fat squares of brownie, fresh strawberries, and toasted cocoanut. Just about anything else you'd want was there, too. Beyond these delicious tidbits were the freezer cases with maybe a dozen trays of freshly churned ice cream. Now here's where the 'cold stone' fits in. Instead of the usual drill, you know, ordering a scoop of strawberry ice cream and then asking for pecans or chocolate chips or Oreo pieces to be sprinkled on top, at Cold Stone your ice cream is scooped up and immediately plopped down on a slab of icy marble. Then whatever yummies you've chosen are deftly worked into the ice cream. When your order is finally presented to you, completely folded into your ice cream are ingredients that just a few moments before were entirely separate. Delicious is too small a word to describe the delight. For God's people in exile, people who experienced themselves beyond hope and beyond help, God's promise to write the law upon their hearts was a promise to bring comprehensive change to their lives. God would forgive them. God would enable them to start again. But this could only be accomplished by bringing their hearts and God's heart so closely together that the combination of the ingredients would create something entirely new. This is what God wants to do in our lives. By writing the law on the people's hearts--then and now--God wants us to find the covenant alive inside us where it waits to be folded into every morsel of who we are. Rather than sprinkling us with rules and precepts and religious requirements, God wants God's law to be integral to who we are. Do you hear how merciful this is? How profoundly loving? How potentially transformative this is? I say potentially, because God doesn't sprinkle God's law on us while we sleep and then wait for us to wake up changed. God puts that law inside us and lets us join God in working it in, so that the contents of God's heart and ours co-mingle, so that these two ingredients can together create something entirely new and delicious. If that sounds too theoretical for you, even too mystical, just consider the life of Jesus. He shows us what happens when the human heart and the divine heart come together. When Jesus' heart and God's heart were folded in with each other, something so new and life-giving was created that we're still spinning from its power and beauty two thousand years later. Forever and always God is in pursuit of our hearts. Even while we sleep. Even while we wander through life unaware of God's gracious activity. Even while we sleep God traces words of love on our hearts. And yet God respects us, which is why we don't wake up the passive recipients of a magic cure or a miracle change. When we wake up, what we do discover is that we are wildly desired partners toward whom God has been reaching out. Reaching out so that our hearts might find with God's heart that holy union that makes all things new and life-giving. It's only when we say "yes" that the deliciousness begins. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen
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